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...MEMORY YET GREEN: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ISAAC ASIMOV, 1920-1954 Doubleday; 732 pages...
Other writers may sit white-knuckled at their desks, grinding out a few pages a day, a book every couple of years. Not Isaac Asimov. Back in 1938, the teenage author sold his first tale to Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine. Encouraged, he branched out from sci-fi to fields as varied as his interests: literary criticism, psychology, mathematics, mystery, poetry, humor, American history. Simenon may have written more thrillers, Chesterton more poetry and philosophy, Pulp Romance Writer Barbara Cartland more novels. But no single author has ever written more books about more subjects than Isaac Asimov...
This month he extends that record with the publication of his 200th book. Leave it to Asimov to complicate things by passing the milestone twice. With rival publishers equally eager to bring out the landmark work, the author has satisfied both by assigning the same number to two offerings...
Both are remarkable works. Opus 200 is a cornucopia: for sci-fi buffs there are excerpts from the 1972 novel The Gods Themselves and the award-winning robot story The Bicentennial Man. For those who prefer Asimov's other talents, there are such tours de force as an introduction to binary numbers; an explanation, in language that even Dick and Jane can follow, of why it is possible (but not practical) to reverse the basic nuclear reaction and convert energy into matter; some witty Asimovian annotations on Shakespeare, the Bible and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Byron...
...other Opus 200, In Memory Yet Green, is a guide to Asimov himself: a detailed, candid account of his early days in Brooklyn, in the developing field of science fiction, in the worlds of college teaching and book publishing. In Memory, which follows its central character to his 34th year (he is now 59), may not fall into the same class as Rousseau's Confessions. But like the author, it is ceaselessly informative and entertaining...