Title: Nine Tomorrows

Author: Isaac Asimov

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 256

Rating: 4/5

Here we have some more pretty awesome Isaac Asimov short stories, all based around the theme of the future of our civilisation. Asimov does a great job of writing stuff like this, and a classic example of it is a short story in which people have forgotten how to carry out mental arithmetic. They have to rely on computers to do it for them, and that causes a lot of problems… until someone rediscovers the lost art of calculating things inside their head.

There’s a lot of fun stuff and food for thought here, just as I’ve come to expect from Isaac Asimov, and I’d have to say that it’s pretty typical as an example of his work. Of course, some of the stories are better than others, and some of them are also very much a product of their time, as was the case with a piece on aliens getting involved in the Cold War.

All in all, this was a decent little collection and definitely worth picking up, but it was also pretty standard for Asimov. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a bad place to start if you see a copy going spare, but you’ll want to get to the robot stories sooner rather than later. But there are some absolute crackers in here, and I’m not even mad that I’d read a few of them. It was about time for a re-read anyway.

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