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A fair green planet will always be bait to the interstellar explorer-colonist type. But when a planet has some mysterious killer-characteristic—then it’s “sucker bait”!
The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories is a science fiction anthology written and edited by Isaac Asimov. Following the usual form for Asimov collections, it consists of eleven short stories and a poem surrounded by commentary describing how each came to be written.
A complex tale of time travel and time paradoxes, considered by some critics to be Asimov's finest work.
From Robert Silverberg’s “Earthmen and Strangers” anthology, 1966:
Randall Garrett’s story examined, from the viewpoint of the Earthmen, a possible encounter between our species and hostile aliens. In the story that follows, Isaac Asimov handles the same theme from the viewpoint of the aliens themselves. Suppose, he says, strangers from afar have been watching us for years. Suppose, too, that they are the overlords of a galactic empire, eager to add us to their dominion. How will they react, though, when they learn what sort of creatures we Earthmen really are? To them, we are the aliens—and we are terribly, frighteningly alien.
Isaac Asimov, one of the science fiction’s ablest practitioners, rarely deals with galactic matters these days. The Boston-based Dr. Asimov, who taught biochemistry while writing such famed s-f novels as The Currents of Space and The Caves of Steel, now devotes himself to science fact with equal success. Though jovial and even boisterous in the flesh, Asimov is scholarly behind the typewriter, and he’s won acclaim for such standard reference items as The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science and Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology.
