A Book a Day: Gold

 Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like. In light of renewed interest in Foundation because of its forthcoming adaptation, I thought I'd share my fave Asimov book. (And yes, nb. Asimov is a problematic fave because he was a gross lech.) Gold is a posthumous collection of his latter-day short stories and essays; the fiction is surprisingly meta, and the nonfiction primarily touches on fiction-writing as a craft in a useful way. Gold has a companion volume called Silver which collects fantasy material, but Asimov really is a classic hard sf writer for a reason. I also have a soft spot for this one since it was the first Asimov I ever read; after this it was I, Robot, then his 1994 autobiography and collected short stories, and so on. More than anything else he really was a master of short pieces, and while a lot of his later oeuvre was on the shaky side (seriously, don't read anything published between 1980-1990, honestly), this combination of fiction and nonfiction works so beautifully together to make you think about sf writing.