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Originally Posted by ziegl027
Don't forget the non-robot, non-Foundation short fiction. "Nightfall"' and "The Ugly Little Boy" spring to mind.
Also keep in mind before launching into reading Asimov that he was a very prolific author who pretty freelily admitted that he wrote largely to put some money in his pocket. Not that he wasn't a good writer and didn't love writing, but if he sent it out and somebody bought it, he didn't care if it was one of his BEST. The check cleared, so it was good enough. I think a lot of the Foundation stuff and Robot stuff falls into that category. It was selling, so he wrote more of it.
So, as an Asimov newbie, if you launch into trying to read things in chronological order by publication or series chronology, you may not get the best first impressions of him....
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Actually I would say that is somewhat unfair to Asimov. Pretty much every writer who publishes fairly often, writes to make money (There are some exceptions like J.D. Salinger). Even "Literary Authors" write with the hopes that their books will sell, or at least give them enough credentials to get a spot as a writing teacher some where.
In addition, Asimov's SF output was basically bimodal. He published most of his SF in the 40s and 50s... and then basically his output greatly dropped off in the 1960s and 70s before picking up again the 1980s. He was writing other things, even though his publishers had been begging him for years to write more Foundation and Robot novels.
Of course, I may not be completely objective when it comes to Asimov. He was my favorite author in my early teen years. I remember in the last one or two summers before I had to get a job, spending hours sitting on a chair in the back yard reading Foundation, or the Complete Robot....
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Bill