A little Asimov goes a long way for me. It was 15 or 20 years ago that I read four books from the Foundation series. At that time I enjoyed them a lot but not enough to find other Asimov stuff to read. Recently I finished a collection of Asimov shorts called Buy Jupiter. The title of the anthology is taken from the title of one of the stories in the collection. The first few stories were interesting but by about halfway through the book I was pretty bored with it.

Each of the 24 stories followed a similar structure. Nearly all of them ended with a clever twist that wasn't all that clever. My guess is that when these were written, primarily in the 50s and 60s, these twists were clever. Now, though, we've seen pretty much every sci-fi twist over and over again. In fact, all these now common devices were probably invented by Asimov so that his stories are now suffering from too much success.

It should also be noted that Asimov fans don't consider Buy Jupiter to be one of the strongest collections of stories. In the biographical sketches between stories Asimov hints at the fact that some of these stories weren't first choices for the editors when originally written. I can't help but think that maybe he was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get this collection out.

Readers wanting to be introduced to Asimov will probably do best to start somewhere else. Asimov fans will probably want this book in their collection so that they can say they have all of his stories.

Comments

Add New Search RSS