Isaac Asimov's - Mega Collection of audiobooks (19 AUDIOBOOKS)

You have an excellent opportunity to find in this post the best creations of the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov.

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The United States and the Soviet Union have both developed technology that allowed matter to be miniaturized using a process that shrinks individual atoms, but its value is limited because objects shrunk return to normal size after a period of time - the smaller an object is made, the quicker it reverts.
Scientist Jan Benes, working behind the Iron Curtain, has figured out how to make the shrinking process work indefinitely. With the help of the CIA, he escapes to the West, but an attempted assassination leaves him comatose, with a blood clot in his brain.



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The stories take the form of conversations between an unnamed writer (whom Asimov identifies in the collection introduction as himself) and a shiftless friend named George. At these meetings George tells how he is able to conjure up Azazel and their adventures together. George's greatest goal in life is a free lunch (or dinner, or ride, etc), but Azazel is constrained so that he cannot directly benefit George. George can only call upon Azazel for favors to various friends, which invariably go awry.




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Several centuries after the events of Second Foundation, two citizens of the Foundation seek to find Earth, the legendary planet where humans are said to have originated. Interestingly, even less is known about Earth than was the case in Foundation, when scholars still seem to know the location of 'Sol'.
The story follows on from Foundation's Edge, but can be read as a complete work in itself. (It does, however, give away most of the mysteries that Foundation's Edge is built around.)




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The Mayor of Terminus, Harla Branno, is basking in a political glow, after an appearance by the holographic Hari Seldon. Five hundred years after the Foundation's beginnings, her policies have been vindicated by Seldon's Plan. However, on this day, Golan Trevize, a Councilman with an unusual intuition, questions whether the Second Foundation, which is thought to be extinct, is still controlling events. He first makes his feelings known to a fellow Councilman, Munn Li Compor, who has sold Trevize out to the Mayor. Trevize then brazenly attacks Branno's policies in a Council meeting, in which he is arrested for treason and removed. Branno was waiting for Trevize to openly challenge her, on a day when her political power was highest, and contrives a plan to remove Trevize from Terminus. She orders him to leave and to search for the Second Foundation. As a cover, he is to be accompanied by one Janov Pelorat, a professor of Ancient History, who is searching for Earth, the long-lost homeworld of humanity.



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After inventing a device that can jam telepathic abilities and can even be used to cause telepaths great pain, the Foundation finds and locates telepaths on Terminus, "at the other end of the galaxy" (from the First Foundation, also at Terminus). Since, as Arkady Darell puts it, "a circle has no end", then by tracing the disc of the galaxy around its edge, one would come back to Terminus. Thus, they declare the Second Foundation destroyed after finding the roughly 50 mentalist agents on Terminus, and are content to forget the matter. Finally, in response to the question "Where is the Second Foundation?", the First Foundation had found an answer that fit. However, although this was "the answer that satisfied", this was not "the answer that was true".




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In Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov continues the chronicles of the life of Hari Seldon, first begun in Prelude to Foundation.
The story takes place on Trantor, and begins eight years after the events of Prelude to Foundation. It depicts how Seldon developed his theory of psychohistory from hypothetical concept to practical application in galactic events.





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The story begins on Trantor, the capital planet of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire. Though it has endured for so long, and appears outwardly to be strong and stable, the Empire has been imperceptibly declining for centuries. The only one who realizes this is Hari Seldon, a mathematician who has developed the science of psychohistory, by which it is possible to predict future events by extrapolating from historic trends. He has set up a project which is increasingly harassed by Imperial officials from the Commission of Public Safety — the actual rulers of the Empire. They finally arrest Seldon and Gaal Dornick, a young mathematician who has just arrived to join the project.




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The stories were not initially conceived as a set, but rather all feature his positronic robots — indeed, there are some inconsistencies among them, especially between the short stories and the novels. They all, however, share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots, and morality. Some of the short stories found in The Complete Robot and other anthologies appear not to be set in the same universe as the Foundation Universe. "Victory Unintentional" has positronic robots obeying the Three Laws, but also a non-human civilization on Jupiter. "Let's Get Together" features humanoid robots, but from a different future, and with nothing to prevent a robot from intentionally killing humans.




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Most of Asimov's robot short stories are set in the first age of positronic robotics and space exploration. The unique feature of Asimov's robots are the Three Laws of Robotics, hardwired in a robot's positronic brain, which all robots in his fiction must obey, and which ensure that the robot does not turn against its creators.




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Until his death in 1992, author Isaac Asimov would write more than 120 ingenious tales of detection and deduction, and in 66 of them he would present his armchair detectives, the Black Widowers, with the mind-teasing puzzles that they would strive to solve in often-quarrelsome conversation. The Black Widowers club is meeting again. In a private dining room at New York's luxurious Milano restaurant, the six brilliant men once more gather for fine fare served impeccably by their peerless waiter, Henry. At table, too, will of course be that requisite dinner guest to challenge their combined deductive wit: a man whose marriage hinges on finding a lost umbrella; a woman shadowed by an adversary who knows her darkest secrets; a debunker of psychics unable to explain his unnerving experience in a haunted house; or a symphony cellist accused of attacking his wife with a kitchen knife. In addition to six stories that have never before appeared in any collection, this volume includes the ten best-ever Black Widowers cases, among them the very first to be published, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as the first brand new Black Widowers story to appear in more than ten years.




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The main theme is a number of planets that have been conquered by a race of oppressive conquerors. There, the story starts on Earth, but Earth is not truly centrally involved, and the affairs of this group of worlds is seen as a small matter within a larger galaxy.
The hero is sent to Rhodia, the strongest of the conquered planets. There he gets involved in romance and intrigue. There are rumours of a world where rebellion is secretly being plotted — but is there anything to it?




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The most important tool of science is mathematics. This clear and readable book shows even the non-mathematical reader how to use this tool with understanding. Starting with the most basic sort of finger counting, Isaac Asimov proceeds to the pleasures of the abacus, where numbers take physical shapes, and on to the ideas of zero, fractions, and the decimal system. He makes sense of logarithms and even of imaginary numbers, and ends at the very frontiers of mathematics with a discussion of infinity and the concept of an infinity of infinities! He mathematics which Professor Asimov presents is not the thorny wasteland many struggling students suppose it to be. His main concern is no the mathematical techniques one learns in textbooks, but the various wherefores behind them.




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The independent planet Sark exploits the planet Florina and derives its great wealth from kyrt, a versatile fiber that can only be grown on Florina. The relationship between the two planets is analogous to the situation between imperial powers and their colonies during the mid-20th century, where the Florinians are forced to work in kyrt fields and are treated as an inferior race by the Sarkites. Attempts to break the Sark monopoly and grow kyrt on other worlds have thus far been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Trantor would like to add these two worlds to its growing empire.





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Nightfall and Other Stories is a collection that Asimov published in 1969 so that his most famous story would appear in his own anthology. All the stories are presented in order of publication date so that readers can form their own opinions about Asimov's literary development and whether "Nightfall" is truly the best of his short stories.




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The novel is set in an era in which interstellar travel is in the process of being discovered and perfected. Before the novel's opening, "hyper-assistance", a technology allowing travel at exactly light speed, is used to move a reclusive asteroid colony from the vicinity of Earth to the newly discovered red dwarf, Nemesis.



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The book opens with Elijah Baley on Earth, training with his son and others to tolerate the outside, in spite of their socially ingrained agoraphobia. He is ordered to go to Washington.
There, he is told that the Spacer world of Aurora has requested through diplomatic channels that he go to Aurora. He is told that the mind of R. Jander Panell, a humaniform robot identical to R. Daneel Olivaw, has been destroyed via a mental block - "roboticide", as Baley later terms it.
A robot's inventor, Han Fastolfe, has been implicated. Fastolfe, who was last seen in The Caves of Steel, is the best roboticist on Aurora. He has admitted that he is the only person with the skill to have done it, although he denies doing it. Fastolfe is also a prominent member of the Auroran political faction that favors Earth. Implication in the crime threatens his political career; therefore, it is politically expedient that he be exonerated.




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The story arises from the murder of Rikaine Delmarre, a prominent "fetologist" (fetal scientist, responsible for the operation of the planetary birthing center reminiscent of those described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) of Solaria, a planet politically hostile to Earth. Elijah Baley is called in to investigate, at the request of the Solarian government. He is again partnered with the humaniform robot R. Daneel Olivaw. Before leaving Earth, he is asked by Earth's government to assess the Solarian society for weaknesses.




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In this novel, Isaac Asimov first introduced Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, who would later become his, and more so his readers', favorite protagonists. They live roughly three millennia in Earth's future, a time when hyperspace travel has been discovered, and a few worlds relatively close to Earth have been colonised — fifty planets known as the "Spacer worlds". The Spacer worlds are rich, have low population density (average population of one hundred million each), and use robot labor very heavily. Meanwhile, Earth is overpopulated (with a total population of eight billion), and strict rules against robots have been passed. The eponymous "caves of steel" are vast city complexes covered by huge metal domes, capable of supporting tens of millions each. The New York City of that era, for example, encompasses present-day New York State, as well as large tracts of New Jersey.
Asimov imagines the present day's underground transit connected to malls and apartment blocks, extended to a point where no one ever exits to the outside world. Indeed, most of the population cannot leave, as they suffer from extreme agoraphobia. Even though the Robot and Foundation series were not supposed to play in the same universe until much later, those "caves of steel" resemble the planet Trantor.



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Our Angry Earth: A Ticking Ecological Bomb, (1991) is a non-fiction book and polemic against the effects humankind is having on the environment by the science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl. In his last non-fiction book, Asimov co-writes with his long-time friend science fiction author Frederik Pohl, and deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer.