Ny anmeldelse levert til amazon.co.uk:
Not a Science Fiction Book!
Isaac Asimov, "The Good Doctor of Science Fiction", was an incredibly profuse writer. He is best know for his fiction, but he was also a bona fide scientist, and a great popularizer and explainer of science.
This book is a collection of non-fiction essays. Some could be called musings; most are pure "popular science", that is, explanations of (sometimes difficult) concepts in chemistry or physics that anybody willing to make a bit of effort can understand... Asimov had a great talent for this; Dawkins said in the preface to The Selfish Gene that he wanted to make biology read like a mystery story, because that's what it is to him. Asimov manages to do this to all the diverse topics he discusses... his writing is timeless. Now, more than thirty years later, it's still fresh.
Indeed, I dug this up recently because one of the topics discussed is very much in the news: Two of the essays presented here, "Stop!" and "...but how?" are on the problem of population. From the former:
"[I]n April 1970, I gave nine talks which, despite Rigoletto, were not funny at all. It was the month in which the first Earth Day was celebrated, and every one of my talks dealt, in whole or in part, with the coming catastrophe.
I have discussed that catastrophe in the final chapters of a previous volume, "The Stars in Their Courses" (Doubleday, 1971), and I have made it quite plain that in my opinion the first order of business is a halt to the population increase on Earth. Without such a halt right away, none of mankind's problems can be solved under any circumstance: none!"
Foranledningen var jo selvsagt at jeg ville vite om den var i trykk... De to essayene, Stop! og ... but how? kunne jeg tenkt meg å skrive av og legge ut her, siden de snakker om akkurat det samme som forrige post: Overbefolkning.
Innlegg
