| Book 29 | Science Fiction Collection | 1959 |
| ◀ | The Death Dealers [A Whiff of Death] | The Clock We Live On | ▶ |
 Asimov fan |
Target reader |
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…
…and every one brings us awesome new wonders, heart-stopping new adventures. Dr. Asimov shows us the Olympics, 21st-century style…a suicidal computer…a child who found a mother—40,000 years too late…and other incredible visions, waiting to come true, just a few tomorrows up the road.
This is my favorite of Asimov’s short story anthologies.
Naturally, Golden Age Syndrome is in full effect here—I couldn’t have been older than thirteen when I first read it. At the same time, however, this is a collection with nine of Asimov’s stories written at the peak of his form, plus two bits of comic verse which are every bit as good as the stories. And this is no small praise, either. Two of the nine stories (“The Ugly Little Boy” and “The Last Question”) are among Asimov’s three favorite of his own stories. You also have one of his more famous tales (“The Feeling of Power”), an early Wendell Urth story, a Multivac story, and so on.
All of the stories here are good and would be a credit to any science fiction writer. (This is one of the advantage of the earlier of Asimov’s anthologies. In later years, he would anthologize everything he wrote—with two exceptions—regardless of quality, and some collections have a very uneven quality as a result. In the anthologies from the 1950’s, he only included his best.) If any seem weak, it’s because some of the companion pieces are so very, very good. There is not a story in this volume that I do not meet with delight each time I read it. This is an absolute must-have for any Asimov fan or science fiction collection.
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