SCIENCE PAST SCIENCE FUTURE

Asimov, who may be Renaissance Man or half the Sperry UNIVAC catalogue in drag, processes data with the joyous abandon of a goat processing tin cans. This collection of miscellaneous magazine pieces has the unmistakable Asimovian ring—cheerful, impatient, incurably glib but unaccountably engaging. Whether explaining the development of transistors or loosing a stream of facile generalizations about American history, speculating on how women might be biologically redesigned to reduce MCP exploitation or dismantling the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, he conveys an indefinable sense of joie de savoir. How many books has the guy written, anyhow? Well, there's an essay titled "How to Write 160 Books Without Really Trying." Actually, it was originally 100 books, but that was in 1969. By publication date, who knows?