Title: Tomorrow’s Children
Author: Isaac Asimov
Category: Fiction
Page Count: 432
Rating: 3.5/5
This book is interesting because while it’s edited by Isaac Asimov, it actually features a whole bunch of stories from various members of sci-fi royalty. There’s pretty much a little bit of everything here, and it’s all grouped together based on the gimmick that all of the stories relate in some way back to children. True, I don’t really like kids and so that in itself wasn’t particularly appealing to me, but luckily the sci-fi masters involved were enough to offset that and to make me enjoy it.
Of course, some stories were better than others, and there were one or two that were so dull that I had to push myself to keep reading. With that said, there were also one or two where the idea alone was enough to make the entire collection worth picking up, and so swings and roundabouts.
As for who’s in it, well there’s a little bit of everyone. I particularly enjoyed the Philip K. Dick story called The Father-Thing, because that was almost flat out horror as opposed to traditional science fiction. Asimov’s own story at the end was quite good too, but he ruined it a bit with his introduction in which he said he thought it was the best in the whole collection.
Then we have a lot of the usual suspects, plus some authors I’d never come across before. Alas, I left the book in the other room and can’t be bothered to go and get it, so I’m not going to give you a comprehensive list of every author and every story. But I can tell you about a few of my favourites.
For example, there was a pretty good one about fliers, where the moon’s lower gravity allows people to take to the lunar skies using purpose-built wings. This is also a love story, in a way, although to go into further details would be to share spoilers. That doesn’t matter too much though ‘cause I’ve never been one for romance and I still enjoyed the story, so there must have been something in it.
There was also a cracker about a granddad who taught his granddaughter how to make things disappear by saying a magic word. It riffed on philosophy which says that objects only exist because we perceive them and believe them to exist, so when the girl believed that they’d disappeared, they really did.
All in all, lots of food for thought and a load of great sci-fi fun.
