Fact and Fancy
Fact and Fancy is a collection of seventeen scientific essays by American writer and scientist Isaac Asimov. It was the first in a series of books collecting his essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov's second book of science essays altogether. Doubleday & Company first published it in March 1962. It was also published in paperback by Pyramid Books as part of The Worlds of Science series.
After he had written 200 essays for Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov wrote of them "To this day I get more pleasure out of them than out of any other writing assignment I get."
The only essay that did not appear in Fantasy and Science Fiction was "Our Lonely Planet", which first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction.Contents
- Part I: The Earth and Away
- *"Life's Bottleneck"
- *"No More Ice Ages?"
- *"Thin Air"
- *"Catching Up with Newton"
- *"Of Capture and Escape"
- Part II: The Solar System
- *"Catskills in the Sky"
- *"Beyond Pluto"
- *"Steppingstones to the Stars"
- *"The Planet of the Double Sun"
- Part III: The Universe
- *"Heaven on Earth"
- *"Our Lonely Planet"
- *"The Flickering Yardstick"
- *"The Sight of Home"
- *"Here It Comes; There It Goes"
- Part IV: The Human Mind
- *"Those Crazy Ideas"
- *"My Built-in Doubter"
- *"Battle of the Eggheads"
