"Earth Is Room Enough" by Isaac Asimov

This is my second-favorite of all of Asimov’s short story collections. 

I freely admit my prejudice here: this is "golden age" syndrome in full bloom. I purchased my copy in my early teens—probably in 1973 or 1974—at a grocery store a couple of blocks south of my junior high school, and have read it a half-a-dozen times in the twenty years since.

On the other hand, this is a collection of stories taken from the 1950’s, when Asimov’s fiction writing was at its peak, and not selected on the basis of they-haven’t-been-anthologized yet. The net result is that, although the collection contains some decidedly weak stories (e.g., “The Message” (in which we find out that Kilroy really was there)  and “Hell-Fire” (a nuclear explosion is viewed in slo-mo)), and some decidedly medium stories (e.g., “Gimmicks Three” (selling one's soul to the devil), “Someday”(a story-riting compter called The Bard), it also contains some of Asimov’s best stories (“Dreaming is a Private Thing” (pre-recorded dreams are sold for entertainment), “The Fun They Had” (a girl of the future yearns for the old days of education she's read about in a book), “Satisfaction Guaranteed” (the use of  an unusual robot servant), and, above all, “The Dead Past” (use of an illegal time-viewing device has consequences). Plus, of course, we have two delightful pieces of comic verses that seem to parodies of something somebody else may have written, although I certainly have no idea who that could be.

(Another personal note: When first I read this collection, I always groaned when I started. “The Dead Past”, after all, was over 50 pages long! And “Someday” was by far my favorite story in the collection. Somehow, my views regarding these two stories have changed over the last twenty years. “The Dead Past” is among my very favorites of all of Asimov’s shorter works, and “Someday” is decidedly an also-ran.)

This collection was put together by Asimov to answer one of several consistent criticisms he faced during the 1950’s: that he couldn’t write sex, that he couldn’t write aliens, and that he couldn’t keep any of his stories on the Earth.

The result is delightful. We have here an excellent robot story, some strangely wistful stories, some of the earliest (and best) Multivac stories, and, of course, “The Dead Past”.

Definitely a must-have for the Asimov fan, the full contents of this collection now make up the first third of The Complete Stories, volume 1. (asimovreviews.net)