Books: What Makes Isaac Write?

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Asimov's Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament and The New Testament (each: Doubleday, $12.95 hardcover; Avon, $4.95 paperback). It was the omissions in the Old and New Testaments that begat Asimov's Guide to the Bible (1968 and 1969). "It happens," writes the author, "that millions of people today know of Nebuchadnezzar, and have never heard of Pericles, simply because Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned prominently in the Bible and Pericles is never mentioned at all." Biblical Scholar Asimov characteristically mentions all: history, biography, geography, archaeology and cross-culture myths that are the roots if not the artistic and spiritual blossoms of the Good Book. The result is another testament to the author's Jovian powers of assimilation and explication.

Limericks: Too Gross (Norton, $7.95 hardcover). Asimov the poetaster and John Ciardi the poet might seem like an odd couple. But the two, who first met at a writers' conference, are close friends. They are also competitors and over the past several years have tried, with limited success, to top each other at composing limericks. The result of their 1978 Shootout is a book in which each offers 144 of the five-liners. One of Ciardi's milder offerings reads: "Said a voice from the back of the car,/ 'Young man, I don't know who you are./ But allow me to state,/ Though it may come too late,/ I had not meant to go quite this far.' " An Asimovian retort goes: "There is something about satyriasis/ That arouses psychiatrists' biases,/ But we're both very pleased/ We're in this way diseased/ As the damsel who's waiting to try us is." Thus: Though their poetry centers on mating,/ Both men show very few signs of dating./ Still their comedy's salty/ And their taste somewhat faulty,/ So their book gets a solid X rating. ∎

Excerpts

"Can cars have ideas? The motor designers say no. But they mean under ordinary conditions. Have they foreseen everything?

Cars get ill-used, you know.

Some of them enter the Farm and observe ... They find out that cars exist whose motors are never stopped, whom no one ever drives, whose every need is supplied.

Then maybe they go out and tell others. Maybe the word is spreading quickly...

There are millions of automatobiles on Earth, tens of millions. If the thought gets rooted in them that they're slaves; that they should do something about it...

Maybe it won't be till after my time. And then they'll have to keep a few of us to take care of them, won't they? They wouldn't kill us all.

And maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't understand about how someone would have to care for them. Maybe they won't wait. [Nightfall and Other Stories, 1969]

The propensity for judging matters with a variable measure shows up in the game of Conjugation, which expresses the differing manner in which we treat ourselves, present company, and absent unfortunates:

I am firm; you are stubborn; he's an obstinate mule.

I am liberal; you are radical; he's a Communist.

I am farseeing; you are a visionary; he's a fuzzy-minded dreamer. [Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, 1971]