So over the past four or five weeks, I’ve read (or re-read, in most cases, some 40 years or so since I first read most of these stories in the late-’60s\/early-’70s) some 100 Isaac Asimov stories, including the complete contents of (in roughly this order) The Best of Isaac Asimov<\/b>, I, Robot<\/b>, Nine Tomorrows<\/b>, Asimov’s Mysteries<\/b>, Eight Stories from The Rest of the Robots<\/b>, The Bicentennial Man and other stories<\/b>, Earth Is Room Enough<\/b>, Nightfall and other stories<\/b>, and — [I read The Martian Way<\/b> just a couple years ago, and so did not reread the four stories in that book in these past weeks] — and along the way other collections that mostly overlapped those, with a few extra stories in each: Robot Visions<\/b>, Robot Dreams<\/b>, and The Complete Robot<\/b>. I also read Harlan Ellison’s I, Robot<\/b> screenplay, published in 1994, and segueing from that, his script for “Phoenix without Ashes”, published in original script form in a 1975 anthology Faster than Light<\/b>, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois [though its premise is contrary to the book’s title…], glanced through Edward Bryant’s novelization, Phoenix Without Ashes<\/b> (published in 1975), which I read way back when but did not reread just now, and read for the first time the graphic novel version of Phoenix Without Ashes<\/b>, just published in 2012, with illustrations by Alan Robinson, that is extremely loyal to the original script version. <\/p>\n
But Harlan Ellison is a tangent to Asimov (one I might follow up on presently), and I’ve promised to blog about rereading Isaac Asimov. I will drill through many of these stories in subsequent posts, but for now, I will note these general conclusions:<\/p>\n
So over the past four or five weeks, I’ve read (or re-read, in most cases, some 40 years or so since I first read most of these stories in the late-’60s\/early-’70s) some 100 Isaac Asimov stories, including the complete contents … Continue reading