Essays from a SciFi Master

Isaac Asimov was one of the most recognized names in Science Fiction in the 20th Century. While he was a legendary novelist, he loved playing with ideas as the essays in The Tragedy of the Moon demonstrate. In "The Ancient and the Ultimate" he muses on the book as a form of "stored speech." Asked to speculate on the perfect video cassette of the future, he describes the BOOK - compact, self-contained, personal, unobtrusive, portable. Technology may find a replacement for the ubiquitous book but, until that day, Asimov argues, books will not disappear.

While the essays in this volume cover a lot of ground from space to the thyroid gland to the book, one of the most intriguing is "Lost in Non-Translation". Asimov examines the meaning of despised foreigners in two Biblical stories - a Moabite woman, in the Old Testament book of Ruth, and a Samaritan business man, Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament. He brings home the distinctions humans make toward those despised others in our midst in terms of American race relations. Although there have been many changes to the category of despised others in America, this essay is as thought provoking a treatment today as when it was published some 30 years ago.

These two essays alone make The Tragedy of the Moon worth reading.