Extrapolating the 1950s

Feb 2015
Earth is Room Enough - Isaac Asimov - Panther, 1960
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My brother and I had the same experience when we encountered the Foundation Trilogy as teenagers. We took them on a holiday to France and although we both usually got sick when we read in the car, we literally could not put the books down. I still consider it one of the great literary experiences of my life, on a par with reading the whole of The Lord of the Rings over a weekend (teenage years are great for an introvert bookworm - all that free time!). So I have a great fondness for Dr A and read various of his novels at college, even a couple of the disappointing sequels which tried to combine his Robots and Foundation universes. This one, a book of short stories mostly set on planet Earth, I never got around to. I had some trepidation about trying it now because my tastes have changed somewhat in the intervening years and I thought that his mid-twentieth century sensibility might start to grate. It is certainly true that his characters have a distinctively 1950s feel to them and his shaggy dog stories no longer amuse me as once they did. But I had forgotten what an effervescent writer Asimov was, and just how prescient some of his ideas were. So I wasn't disappointed at all.
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