While Isaac Asimov officially celebrated his birthday as 2 January 1920, his birth date is uncertain. Records were not well kept in the U.S.S.R. in the period between World War I and World War II, particularly if the records concerned Jews. By the time A...

By the time of his death in 1992, Isaac Asimov was widely regarded as one of the most productive and versatile writers of all time. Asimov was best-known for his science-fiction novels and popularized accounts of science, but he worked in a number of oth...

The author of nearly five hundred books, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is esteemed as one of the finest writers of science fiction and scientific fact in the twentieth century. Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, to middle-class Jewish parents in Petrovichi,...

DEFINE the perimeter of your lawn, beds and borders with an edging product. It doesn't need to be grandiose, shop around for something that is practical and unusual. Edging can jazz up the frame of a balcony, the boundaries of a terrace or, for...

Looking to drive up stagnating sales, Ford Motor Co. spends half a billion dollars on a project to create its first crossover utility vehicle. There was a lot riding on this project. After dominating the U.S. sport utility vehicle (SUV) market in...

In 1982 Isaac Asimov returned to the science-fiction world of the 1940s to produce the long-awaited fourth volume of the Foundation series [Foundation's Edge]. Reasons (of many kinds) for a sequel have been clear for many years; most important of them, the Trilogy itself stopped after 400 years of the thousand-year saga envisioned in Hari Seldon's psychohistorical predictions, and concluded with some uncertainty about the situation in which it left the Foundation universe. (p. 15) [A brief sum...

In some respects Foundation's Edge is not simply a continuation of the earlier stories, but is a redirection. A certain amount of past history has had to be rewritten, notably the career of Asimov's famous Napoleonic character, the Mule. But more important is the shift of Asimov's own position toward the ideas in the stories. The previous stories, it is now clear in retrospect, emerged from the milieu of Hitler's Germany and World War II. The Foundations were a parable on Judaism...

I am relieved to report that ["Foundation's Edge"] is a worthy sequel in every way. As before, the First Foundation wields the power of the physical sciences and technology, and the Second Foundation has the power to cloud men's minds and predict mass behavior through the statistical insights of psychohistory. Also as before, the fate of all humanity is at stake as these mighty adversaries clash—and the focus is on the actions of a handful of people who are earnest and art...