Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Read Online Free PDF Page A

we shouldn't be surprised that he tended to be a bit sloppy on the detail, whether factual or conceptual.
    There is, however, I think a little more to it in Asimov's instance than that. His otherwise admirable anti-elitism affected his writing as well. Take this comment:
    Of course, it helps if you don't try to be too literary in your writing. If you try to turn out a prose poem, that takes time ... I have therefore deliberately cultivated a very plain style, even a colloquial one, which can be turned out rapidly and with which very little can go wrong. Of course, some critics, with crania that are more bone than mind, interpret this as my having "no style." If anyone thinks, however, that it is easy to write with absolute clarity and no frills, I recommend that he try it.
    This simplified style became more pronounced in his fiction as the years went by; reading his later novels, from Foundation's Edge (1982) onwards, time and again one desperately wishes he would put a little more of that unnecessary floridity into his style, because by then what had once been a laudable transparency had descended to pedestrianism. But, more significantly, his urge towards written clarity seemed to affect not just his prose style but also the content of what he wrote. The truth of the matter is that in some areas of knowledge, notably but not exclusively the sciences, a full understanding cannot be presented to the lay reader in terms that he or she will comprehend. Scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies have made an excellent fist of conveying at least a partial understanding of very abstruse ideas to the lay reader who's prepared to work at it; but many potential readers give up by about page 3 because unwilling to put in the necessary cerebral effort. Very few would have the same difficulty with an Asimov popularization – which is to his credit – but at the same time you don't get nuttin for free: you may come away from an Asimov popularization thinking you've gained a good understanding of the subject, but the chances are that the "clarity" you've so much appreciated will in fact have misled you entirely. Just as crystal-clear writing can obscure the reader's vision of the scene, so can crystal-clear explanation obscure understanding of ... well, of what in fact is not being explained, even though writer and reader may think it is.
    All of that said, this is as charming a book as Asimov obviously was so charming a man. And it is very much an Isaac Asimov book rather than a Janet Jeppson Asimov book; his widow is to be commended for having made that so. In other aspects, however, her editorial hand is less assured; the editorial apparatus tends to be rather sloppily written, and she should not have been satisfied with such shoddy proofreading and indexing. For example, in the Bibliography we are told on page 190 alone not only that Asimov published a 1950 story collection called I, Robert but that the collaborations with Robert Silverberg ( Nightfall , The Ugly Little Boy , Forward the Foundation and The Positronic Man ) were solo efforts. That sort of error, presumably perpetrated throughout, is appalling in what purports to be a definitive bibliography of the author.
    But it's the anecdotes, often deliciously self-deprecating, that remain in the mind. Some of these concern Asimov's loudly trumpeted rationalism, which brought him little popularity in the Bible-blinded USA of the late 20th century (he was named Humanist of the Year in 1984 by the American Humanist Association, and by the time of his death was still serving as President of that organization); others concern sf, and writing, and science, and publishing. All are of course personal tales, but the truly personal ones – those involving family and close friends – are perhaps the most affecting. Let me summarize the feel of this excellent book by quoting one:
    After my parents sold the candy story [ sic : "store" is meant], my mother decided to go to night