{"id":582,"date":"2013-08-21T12:54:06","date_gmt":"2013-08-21T10:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=582"},"modified":"2015-04-30T17:27:28","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T15:27:28","slug":"opus-200","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/opus-200\/","title":{"rendered":"Opus 200"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned last week<\/a>, I learned a lot from the teachers I had at school. At home, in a neighborhood without many other kids, I had some other good teachers in the form of books.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite authors back then was Isaac Asimov<\/b> (1920\u20131992). He’s mainly thought of as a science-fiction writer because of the lighthearted yet thought-provoking short stories he wrote in the 1950s. Asimov was fascinated by the way people use technology and by the way it sometimes changes human behavior. See “The Feeling of Power” and the stories in the I, Robot<\/i> collection for some examples.<\/p>\n

Quite a lot \u2014 perhaps even most \u2014 of Asimov’s work was nonfiction, though. He was the Stephen Hawking of his day, explaining concepts of astronomy, cosmology and mathematics to educated readers who had little precise knowledge of those subjects. I was privileged to meet him once at a fascinating lecture in which he mapped out the future of human civilization for the next 100,000 years.<\/p>\n

Asimov prided himself on having written more books than any other science or science-fiction author. At least, that was the goal he had set for himself. In 1969, he published Opus 100<\/i>, a Bible-sized digest<\/span> of his first 99 works. (He counted the collection itself as his 100th book.) By 1979, he had published 99 more, so he put them in Opus 200<\/i>. Something was suspicious, though, when it took him only five more years to get to Opus 300<\/i>, and to 515 books by the time he died.<\/p>\n

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find he’d been cheating. Many of his books were collections of short stories that had just been published in different combinations. Some of the nonfiction works were newer editions of the same books.<\/p>\n

His Opus<\/i> collections only distracted from the fact that he did write a colossal amount. In an essay somewhere, he explained that he approached writing as a nine-to-five job, writer’s block or not. He’d put a blank piece of paper in his typewriter after he’d thought out a story in his head, and write it once from beginning to end. Writing a perfect first draft<\/span> is a difficult skill to master, and the sign of a great writer.<\/p>\n

So in the spirit of Asimov, I am going to use this, my 200th column, to look back at my favorite columns, some of which you may not have read. I’m also including your favorites as well, based on the number of visits to those pages.<\/p>\n

Thanks to all the regular readers of this column, and special thanks to those of you \u2014 Haufenwolke, Chantal, Brigitte, Erika, Gabi, Shari, Lagunella, SchubiDu, Kerstin and others \u2014 who take the time to comment. Please send in any ideas or questions you may have about fascinating America, and I’ll do my best to respond to them.<\/p>\n

Mike’s top 10<\/h2>\n