Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can't recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn't also an SF fan.
So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were sorting through a bunch of old books left in the department after we cleared out Ralph Alpher's old office and some other old book collections, I grabbed it figuring I should check out some of his science writing. The book in question is The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes. It has a copyright date of 1977, and a little callout on the front cover proclaiming it "The #1 Mystery of Time and Space" (it's the March 1978 paperback edition pictured at fantasticfiction).
It's sort of an interesting read, in that I suspect the book market has changed pretty dramatically since then. Our understanding of the science has definitely changed quite a bit in the intervening thirty years. As a result, the book is just this side of "historical curiosity," and somewhat more interesting as a look at how mass-market science writing was approached in the past.
The most interesting aspect of it, to me, is the way he tries to be quantitative without being mathematical. There are equations in the book, about ten of them (at least, ten is the number of the last equation I see in a quick flip through), but nothing too threatening. There are numbers galore, though-- table after table enumerating the density, surface gravity, escape velocity, temperature, and size of a huge variety of astronomical objects. Whenever a new class of thing is introduced, he revels in making numerical comparisons to things that have gone before-- it's a million times bigger than this, a hundred thousand times smaller than that, and so on. I'm not sure there's a single page of the book without at least one numeral.
As far as the writing goes, there's nothing flashy about it. This doesn't come across as a book that's trying to make science seem exciting to non-scientists. The approach is very logical and methodical, building up from a basic discussion of forces and density to planets, ordinary stars, white dwarfs, supernovae and neutron stars, and finally black holes. There's no dazzling prose here-- not that this would be surprising to anyone who has read his fiction. Asimov was not given to lofty flights of rhetoric.
Interestingly, it's sort of indifferently fact-checked and copyedited. I'm not sure why that would be, but it's got a slghtly slapdash feel in places.
The general subject of the book is astronomy, which I don't know all that well, so it's a little hard for me to say how good the explanations are. I think it's pretty solid up through neutron stars, though there are some archaic bits of terminology-- "cosmic egg" and "hyperon" jumped out at me as terms I've never heard in more modern treatments of the subject. It kind of goes off the rails when it gets to the last chapter, though, which goes on at some length talking about wild speculations: that Tunguska was a black hole hitting the Earth, that the entire universe could be a black hole, that quasars could be "white holes" or wormholes connecting the past and future.
The speculative bits are obviously things that a science fiction author would find irresistable, but they're also pretty dated. This was before the idea of inflationary cosmology, and before string theory really caught on, so topics that you would expect to see in a modern treatment are entirely absent. In other areas, things that are presented as open questions have long since been resolved.
It was an interesting read in an academic sort of way. It's really not very much like most of the popular science writing I've read in recent years-- it's very slow to develop, and short on hooks for people who aren't already interested in the subject. I don't think I'd recommend it, or try to emulate it, but it's interesting to see how Asimov went about writing popular science.
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Oh, wow. I read this book. I *loved* this book. I was all of eleven in 1982 when I read it, stolen from my college-age geek brother's bookshelf. I had recently been inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and I wanted to know more. the title caught my attention. The ideas caught my attention even more. I pored over the charts, trying to make sense of them... I'd bought fully into the "girls can't do math" idea, sadly, and never realized that I was in fact doing math as I processed the information!
I found it again three years ago at a used-book sale and bought it for fifty cents. Your review is spot-on. I think that most adults now reading it would be shaking their heads, but the basic way he presents the concepts is useful when educating children. It certainly worked for me!
I love Asimov's nonfiction science books. "Realm of Algebra", "World Of Carbon", "Understanding Physics" and many more. He's a very clear writer and just as clearly loves his subjects. But he also sat down every morning and typed for three solid hours, then handed the results to his editor, seldom to be revisited by him. So you do run into the occasional error. To be expected when you write over 500 books and massive correspondence in one lifetime.
I miss him.
I was a regular reader of Asimov's fiction and non-fiction and I still like them. For a junior-high kid, he was a very engaging non-fiction writer and probably got me thinking about a lot of different things. That said, he was notorious for bad copy-editing and being a bit loose about fact checking (with no references or footnotes). With his diverse interests, his non-fiction covered everything from modern science to ancient Greece and the bible. There was no way he was this knowledgeable and anyone who took an intro college class in any of these topic would find frequent errors. I suspect the closer you got to his Chemistry PhD the more accurate he was, but I'd have to reread a lot of his books to confirm this. BTW, his later autobiography, "I, Asimov" puts some of this in context and is an interesting read. I never read his first two autobiographies so I can't comment on those.
I think the biggest difference to modern science writing is that it's in a price point and length that doesn't seem to exist anymore. It was relatively cheap books that tackled complex scientific topics at an introductory level. Perhaps the internet and wikipedia has pushed away some of the need for those, but it would still be nice to see something between wikipedia/newspaper/blog science and a 300 page book by a science writer. Also perhaps the strange type of person, like Asimov, whose ideal life is writing for most of his waking hours 7 days a week is now attracted to online media and less likely to pump out quick book after book.
In my younger days (long, long ago!) I read everything by Asimov I could get my hands on - science fiction or science fact. As I recall, he used to write a regular science fact article for the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I found his fact-based books and articles interesting and fascinating. He also wrote Asimov's Guide to the Bible. What always came across to me was his love of learning.
Asimov also had sort of a special relationship with his publishers - I think they let him put out just about anything he wanted to write for a while. He wrote of Doubleday after the publication of Caves of Steel , "Until that point, they wanted outlines and chapters from me before handing me contracts, but after that I got my contracts on my mere statement that I was going to write another book." I don't know if that held for his nonfiction, too, but I suspect so, considering some of the stuff he was able to get out in book form. Over 500 books!
Thinking more, I think both his fiction and non-fiction was targeted to be accessible to children in middle school or younger. From his personal writings I remember reading that one of his underlying principles was never to talk down to the reader. He used simple words in straight-forward sentences and wrote in short parcels, but it never seemed like he was throwing in stupid examples to try to relate to a 7th grader (like so much science writing for children I see). Perhaps people here with more experience with modern science writing for children know if there are any modern equivalents.
As for his non-fiction popularity, I mostly got the books from the libraries and they were very well read. I don't know how many end-consumers bought them directly, but I'm sure the books profited just from sales to libraries.
I remember reading "Atom" when I was a kid and it was one of the first books that got me into all that quantum stuff. I think it was one of the last popular science books he wrote because I can remember when it came out. I can't remember too much about it, but given your specialty it might be worth checking out.
Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers.
I'm surprised that you find this surprising. Asimov largely abandoned novel-length SF in 1958--as he described it, he was four chapters or so into what would have been the third Lije Bailey novel--in favor of science popularization. Although he never completely abandoned short story writing, during the next 25 years he published only one SF novel, The Gods Themselves. Only in the 1980s did he get back into novel-length SF, and I suspect that was partly because literary trends were toward novels and away from short stories.
Asimov's science popularizations, especially the collections of his monthly F&SF columns, are what got me interested in science. I certainly knew of his fiction output, but by the time I discovered him as a geeky elementary school kid in the late 1970s, he had published far more nonfiction than fiction, and he was always an engaging writer.
I think bsci #3 is correct in guessing that if Asimov were alive today, he would be a blogger. I also think his typical output would be much shorter articles, because blog audiences tend to have a shorter attention span than somebody who is reading an essay or two of his at bedtime.
The Collapsing Universe was the first science book I read, when I was around eight or nine years old. Before that I was deepy interested in spaceships and rockets and the like; after reading it I was interested in physics. I think that one book shaped quite a lot of my life.
I buy old Asimov pop science collections whenever I find them at book sales and used book stores. I loved them as a kid and I still do. His narrative voice is so pleasant that the books make good company, and his explanations so clear and effortless, that you get the thrill of discovery without any of the hard work. He probably had as much to do with my choosing to major in physics as anything...
I was probably about 14 when my dad gave me Asimov's "Life and Energy" to read. It had a huge influence on me, and it was definitely not trivial. It covered thermodynamics, kinetics, biochemistry ... a whole bunch of stuff. It was searching for a scientific definition of life; I can still remember what he came up with ... "a temporary and local decrease in entropy by the use of enzymes as catalysts". This stuff is, I suppose, about as close as you can get to Asimov's professional training as a biochemist. I still have a warm feeling about the book, though I haven't looked at it for decades.
I love Asimov pop-sci! Especially when he writes about Chemistry -- as you mentioned before, it's rather hard to find good pop-sci chemistry books, and the chemistry he talks about is stuff that I'm learning in school now -- so, all undergrad type stuff, and understood before 1900, so nothing terribly new. I also enjoy whenever he starts talking about mathematics.
The reason I like Asimov so much is his mind was able to break concepts apart into easily digestible pieces, all the while relating them to something common. The simple logic of his essays are pleasurable to my mind. Even when I know the Chemistry he's talking about, I always feel like I've somehow walked away with a clearer understanding of Chemistry as a whole.
"As far as the writing goes, there's nothing flashy about it."
That's part of the secret of his success. d00d, over 500 books written or edited!
He sought a style which appeared to be no style. He never took a writing course. He knew Literature (see his books about the Bible, or Byron, for instance). But he did NOT want the reader to notice his language. Just the ideas! And the people. And the History. And to have fun THINKING.
I'm also surprised that you're surprised. Maybe distracted by his fiction? Or his dirty limericks?
bcsi said I don't know how many end-consumers bought them directly, but I'm sure the books profited just from sales to libraries.
Exactly. So much so that after his The Human Brain(1964) was panned for being out of date and in some cases being wildly inaccurate in a Library Journal review, he only ever wrote one more book on the life sciences.
I find it worth noting that his entry at Wikipedia makes no mention at all of any of his academic research or publications, despite having become a tenured professor of biochemistry at BU.
I also freely admit that the following is no more than rumor, but back in the early '60s I heard from a college classmate who was then a grad student at BU that one of the reasons for Asimov's amazing publication output was that he hired grad students to do literature research and compile summaries for him and then did all his non-fiction writing based on those summaries.
I'm surprised that you find this surprising. Asimov largely abandoned novel-length SF in 1958--as he described it, he was four chapters or so into what would have been the third Lije Bailey novel--in favor of science popularization. Although he never completely abandoned short
story writing, during the next 25 years he published only one SF novel, The Gods Themselves. Only in the 1980s did he get back into novel-length SF, and I suspect that was partly because literary trends were toward novels and away from short stories.
Well, I was -13 in 1958...
I clearly recall Asimov's SF-- mostly short story collections, plus older novels like the Foundation books-- but aside from some essays in a mixed collection of fiction and non-fiction, I don't recall any of his science books. Of course, I have almost no strong recollections of popular science books by anyone, so Asimov is not alone. Most of my pop-science consumption was in the form of tv shows and magazines.
Asimov was great, largely because of his simple style and direct examples. He was of the old school in which anyone could understand anything if it was properly explained. That meant he didn't talk down to his readers the way so many modern science writers tend to. They tend to handwave when the going gets rough. Asimov just kept talking through it.
The theory of modern writing is that each equation costs you so many thousands of readers, so equations need to be avoided, even when they actually make the material easier to understand. The same goes for chemical structures and tables. I think that this has hurt modern science writing.
If you look back even further and read some Eisely, Shapley or Haldane, you'll see a much more direct style. Back then, everyone was considered capable of doing science. In fact, that was seen as science's great strength. You didn't have to be one of the chosen or have some particular talent to dissolve salt in water or roll a ball down a ramp. The modern view is that only a select few can do science, and if you are lucky, you might get to taste a few of the table scraps. Personally, I find this a rather pernicious and destructive change.
By the way, all that flight of fantasy white hole, we live in a black hole, Tunguska was a black hole explosion stuff was exactly what physics PhD students speculated about in informal bull sessions back in the mid and late 1970s. I lived with three such back then: Xray, IR and fusion. Asimov wasn't going off the rails as so much as echoing the zeitgeist. Those were exciting times.
I read a lot of Asimov's pop sci as an early teen (along with everyone else here, as well).
The distinct thing you picked up from "The Collapsing Universe" (its effort to be quantitative, with lots and lots of numbers) follows in his other books as well.
I remember reading his books on the planets (nonfiction books on Mars, Venus, asteroids, etc.) and his devoting many pages to working out what Phobos and Deimos look like from surface of Mars (apparent size in the sky, motion against the starts, etc.). Granted, this is not really the most fascinating thing about Mars, but the thing I recall reading this as a 14 or 15 year old is that, "He's using the algebra and trig I'm just now learning..."
This is what I think is so desperately missing from today's science popularization: the fact that science is QUANTITATIVE and makes exact predictions, often use very simple and familiar mathematical tools that many high schoolers could appreciate. All the melodrama and mysticism written about QM total misses the point: as weird as QM is, the weirder part is how well it works (and how inescapable it has become as a part of modern technology).