Contains 55 essays on science fiction.

A collection of essays by a master of science fiction is devoted to a discussion of the nature, characteristics, and function of science-fiction writing, including information on authors, works, and themes

Compares what writers over the centuries have written about an imaginary future with the reality revealed by time.

The final collection of fiction and essays by the most celebrated science fiction author of all time—including the Hugo Award–winning story “Gold.” Isaac Asimov is widely considered both the inventor of science fiction as well as the genre’s greatest practitioner. This wide-ranging collection is the final and crowning achievement of his fifty-year career as a writer. It includes an introduction by the renowned science fiction author Orson Scott Card. The first section contains stories that range from the humorous to the profound, at the heart of which is the title story, “Gold,” a moving and revealing drama about a writer who gambles everything on a chance at immortality: a gamble Asimov himself made—and won. The second section contains the grand master’s ruminations on the SF genre itself. And the final section is comprised of Asimov’s thoughts on the craft and writing of science fiction.

When he was twenty-one years old, Isaac Asimov published Nightfall, a story that set the standard for science fiction at that time and established its author as a major science fiction writer. Over the next fifty years, Asimov went on to push the frontiers of science fiction and redefine the genre. Much of the science fiction found today in movies or on television can be traced to Asimov's ideas of futuristic societies featuring robots, space travel, and galaxy-wide civilizations. Asimov, a scientist, has also published hundreds of popular nonfiction books about science. Author Karen Judson interviewed Asimov's widow, Dr. Janet Asimov, and others, to put together an insider's view of the life and legacy of Isaac Asimov and to place the man and his work into the continuum of science fiction literature.

An enthralling collection of four intriguing science fiction stories. A strange creature kept in a science lab isn't quite what it seems in Gillian Philip's "The Changeling;" two space garbage men pick up a bit more than they bargained for in David Orme's "Space Junk;" a young girl has an unsettling encounter with identical strangers in Mary Chapman's "Strangers;" and a space war comes to an end, but at what cost in Alan Durant's "The Neronian Box."