All the Leftovers: The Early Asimov by Isaac Asimov
The Early Asimov (Doubleday, 547 pages, $10 in hardcover, September 1972)
By Isaac Asimov
Cover by Barry Kiperman
This is a book I’d never read before, and debated recently about whether to ever read it. On the one hand, life is too short to read every book one might have accumulated, and this book consists, frankly, of all the stories from Asimov’s early career that had not already been included in 10 earlier collections — all the leftovers. (Those 10 include I, Robot as well as the three Foundation “novels,” since those were largely comprised of earlier magazine stories.)
Thus I had passed over it several times before. On the other hand, I kept noticing early stories by Asimov in various anthologies, and realized that I’d never read those stories, or only a couple of them via those anthologies. So why not catch up on the others and just read through this 1972 book? An attraction is the substantial, autobiographical notes Asimov provides, detailing how each story was written and submitted; the book is subtitled “Or, Eleven Years of Trying.”
Such notes proved so popular here that he provided similar notes in subsequent books (like the anthology Before the Golden Age) and then in two lengthy volumes of autobiography over the next eight years.
So before considering individual stories, here are the broad takeaways from reading this book.
