The Alternate Asimovs by Isaac Asimov

(Grafton 1987 349pp £3.50)

This volume contains Asimov's novellette versions of Pebble in the Sky and The End of Eternity, written for magazines in the fifties but rejected then, and the short story "Belief" with the conclusion Asimov wrote to please John W Campbell and the conclusion he had written originally. "Belief" is the most interesting of the three because it shows Asimov able to write two conclusions from the same introduction and theme and make both of them seem as appropriate.

Asimov wrote about the history of Pebble in the Sky in The Early Asimov, but there are major discrepancies between what he describes there and the manuscript reprinted in The Alternate Asimovs. For example, the original title was "inspired by Robert Browning's poem Rabbi Ben Ezra and was a misquotation" - it is referred to as "Grow Old With Me" but it is printed as "Grow Old Along With Me" in The Alternate Asimovs even while Asimov in his foreword to the story says "here it is as originally written for Startling except for the correction of typos and minor infelicities" and does not mention this major, silent correction.

Asimov has also said that he can remember no detail of the original story but in 1974 he said he thought Pebble in the Sky was practically a new novel, retaining only Joseph Schwartz and the Judeo-Roman background (according to Joseph Patrouch in his Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov). Actually the novellette and the novel are very similar. This is worrying, since it suggests that Asimov's recollection is untrustworthy, and in turn throws a lot of bio-bibliographical doubt on his other recollections of working in the Golden Age. Now that we have what he has claimed to describe we can see that his statements were misleading. What else might be?

The Alternate Asimovs as is usual comes with the Doctor's running commentaries. I think in one of them he should have corrected his past statements, or at least mention the disparities. He would have appeared more trustworthy and consistent. Against this criticism, as Asimov says of the rejected story "I think Startling could have done lots worse than to have accepted and published it" - it was work of Asimov's recognised standard. People might like to take up the other questions, though.

The Big Sun of Mercury by Isaac Asimov
(Lightning pp143 £1.99)

This is a Lucky Starr juvenile. Long conversations not only carry the plot, but are also loaded with science which a note says has been proved wrong since. The publishers have not corrected the American spelling.

PRELUDE TO FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov

(Grafton 1989 pp460 £3.99)

The early life of Hari Seldon, the man whose theories changed a universe, when Karl Marx only managed to change a world, ought to have been one of great interest. The portrayal of it ought to have been a great challenge. The explanation of that mind's workings require a great understanding.

Unfortunately this book provides none of them: it is weak in both invention and explanation. Hari Seldon is an idiot - alleged to be a great mathematician, he never talks of mathematics; alleged to have developed a theory of future history, he is ignorant of history. The facts we are given fail to support any belief in what he does.

The book begins just after Seldon has delivered a lecture outlining the mathematical principles that allow the future to be known. This leads to his being hounded through the rest of the novel until he finally finds protection. He takes sanctuary in three different societies in his underground life, and eventually abandons his attempt to know what has happened on planets throughout the past. Trantor, he decides, can supply all the data he needs to develop his theory.

What events show us is that Seldon produced his work out of nothing: it was not produced by an analysis of the past, about which he knows nothing. Indeed, he never even seems to know the maths either.

Presumably, Seldon should be Dr Asimov's equal if not greater, yet what Asimov gives us is a something much less. This is a book that does not explain the foundation of the Foundation.

ROBOT DREAMS by Isaac Asimov
(Gollancz £3.95 pp 349 1988)

This is a short story collection with illustrations. The title story is a new account of one of Susan Calvin's exploits, and some of the other stories have never been collected in book form before, but over half of the stories in here come from collections first published in the 50's. What it is not is a collection of Asimov's robot stories. Thematically this book seems to include most of Asimov's interests, although none of the Foundation stories are here. In a sense it just a good collection of Golden Age SF, but that leads me to wonder who its intended audience may be: the number of Asimov completists must be very small and other fans will be put off by the re-packaging of previously available material. So, perhaps, the illustrations are meant to attract non-SF readers.

Each story starts with a running variation of a collapsed humanoid robot, and some contain a whole page illustration of a scene from the story. The illustrator, Ralph McQuarrie, was involved in the design of Star Wars, and the robots are very similar to those of Star Wars, but when he comes on to other areas - like equine extraterrrestrials or Neanderthals- he goes twee. As both of those stories have dark sides it tends to weaken their effect. Fortunately, not every story has an illustration with it.

Apart from the title story (how do you think Susan Calvin reacts to a robot who dreams?) this collection includes "Little Lost Robot", "The Last Question" and "The Martian Way".

A lot of Asimov's alternate presents and most of his futures are, when you think of it, pretty unpleasant. His worlds tend to be overcrowded, run by inhumane bureaucrats, controlled by large but crude computers; his frontiers are harsh and restricting, and even after the frontiers have been opened the life on the new worlds is no better than on the old. How many people will stop and think about the implications of his work after reading this book, or noticing the clash between the illustrations and the text, I don't know. But I would hope that some would. Perhaps someone could decide if Asimov is a futuromane or a futurophobe.

ROBOT VISIONS by Isaac Asimov

This is the second book collecting Asimov's robot stories in a rather disorganised way. It is described as the companion piece to the earlier Robot Dreams, and like that comes with Ralph McQuarrie's illustrations.

The title story is new and two other stories out of the eighteen are previously uncollected, we also get the only short story written about R. Daneel Olivaw. The book ends with sixteen short essays, a good number of them actually the introductions to the "Robot City" shared world novels, and many of of them repetitive.

As with the earlier book, McQuarrie's illustrations do not seem reaaly appropriate - his robots look too lovable, and in the future world of Lije Bailey and Robot Daneel Olivaw, people hate robots. (McQuarrie also gets things wrong - his illustration to "Robbie" shows the little girl wearing peddle-pushers when she described as wearing a dress, for instance), but they may help to introduce fans of R2D2 to harder stuff.

What the illustrations tend to hide is the division in Asimov about the future of robots. For decades people pointed out that the future of the Foundation and of the robot stories was at variance. There are, though, big discrepancies between robot stories - the 1956 story "Someday" describes crude robots not made by U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, and has a very different atmosphere to the Susan Calvin stories collected in I Robot and The Rest Of The Robots. U.S. Robots was building time travel machines there, how was that lost by the time of The Caves Of Steel? And, as Asimov admits in his introduction, while he wrote about computers he never related them to robots.

This is a book that will complete many people's robot collections, but I would have preferred something in a better order.