Science Fiction

I have heard writers comment about what writing takes out of them. I met Larry Niven at a big science fiction convention in the late 1980s, for example, and he said "I sweat blood" when writing. My father was a poet and he often observed that writing is "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration". They all say things like that about writing, that it's hard work.

Except Asimov. He said that writing was "easy" (his word) for him.

I have read all of Asimov's Foundation novels. In the early 1980s he started writing them again, and every time he came out with a new one, I had to re-read the earlier ones to refresh my memory before reading the new one. As a consequence, I have read the original trilogy at least a dozen times, and I never get tired of them. They're space opera, but they're GREAT space opera, FUN space opera. (Recently there was a Foundation TV series, but they took so many liberties with it that they RUINED it. It was almost unrecognizable compared with the original, which is great literature, in my humble opinion.)

I vote for Asimov.

— Ron