I take issue with this volume, and not because they’re short stories and you’re bound to like some more than the others: they’re all delightful, with very few and negligible exceptions.
No, my problem is curatorial: I take issue that instead of grouping all the short stories in a single volume and call it, I don’t know, “The Adventures of George and his little friend Azazel,” they decided to throw fiction and non-fiction together in a single bunch, just because they both deal with sci-fi tangentally through the lenses of something someone might consider fantasy. And if you’re thinking “I didn’t know Asimov wrote fantasy“, he most definitely did not.
What he wrote was satire.
Superb, glorious satire. And it certainly isn’t sci-fi either, I agree, but… well, you have a whole essay of Asimov explaining why he tried to twist the genre of his stories, and it’s a whole new level of hilarious in itself.
Then you have short speculations on fantasy as a genre, including one on Tolkien (yay for that, except Asimov dives deep into the whole metaphor and allegory thing, so nay for that), and one of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and one of Americans not reading anymore. O tempora, o mores.
In short, a collection of delightful writings that feel like that splendid dinner you have a few days after Christmas, with all the reheated leftovers.
Everything is delicious, but I wouldn’t invite guests for that.
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