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Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 Paperback – October 1, 1990

by Isaac Asimov (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 639 ratings
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An enthralling collection of short stories from the award-winning science fiction writer of I, Robot and The Foundation, Isaac Asimov.
 
Originally published in various magazines, this volume includes some of Asimov’s self-described personal favorite short stories, including “Franchise” and “The Last Question.” It also includes “Nightfall,” a story about a planet that only experiences night once every 2,049 years, which the Science Fiction Writers of America has voted as the best science fiction story ever written. The many fans of Isaac Asimov’s work won’t want to miss this wonderful collection of short fiction from the sci fi master.
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Previous page
  1. Book 1 of 2
    Isaac Asimov
  2. Print length
    624 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Crown
  5. Publication date
    October 1, 1990
  6. Dimensions
    6 x 1.3 x 9.25 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    038541627X
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0385416276
  9. See all details
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All the Little Raindrops: A Novel
"All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more

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Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The first book of the definitive three-volume collection of short stories by the prolific Isaac Asimov, whose tales have delighted countless fans for over half a century--a must for every science fiction bookshelf.

From the Inside Flap

ok of the definitive three-volume collection of short stories by the prolific Isaac Asimov, whose tales have delighted countless fans for over half a century--a must for every science fiction bookshelf.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (October 1, 1990)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 038541627X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385416276
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.3 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 639 ratings

About the author

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Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

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Isaac Asimov (/ˈaɪzᵻk ˈæzᵻmɒv/; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov; circa January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was prolific and wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in 9 of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification.

Asimov wrote hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, beginning with Foundation's Edge, he linked this distant future to the Robot and Spacer stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume set Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as works on astronomy, mathematics, history, William Shakespeare's writing, and chemistry.

Asimov was a long-time member and vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs". He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, and a literary award are named in his honor.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Phillip Leonian from New York World-Telegram & Sun [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
639 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Sue
5.0 out of 5 stars Asimov Great Stories
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2024
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As a fan of Asimov, I really liked this story collection.
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Stacy Yam
5.0 out of 5 stars Great condition
Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2024
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The book arrived in great condition
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Peter Levine
5.0 out of 5 stars Assimov Was Right On Predicting the Future
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2023
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As I have been reading these short stories, I was awestruck how Assimov could forsee some of the darkest aspects of new technologies. His rules for Robots for instance, should be required for anyone who is going to use AI. Assimov is so readable and so succinct that the words and message just hammer home that
all progress is not necessarily beneficial.
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Nancy A.
5.0 out of 5 stars Paperback book
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2023
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It’s great!
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Scott Holstad
4.0 out of 5 stars Decent Short Story Collection
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2015
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This 600+ page book of short stories is a pretty good collection of Asimov’s early 1950s work. Some of the stories are very, very good, such as “Nightfall,” which I was delighted to find had been turned into a full novel later, which I recently bought and intend to read. Others are not quite as good. One that irritated me was “I’m in Marsport Without Hilda,” where a man comes “home” to a space station after being out in space for a long time and as he’ll be heading for the planet and his wife in another day, he contacts a local woman for a one nighter — even though he’s married. Events occur that delay their tryst and she gets impatient with him and I guess the humor lies in his attempts to solve everything so they can get together and hit the sack. Finally, everything has been taken care of and he’s ready to go meet the whore, when he hears a woman call his name and turns around to find his wife unexpectedly greeting him — and he’s ticked. To me, this was a very offensive and sexist story. I didn’t think it merited inclusion in an anthology of collected works since it was in such poor taste. But then, as I’ve discovered, Asimov — if you go by his early work — was a bit of a sexist himself, as he rarely used female characters and with one exception I can think of, when he did, they were typically window dressing — poor, helpless, empty headed dullards completely dependent on men to save them from whatever was happening to them. Oh, and as we learn in one story here, woman like to talk. A lot. I guess that’s all they do. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt by saying maybe he was a product of his times. It was the 1950s after all and women’s lib hadn’t occurred and a woman’s place was in the home, so maybe…. And I haven’t read enough of his later work to know differently, although I just recently finished Foundation’s Edge and it had strong female characters, although one was evil. It was written in the 1980s. Maybe he adjusted with the times. It seems possible.

In any event, the stories in the book are largely pretty good, until you get to about the last 100 pages or so and then the quality of the work drops off immensely. I’m not sure why that is, but the last several stories are quite bad. There’s a marked difference between them and the earlier pieces. Again, I don’t know why the editors decided to do it that way, but that’s just the way it happened, so I guess you have to live with it. One thing that was interesting is Asimov’s obsession with computers, using one giant computer he calls “Multivac” repeatedly in his stories. Multivac is a computer that pretty much runs the world and everything in it. It is hundreds of miles big and spits out data punch cards, much like the giant 1950s-era computers did, requiring specially trained computer programmers and operators to interpret its results and instructions. He also worries about man versus machine and sides with man virtually every time, which is interesting as he is constantly writing about machines such as robots. I find Multivac interesting because it’s proof that Asimov had absolutely no sci fi foresight like other sci fi writers, such as Philip K. Dick, did. He never was really able to guess at desktops, laptops, smart phones, or anything like that. Meanwhile, so many other early sci fi writers were able to envision things such as these that I am continually amazed that Asimov maintains the massive sci fi reputation he enjoys. Personally, I think he was stuck in a 1950s nuclear-era technology rut with absolutely little ability to think ahead creatively like so many of his peers and while the stories in this book are generally pleasantly well written, except for much dialogue, which Asimov always seems to have problems writing, his writing skills don’t even begin to measure up to so many other sci fi writers, it’s not even funny. Personally, I think he had several decent ideas and could tell a decent story, but then so could hundreds of other writers, so in my opinion, he was just a hack. I can easily name numerous other sci fi writers who are infinitely better than he ever was.

Whatever the case, and no matter how poorly Asimov wrote most of his novels, most of these short stories are quite good and are pretty well written. I assume he must have had a good editor. This book is the highest rated book I have ever seen on Goodreads, with a 4.36 out of 5 score. I certainly don’t think it deserves a 5 at all and I’m not even sure it deserves a 4, but I’m going ahead and giving it one just because so much of it was entertaining and after all, isn’t that what you want out of a good short story? I’m curious, now, to see how his writing matured in the ’60s, so if I see Volume 2 of this series, I’ll probably get it. As for this book? Recommended.
9 people found this helpful
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Jay Shelton
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite author, just don't buy from this seller unless you don't mind damaged books.
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2023
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No need to review Asimov, just read everything he ever wrote.
As for the book itself, the seller ships in a plain envelop resulting in deep indentations in the book. I may be a bit anal about the condition of my library (can't stand to even have creases in the binding), but when I purchase a new book, I expect it to be in new condition.
Not worth the hassle of returning it.
3 people found this helpful
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Thomas D. Mcsweeney
5.0 out of 5 stars Well packaged and received without damage
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2020
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Of course Isaac Asimov, the Father of Science Fiction writing, changed how humanity viewed robots and artificial intelligence. His Foundation series is a hallmark of science fiction. He was the one to introduce mixing genres with his detective/science fiction short stories. This wonderful collection of his earlier works displays his advanced ideas on robots and the mixing of genres to create a higher level of excellent literary works. Many of these ideas would be incorporated and expanded upon in his later works. This collection of stories would be the perfect introduction to the master and a perfect introduction to the genre of science fiction. A good gift for your intelligent teenager or advanced reader of any age who has not been introduced to science fiction or as a gift for that person who already loves science fiction but has not read Asimov's short stories.
7 people found this helpful
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Luc Van der Veken
1.0 out of 5 stars The kindle edition is horrible
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2019
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The book is good of course, it's Asimov. But the kindle version is unreadable, even at the reduced price of $3.50 you're being charged too much. I wish there was a way to give zero stars.
I think someone took the hardcopy, scanned it, ran it through OCR, said "now I have an e-book", and published it without bothering to proofread it or do any further processing.

It is riddled with OCR errors - characters that turned into something else, for example capital I's that become digits 1 are just among the minor ones. An example: if you see "TheIJ&vernment", read "The government".

What you will see a LOT (or actually not see) are spaces between words that just disappeared, creating brand new words like in "a littleuneven", "I explainedthat", and "police carsand everything" that even the simplest form of spell checking would have caught. You'll find about a score of those per printed page of the original.

Then there are things that just shouldn't be there, and I'm not only meaning frayed paper edges from the original that the OCR tries to translate into meaningful interpunction. Page numbers from the original that appear in the middle of a sentence (an actual quote: "I was Page 33 baby-sitting"), up to entire copyright messages (looks like the original had one as a footer on the first page of every story) that found their way into the text. It even pops up between the halves of a hyphenated word, near the beginning of the second story.

Formatting is non-existant. The first story runs straight into what looks like was a piece of poetry between stories, then the title of the second story appears as just another word on itself, followed by the new story. All formatted in the same paragraph style and font without even some extra vertical space, as if it was all still part of the first story.

I read until about 8% of the book, and it feels as if *they* should be paying *us* for reading it, instead of the other way around.
7 people found this helpful
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Takeittoem.
5.0 out of 5 stars A very good complete mix of classic sci fi.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 15, 2024
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Valuable addition to anyone's sci fi bookshelf,stories by classic sci fi writers, good content, entertaining and enlightening content, good range for all ages, good for broadening minds and outlooks of any sci fi fans, you will not be dissapointed, be prepared for thrilling amazing entertaining reads......... Mr.T.
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Meena Seville
5.0 out of 5 stars asimov
Reviewed in Spain on November 21, 2023
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great book
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Rishabh kumar
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for sci-fi lovers!
Reviewed in India on March 2, 2023
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A few days back I saw Isaac Asimov's book reviews from one of my oldest friends on bookstagram and was completed fascinated by his works. Reading about his background I found out that he is considered as the grand master of science fiction and founder of robot ethics in fiction. 20 out of the 25 stories were awesome while almost five of them were not worth it. The dead past, the immortal bard, the gentle vultures and the last question were the best among all these stories. I would suggest this book to every sci-fi plus future oriented stories lover, totally worth the 7 8 days I spent on it. Thanks eeveereads to make Isaac Asimov come into my mind because of your recent reads.
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Rishabh kumar
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for sci-fi lovers!
Reviewed in India on March 2, 2023
A few days back I saw Isaac Asimov's book reviews from one of my oldest friends on bookstagram and was completed fascinated by his works. Reading about his background I found out that he is considered as the grand master of science fiction and founder of robot ethics in fiction. 20 out of the 25 stories were awesome while almost five of them were not worth it. The dead past, the immortal bard, the gentle vultures and the last question were the best among all these stories. I would suggest this book to every sci-fi plus future oriented stories lover, totally worth the 7 8 days I spent on it. Thanks eeveereads to make Isaac Asimov come into my mind because of your recent reads.
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6 people found this helpful
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Fred
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice collection by the Master of Sci-Fi
Reviewed in Canada on December 17, 2020
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This is a great collection of Asimov Sci-Fi short stories. If you enjoy classic Sci-Fi and are ready to journey into early and mid XX century imagination, this if for you. Some classic stories and Award winning ones like Nightfall are included. HAd this book when I was a kid, and I bought it again now that I am 48. Watch out this is a Big and Heavy book.
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Leonardo José Magalhães Gomes
1.0 out of 5 stars Graves problemas editoriais
Reviewed in Brazil on August 4, 2020
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O livro tem a marca de qualidade do grande Asimov. A edição, infelizmente não está à altura dos textos. Ele tem inúmeros erros de digitação como palavras grudadas umas nas outras. sem espaços entre elas, falta dos parágrafos, números de páginas no meio dos textos etc. é necessário que Amazon e a editora corrijam tais erros em respeito ao escritor e aos leitores.
4 people found this helpful
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