Asimov and Me

Opus 200

I decided as a boy that I wanted to be a writer - and that I wanted to write like Isaac Asimov, to go wherever the typewriter might lead - science, science fiction, history, biography, sociology, robotics. And that's what I've done, for more than three decades.

I went all those places in Volume I, which gathered up bits and pieces of my work from 2011 to 2024. It took me even longer than that to hit 100 books (I'd actually started publishing in 2002), so there was much to choose from.

The second 100 books, however, took far less time - as it did for Asimov himself. In two short years, I've generated another 100 books. Now, I'll confess up front that this is largely because we live in the era of quick-hit content, and readers of e-books (Kindle and its kin) prefer shorter reads of less than 100 pages. So I wrote a great many shorter books. I also broke my longer books - the ones running 250+ pages - into small series of shorter ones. And I did a number of fiction compilations that recycled old stories, in the tradition of both Asimov and Ray Bradbury. So I did a little fudging along the way to get that second 100 books so quickly.

Even so, there's plenty of new stuff here - hopefully good stuff, including much more political content (from the Red Brains, Blue Brains series), explorations of the dangers of Christian Nationalism, and quite a bit about Native Americans (The Indigenous Critique). There's some nostalgia from a rock music childhood, some new Ellison-esque fiction, a number of essays - and explorations of both oligarchy and Stoicism.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!