The Sci-Fi Short Stories of Isaac Asimov — A Guide for New Readers

A luminary of science fiction and one of the most famous writers the genre has ever produced, Isaac Asimov was, above all else, prolific.

He wrote 383 short stories, all of them published between 1939 — when his career began at age 19 — and 1995, three years after his death. Of those 383, only nine were "never to be sold and no longer exist." They were early pieces accompanied by a series of memorable rejections.

Asimov soon found his stride. "Since February 1941," he wrote in his autobiography, A Memory Yet Green, "I have never written a piece of fiction that has not seen print."

That includes at least 19 sci-fi novels, a series of juvenile science fiction novels under the pen name Paul French, hundreds of essays, and many books of popular science and history. Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books in his lifetime. His brother Stanley estimated he also produced an additional 90,000 letters and postcards (Yours, Isaac Asimov, Stanley Asimov, 1996).

Put his fame aside for a moment and simply look at the man's work ethic. How many other writers of any genre can claim such an achievement?

"The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes."

— Isaac Asimov, 1969

But raw output only tells part of the story.

What made Asimov extraordinary was that he kept producing work of genuine quality across five decades, in multiple genres, while simultaneously holding a professorship in biochemistry and writing popular science for general audiences. He didn't just write a lot. He wrote well, and he wrote across more subjects than almost anyone before or since.

This guide focuses primarily on his science fiction short stories — the work that launched him, helped define the so-called "golden age" of the genre, and still holds up today.

1930s: the pulps and a first sale

It was the pulp magazines that first launched Isaac Asimov's career.

In the 1930s, when he began writing, the pulp magazines were thriving. Dozens of them had turned to science fiction for their bread and butter, building an audience of voracious readers with an appetite for visions of the future and marvels of science. The magazines all have names that evoke the era: Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Future Fiction, Super Science Stories.

Readers around the country could subscribe monthly or buy them at their local newsstand — like the one in the candy store belonging to Asimov's family, where he first discovered science fiction as a boy. He began writing, imitating what he was reading, at 11 years old.

Asimov's first published story happened to be the third one he wrote. After multiple rejections from editor John W. Campbell — with whom he'd developed a mentor-like relationship — a different editor accepted "Marooned Off Vesta" and published it in the March 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.

Asimov later told a NY Times journalist he'd never forget this experience — not solely because it was his first sale, but because he got $64 for the 6,400-word story. In 2026 terms, that's roughly $1,400. For comparison, SFWA's minimim pro rate for short fiction is eight cents ($0.08) per word — a 6,400-word story today would earn $512. There's a window into how much the pulp papers dominated their cultural moment!

Asimov managed to get two more stories published in 1939, seven more in 1940, and after that there's hardly a year he didn't publish a new story — despite substantially decreasing his fiction output in the 1950s and 60s as his popular science career exploded.

"No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified."

— Isaac Asimov, 1980

Aye, Captain. This writer, at least, agrees.

1940s: watershed moment — "Nightfall" and the Robot stories

Even though his talent was plainly in evidence, Asimov had "created no tidal wave" in the industry. That is, until his name and the title of his 32nd story appeared on the cover of Astounding Science Fiction in September 1941.

It was a story inspired by a conversation with John W. Campbell about a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!"

That story was "Nightfall".

It's an archetypal piece of social science fiction — a term Asimov helped define, describing a new trend in the 1940s led by him and Robert A. Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition. Set on a world with six suns where true darkness comes only once every two thousand years, "Nightfall" asks what happens to civilization when night finally falls.

The answer is not pretty.

In 1964, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the all-time best science fiction short story. — an honor that still draws debate among genre readers today. Asimov himself was characteristically modest about it: "I don't know enough about Writing to be able to tell," he wrote.

The Robot stories begin

Running parallel to "Nightfall" was a series of stories that would prove even more consequential to the genre.

In 1940, Asimov began publishing his "positronic robot" stories — tales featuring robots with sophisticated, human-like artificial brains. The first was "Robbie" (originally titled "Strange Playfellow"), published in Super Science Stories. Then came "Reason" in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941, and "Runaround" in 1942.

"Runaround" introduced the first explicit appearance of the Three Laws of Robotics — the rules governing how Asimov's robots behave:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These weren't just plot devices. They were a direct challenge to the "Frankenstein monster" template that had dominated robot fiction for decades. Where earlier robot stories featured metal creatures who inevitably turned on their creators, Asimov saw robots as something more interesting: a labor-saving technology with built-in ethics, whose stories became thought experiments about the nature of intelligence and the limits of rules.

He also coined two words that have since entered the language:

"Robotics," which he later admitted he didn't realize it might be an original coinage, assuming it was simply the natural analogue of "hydraulics" or "mechanics."

And "positronic," borrowed from real particle physics (a positron is the antiparticle of an electron) to give his robot brains a scientific-sounding name.

Both words appear first in "Liar!" (1941). Data's brain in Star Trek: The Next Generation is a positronic brain. So is the Doctor's in Doctor Who. The words became part of how we imagine artificial minds.

These robot stories were collected in I, Robot (1950), one of the most important short story collections in science fiction history. The book frames its nine tales as reminiscences from Dr. Susan Calvin, a "robopsychologist" — another Asimov coinage — who has spent her career studying what happens when robots encounter edge cases in the Three Laws.

The resulting stories are part thriller, part logical puzzle, and part philosophical inquiry.

1950s: his "golden decade"

Although he continued publishing short fiction at a steady pace through the 1950s, the decade also saw him move into novels — the Foundation trilogy, and the Robot novels beginning with The Caves of Steel (1954) — while simultaneously developing two parallel careers: professor of biochemistry at Boston University, and popular science communicator.

He called the 1950s his "golden decade" in his own retrospective introduction to The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), and the collection reflects it: eight of the twelve stories chosen were from those years.

In 1955, he was awarded the Guest of Honor slot at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention.

The standout short work from this period is "The Last Question" (1956), which Asimov consistently named as his personal favorite. It traces the same question — "How can entropy be reversed?" — across seven different eras of human and post-human civilization, from a supercomputer the size of a small planet to something that might be called God.

"Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably 'The Last Question.' This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—" at which point I interrupted to tell him it was 'The Last Question' and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles."

Other notable works from this era:

• "The Dead Past" (1956), a cautionary tale about surveillance and scientific freedom that feels more prescient with every passing year
• "Profession" (1957), one of the most beloved and frequently recommended stories among hardcore Asimov fans, about a society where education is downloaded directly into the brain
• "The Ugly Little Boy" (1958), a genuinely moving story about a Neanderthal child brought forward in time and the woman who cares for him.

1960s–70s: putting the science in science fiction

If we're going to talk about Asimov's short science fiction, we can't very well leave out his short science nonfiction.

In 1958, he penned the first of 399 monthly columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote these columns for the rest of his life — 31 years — on topics ranging from nuclear physics to etymology to Shakespeare.

In 1977, he lent his name to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and penned an editorial for every issue.

The mystery period

In the 1970s, Asimov turned increasingly to non-science-fiction mysteries for publications such as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He wrote as many mysteries as he did sci-fi stories during those years — possibly more.

In 1971, he wrote the first of 66 mysteries about the Black Widowers, a group of men who meet monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea from his own association with a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders, and modeled most of the characters after his closest friends.

It's worth noting for readers of noir sci-fi mysteries (the subgenre that Asimov basically invented alongside his Robot detective novels): the template he established — methodical, puzzle-driven, with a detective who uses logic rather than force — runs from the Black Widowers all the way through to his robot-detective novels with Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw.

"The Bicentennial Man"

The 1970s also produced one of his most decorated short works: "The Bicentennial Man" (1976). It follows Andrew, a household robot who gradually becomes more human — first in his interests and desires, then legally, and finally biologically — and asks what rights, if any, a machine deserves once it has surpassed human capabilities in nearly every way.

It won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Award for Best Novelette in 1977 — a hat trick of awards — and was later adapted into a Robin Williams film.

1980s and 90s: the final years

Asimov continued writing and receiving recognition through the 1980s, finding time for oddball projects — including a book of lecherous limericks — alongside his fiction.

One of the last stories he ever wrote was "Gold" (1991), published in Analog Science Fiction. It's a story about a science fiction author trying to convince a filmmaker to adapt his most ambitious work — a story told entirely through mathematics. It reads, not coincidentally, like a meditation on Asimov's own lifelong attempt to bring rigorous ideas to a popular audience.

Isaac Asimov died on April 6, 1992, at New York University Hospital.

Later that same year, "Gold" won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

Where to start: the essential Asimov short fiction reading list

For new readers, the sheer volume of Asimov's work can feel paralyzing. Here's a curated entry point:

Start with the big three stories:

• "Nightfall" (1941) — the most famous science fiction short story ever written, or at least the one most often voted that way
• "The Last Question" (1956) — Asimov's own favorite; one of the most elegant short stories in any genre
• "The Bicentennial Man" (1976) — the emotional and ethical peak of his robot fiction

Then read the collections:

• I, Robot (1950) — nine robot stories in a unified frame; the best entry point for his Robot universe
• The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973) — twelve stories handpicked by Asimov himself, spanning 1941–1968; a perfect sampler
• Nightfall and Other Stories (1969) — eighteen stories built around his most famous work

For fans of sci-fi mysteries specifically:

• The Caves of Steel (1954) — Technically a novel, but the original sci-fi detective novel, pairing a human detective and a robot partner in a locked-city murder mystery

For public domain readers:

• "Youth" (1952) is one of the few Asimov stories available legally online and free. It's included in this guide to the best sci-fi short stories in the public domain. (Note: most of Asimov's short fiction remains under copyright and is best read via his collections.)

Asimov's legacy: what he actually changed

Isaac Asimov made a mighty big dent in the sci-fi universe.

It's easy to say he was influential and leave it there. Here's what he specifically did that mattered:

He invented the vocabulary of robot fiction. "Robotics," "positronic," "robopsychology" — words Asimov coined become part of how began to talk about artificial intelligence, both in fiction and in fact.

He upended the Frankenstein template. Before Asimov, robots in fiction were almost uniformly dangerous — Frankenstein's monster in metal. Asimov replaced terror with ethics, asking not "will the robot turn on us?" but "what rules would actually govern a machine that thinks?* That question is more relevant now than it was in 1942.

He defined social science fiction. The idea that speculative fiction could be about human behavior, sociology, and institutions — not just gadgets — owes much to Asimov's work in the 1940s and the writers he influenced.

He wrote the Three Laws into history. The Three Laws of Robotics have been quoted in Senate hearings on AI, debated by ethicists, and cited in AI safety research papers. You can't discuss machine ethics without them.

He popularized science for a general audience. 399 monthly columns, hundreds of popular science books we didn't even cover here, and a sci-fi magazine that still bears his name. He may have done more to make science approachable to non-scientists than any writer of the twentieth century.

"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for."

— Isaac Asimov

He got his wish. No one has replicated it.

All Isaac Asimov's awards for short science fiction

This list covers awards for short fiction only. For novels, degrees, and other honors, see the full "Awards and Recognition" section on his Wikipedia page.

Best quotes by Isaac Asimov

A selection of his most memorable lines, drawn from his fiction and his life.

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
— Foundation

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
— Foundation

"Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it."
— Pebble in the Sky

"We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood."
— The Caves of Steel

"There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass."
— The Gods Themselves

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

"In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate."

"I'm really happy only when I'm up here working."
— New York Times, August 3, 1969

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This piece was first published in April 2022 and has been updated for 2026 with expanded coverage of Asimov's Robot stories, his Three Laws of Robotics, and a new "Where to start" reading guide.