It should be noted that the book was published before Asimov’s lengthy collaboration with Greenberg (and often Ollander) on various science fiction anthologies.

The book consists of nine essays by various authors and an afterword by Asimov himself, “Asimov’s Guide to Asimov,” which I do not believe is otherwise available. One of the essays is a chapter from Joseph F. Patrouch’s excellent Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. The others are all generally good and worth reading. Two, however, are standouts for not entirely positive reasons.

One is Maxine Moore’s “The Use of Technical Metaphors in Asimov’s Fiction,” which is an attempt to extract from Asimov’s work an implied electronic meaphor which simply doesn’t exist.

The other is Charles Elkins’ “Asimov’s Foundation Novels: Historical Materialism Distorted into Cyclical Psychohistory.” This essay is frequently cited by other authors (e.g., Brian W. Aldiss’ in The Trillion-Year Spree) and is the only one whose thesis is specifically addressed by Asimov in his afterword to the whole book.

Elkins starts out with a savage attack on the Foundation series. “From just about any formal perspective, the Foundation trilogy is seriously flawed,” he says. “Stylistically, the novels are diasters, and Asimov’s ear for dialogue is simply atrocious. The characters speak with a monotonous rhythm and impoverished vocabulary characteristic of American teenagers’ popular reading in the Forties and Fifties…” And so on.

So why, he wonders, are they so popular? Taking a clue from a description of the Futurians by Donald A. Wolheim, Elkins posits that Asimov was influenced by the watered-down version of Marxist thinking popular in some American intellectual circles in the 1930’s. That this isn’t true Marxism Elkins shows at some length—and thank goodness for that, at least, as I have never been able to follow Marxist philosophy when I’ve attempted to read it. In attempting to follow Marxism, however, Asimov fails (as he doesn’t understand it) and only manages to embody the kind of anti-Marxist thinking that Marxism is intended to supercede.

Er, OK.

Elkins essay is an important one, but personally I think he’s way off base. If Asimov fails criteria for literary excellence yet maintains popularity the answer is much simpler than Elkins seems to be willing to admit: most people care about good story-telling and not about literary excellence. Good story-telling can cover a plethora of literary sins. This is particularly true in sf where some of the consistently most popular writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, are nowhere near the literary quality of authors such as Sturgeon, Ellison, and Bradbury and yet continue to sell when the others are forgotten.

(Asimov himself once took me to task for criticizing him when he praised Edgar Rice Burroughs, and rightly so. Burroughs, he told me, was a good story-teller, and that matters a great deal.)

The book as a whole is a very good one and worth having. It’s rather dated as a quarter century has passed and some of Asimov’s more important works have been published in the time since. It’s definitely something the Asimov fan should own.