I liked the short stories but the random collection of musings, introductions to other books and anything else that the publisher seems to have had lying around was a bit of a hit and miss. ( )

On the one hand, I very much enjoy Dr. Asimov's stories. All of the fiction in this volume was new to me, and a joy to read. That made up about 30% of the book.

A collection of essays, mostly introductions to anthologies and editorials from his magazine, filled the remaining 2/3 of the volume. They were sorted into two sections - On SF and On Writing SF, but there was no context given for any of them, nor were they in any particular order in each section. Many of the essays lost a lot from not being attached to the books they introduced. There was no way to know what Dr. Asimov meant by "In this volume". The book has the ghoulish feel to it, as if the publisher had simply thrown together a bunch of Dr. Asimov's writing, knowing it would sell.

When Dr. Asimov worked on an anthology, and in his SF magazine, he usually included a brief introduction to each story, telling abit about the author, or putting the story or essay into context. I very much wish the editor of this anthology had done the same. I'm very glad I get this from the library; I would feel quite short-changed had I purchased it.

That being said, the essays are good - just hard to follow in some cases. I'll return this copy to the library next week, so you can borrow it then :) ( )

Asimov is a treasure, god bless him, but his fiction is often little more than a competently written one-liner. I attempted re-reading this whole collection and I got about half way through before remembering that it's so slight, there's a reason I only remember a bit of it now. ( )

I rather liked the first story ("Cal"), about a robot who wants to be a writer, and the title story has some interesting ideas about a future sensory medium and may give some indication of Asimov's feelings about The Gods Themselves. The rest of the stories are okay, but nothing special.

That's roughly the first third of the book; the rest reprints introductions to other anthologies and editorials from Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (though without any headnotes indicating what came from where; you're left to extrapolate from internal evidence and the copyright dates at the end). On the whole, these aren't worth the bother. ( )

Published four years after Asimov's death, this book contains a number of previously unpublished stories and articles about the art of writing science fiction and the field of science fiction. Some of the stories are very good - particularly the title piece, but some are slightly less impressive and a reminder of why the pun is considered the lowest form of humour :-) ( )