Customer Reviews

Earth is Room Enough

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This was, strangely enough, my first science fiction book ever. A friend who read a lot passed it on to me, and I was instantly, as a pre-teen, hooked on Asimov and science fiction.

The premise of these stories is that Earth is "room enough" or has enough material to write science fiction stories. So no planetary visits. Instead, Asimov treads ground rather in the mode of "The Twilight Zone" and finds stories enough on Earth to delight and amaze.

The stories include:
The Dead Past * The Foundation of S.F. Success * Franchise * Gimmicks Three * Kid Stuff * The Watery Place * Living Space * The Message * Satisfaction Guaranteed * Hell-Fire * The Last Trump * The Fun They Had * Jokester * The Immortal Bard * Someday * The Author's Ordeal * Dreaming Is a Private Thing

Of them, I enjoyed "Franchise" which so many years later seems less outrageous than when Asimov first thought up the idea of one representative voter, chosen by demographics and computer simulation, who will be the one to cast a vote that would reflect the majority opinion. But the very best story is "Satisfaction Guaranteed"--a robot story and one that is also in The Rest of the Robots, a companion book to the famous I, Robot. Here, a rising robotics executive brings home a prototype humanoid robot to test its housekeeping abilities on his unsophisticated wife. She, inept, average, unintellectual, is in her husband's eyes, the perfect test subject to put this robotic butler through his--wait, no, ITS paces. But due to the First Law of Robotics (a robot may not harm or allow to come to harm any human) there are the UNFORESEEN consequences.

These are in the classic style of pulp magazine sci-fi, so they may seem quite dated (they even did in 1960-something when I first read this) but the stories are fun to read in any case.