This is the first volume in a series of short science fiction novels for young teenagers about a 14-year-old Space Academy cadet, Jeff Wells, and his unusual robot, Norby. Norby has skills that other robots lack, apparently due to the incorporation of alien parts in his construction. In this first book of the series, Jeff and Norby foil a plot of a villian to take over the Solar System. Norby discovers he has "anti-gravity" capabilities as well as the ability to travel through "hyperspace" and great distances. [Isaac Asimov, in another book, apologizes for using antigravity in this series: he felt that it represented poor science.] The second book in the series is "Norby's Other Secret," published in 1984. These two books were latered reissued as "The Norby Chronicles."

This is the second volume in the Norby series of science fiction stories for children. In this tale, the robot Norby discovers his origin, a dragon-inhabited planet, and some new abilities: traveling through time and telepathy. The first two books in this series were also published together as "The Norby Chronicles."

This volume is a combination of the third and fourth books in the humorous Norby series of science fiction books for children about a space cadet and his unusual robot Norby. In the first story, "Norby and the Lost Princess," Jeff and Norby locate a planet populated by humans who had been transplanted from Earth millennia ago. They rescue a young princess trapped on another planet who has been changed into a plant. In the second story, "Norby and the Invaders," beings from another planet have invaded the planet of friendly dragons and deactivated all of that planet's robots. Jeff and Norby attempt to thwart the invaders who, they discover, believe that technology is bad. They all learn that only misuse of technology is bad.

This is yet another collection of Asimov's science essays for Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. He starts out with the title essay (about the theoretical planet Vulcan that caused perturbations in Mercury's orbit) and ends up talking about the existence of God. As he puts it, he goes from the least controversial essay to the most. All the essays date from the mid-seventies and aren't as dated as the last collection I read, though there is obsolete data about Pluto. As always, it's an easy read and informative.

This book is another collection of 17 of Asimov's essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). It isn't the best one, but it's still good.

Contents:

A. Numbers

1. The Lost Art. About logarithms.

2. Anyone For Tens? More on logarithms.

B. Elements

3. Countdown. About low temperatures and liquifying gases.

4. Toward Zero. About absolute zero (-459.67°F) (-273.15°C) (0°K).

C. Earth

5. The Floating Crystal Palace. About icebergs.

6. By Land and By Sea. About Antarctic exploration.

7. We Were the First That Ever Burst--. About oceanic exploration.

8. Second to the Skua. About Antarctica.

D. Planets

9. The Sons of Mars Revisited. About Mars's two moons.

10. Dark and Bright. More on Mars's two moons.

11. The Real Finds Waiting. More on Mars's two moons.

12. Rings and Things. About Uranus's rings and Chiron

E. Stars

13. Proxima. About how an unknown companion star to the Sun could go undetected.

F. Universe

14. Fifty Million Big Brothers. About extraterrestrial intelligence.

15. Where Is Everybody? More on extraterrestrial intelligence.

16. The Road to Infinity. About black holes.

G. Life and Death

17. The Subtlest Difference. About the difference between life and death.

Also, the introduction of this book contains a list of every essay in every collection, along with a list of the collections.

All of the collections of essays from F&SF, with a * next to the ones I've read as of Thurs, Jan 14, 1999:

Fact and Fancy

*View from a Height

*Adding a Dimension

*Of Time and Space and Other Things

From Earth to Heaven

*Science, Numbers, and I

The Solar System and Back

The Stars in Their Courses

The Left Hand of the Electron

*The Tragedy of the Moon

Of Matters Great and Small

The Planet That Wasn't

*Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright

*The Road to Infinity

(there may be more-- if there are, I haven't found them yet.)

Olympic contests between the Soviet bloc and America were often exploited for propaganda purposes, the outcome of an athletic event supposedly saying something significant about the victor's country. This 1984 anthology, from the height of the Cold War, has several stories built around that notion.

Tom Sullivan's "The Mickey Mouse Olympics" and Nicholas V. Yermakov's "A Glint of Gold" both feature Soviet and American Olympic athletes genetically modified for their events. Sullivan plays the notion for genuine laughs. Yermakov's story is much more serious and shows the price the competitors pay as propaganda pawns. He also works in a defection subplot.

Walter F. Moudy's "The Survivor" abandons all together the notion of mere symbolic combat in the Olympics. In his future, the USSR and USA each put 100 man combat teams into the arena, and they don't come out till one side is annihilated. It's all televised, of course. Moudy is not content to just do a story of future gladiatorial matches. He also delves into what the combat conditioning does to the soldier, what kind of person it produces. It isn't idle speculation, either, because all the survivors of an Olympic War Game get to do whatever they want with no legal sanctions. It's one of the highpoints of the anthology.

Not all of the stories deal with future Olympics; the general theme is competition.

In the case of the dentist in Piers Anthony "Getting Through University", basis for his novel PROSTHO PLUS, the competition is to get accepted to galactic University, School of Dentistry. Anthony creates an entertaining story out of the complexities of dentistry on the galaxy's aliens.

Other highpoints are Norman Spinrad's "The National Pastime", "The Wind from the Sun" by Arthur C. Clarke, and "Prose Bowl" from the team of Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg. Spinrad's story tells of the invention of Combat Football and its fans very violent enthusiasm for it. It's a 1973 story but hasn't dated that much, especially since wrestling promoters now talk of starting their own football league. Clarke's story combines hard science and melancholy in a solar sail race. Also titled "Sunjammer", it was probably the first story to use the idea of solar sails. "Prose Bowl" makes hack writing into an hilarious spectator sport, but it also says some serious things about writers and their audiences.

On the decidely low end of the anthology are Jack Vance's "The Kokod Warriors", about aliens who fight elaborate combats and the humans who bet on them, and Charles Nuetzel's "A Day for Dying", one of those stories with a decadent society of televised bloodsports and an unconvincing revolution to topple it. George Alec Effinger's "From Downtown at the Buzzer", about some aliens fascination with basketball, is marred by a vague ending.

In the entertaining-but-nothing-special category are the rest of the anthology's works. George R.R. Martin's "Run to Starlight" has aliens playing football against humans. The aliens turn out to have a more realistic view of the games' ultimate significance than the humans. Bob Shaw's "Dream Fighter" is another one of those stories where combatants assault each other mentally with horrifying symbols. Suzette Haden Elgin's "For the Sake of Grace" is a feminist story about a poetry contest on a world with an Arab-type culture and the young girl who dares to enter it despite the horrifying consequences of failing. Robert Sheckley's "The People Trap" is a witty, grim tale of a race for land in an overpopulated world. "Why Johnny Can't Speed" by Alan Dean Foster is another combat on the highways story. It was possibly a response to Harlan Ellison's classic "Along the Scenic Route". "Nothing in the Rules" by L. Sprague de Camp is about the chaos caused by a mermaid entering a swimming match. "The Olympians" by Mike Resnick is not, despite the title, a future Olympics tale. The Olympians are an elite group of humans who specialize in humiliating aliens in athletic competitions.

There are enough good stories here to justify taking a look at this anthology.

You know what the twist will be, but that doesn't diminish it much. Easy to read and a page-turner.

Robots in Judgment was editor Asimov's preferred title for this anthology since the stories cover more ground than just robot detectives.

Oh, there are robot detectives here all right. Asimov's famous human and robot detective team of Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw are here for their only short story appearance, "Mirror Image." The murderous mobile law enforcer of Ron Goulart's "Into the Shop" captures the same criminal -- again and again. A robotic Sherlock Holmes, his Cockney-rhyming robot dog, and a Watson of mysterious origins investigate the case of a possibly mad industrialist on a future greenhouse Earth in Edward Wellen's "Voiceover".

Wellen also gives us an interesting, proto-cyberpunk story, "Finger of Fate", with its hard-boiled, if immobile, computer who prowls databases and public records to solve his cases. The machines of Harry Harrison's "Arm of the Law" and Harlan Ellison's and Ben Bova's "Brillo" are not exactly detectives but robot cops, and each must deal with police corruption and the difference between theoretical law enforcement and carrying a badge in the real world of humans. "Brillo" also deals with bluecollar fears of being replaced by machines. The tin stars of Larry Niven's famous "Cloak of Anarchy" supervise a Free Park where anything except physical violence goes -- until an artist decides to put his political ideas into effect and disable them. Stephen R. Donaldson's "Animal Lover" is a cyborg federal cop sent to investigate a hunting preserve with an oddly high body count of hunters.

Stories that don't feature robotic investigators and law enforcers are Christopher Anvil's tedious "The King's Legions", a tale of political machinations and a nearly-magical, sentient spaceship. Technological innovations since its original publication date of 1963 make Larry Eisenberg's "The Fastest Draw" a fully realistic story. In it, a man obsessively tries to make his fast draw competitions with a gunfighter simulcra more realistic. Harry Harrison's "The Powers of Observation" is a predictable but involving tale of espionage and androids in a Cold War Yugoslavia. "Faithfully Yours" by Lou Tabakow, about a convict fleeing some implacable retribution, is flawed by an irrelevant beginning and an ending that stops at the point where things get interesting. The strength of Donald Wismer's "Safe Harbor" is undercut by the rather unbelievable motivation of a central character who opts out of a world largely automated and administered with the help of "bugs", skull implants that monitor health and track their users in case they need emergency aid. Henry Slesar's "Examination Day" is famous but doesn't really work. Its surprise ending is probably there to make a satirical point but about what, exactly, is unclear.

Robert Sheckley's "The Cruel Equations", though, is a clever and funny story about an inflexible guard robot and the man who has forgotten his password but must pass by it -- or die on a desert world.

Not every story is perfect but, with the exception of Slesar's and Anvil's, they're all worth reading, and readers should, especially with the Wellen stories, find some overlooked gems here.

I recently bought this book for a school sponsered summer reading program and i enjoyed very much. SO much so that i had finished in under two hours. I wish the book had gone on longer brnging me evidence to support both cases on whether or not UFO's exist. However, over all i would recommend to others.

Decades ago sci-fi grandmaster Isaac Asimov noted the similarity between detective stories (whodunit?) and science fiction "puzzle" stories (how do you solve the problem?). Avoiding some of the obvious pitfalls, he began to write stories that contain elements of both of these popular genres. But of the various stories in this collection, only Larry Niven's "ARM" really lives up to the title, combining the imagination of science fiction with the action and drama of a detective story. Asimov's "The Singing Bell" comes close, and shows off the master's skill with "puzzle" stories, but the armchair detective doesn't really lend itself to exciting reading and would be a serious disappointment to fans who expect some action. As for the rest, only Poul Anderson's "The Martian Crown Jewels" and "Time Exposures" by Wilson Tucker are bona fide sci-fi detective stories, and both are eminently forgettable. Donald Westlake's "The Winner", Robert Silverberg's "Getting Across", and Philip K. Dick's "War Games" are all very good science fiction stories, indeed are the highlights of the collection, but there are no detectives in them. Perhaps the most memorable sci-fi detective is Philip Jose Farmer's Herr Ralph Von Wau Wau, the intelligent canine of "A Scarletin Study", a humorous send up of the whole cross-genre concept. In sum, while perhaps the blame lies more with the form than with the editing, this book fails to deliver what it promises; the overall collection isn't that strong as "just" science fiction, and the advertised combination of sci-fi and private detective fiction never really coalesces. Readers interested in this idea would do better to pick up one of Asimov's many fine collections.

I thought the book was very good describing the plot, storyline, and characters. However, the book was pretty easy to predict. It's whole storyline was old and boring. The absence of twists and any new developments killed any suspense. Overall the story gets a 3 out of 5.