Enjoyed it, but reality is that no story was as memorable as Nightfall from Nightfall One.
Nightfall was so well written with an original idea.
Most of these stories lacked originality ( maybe because they've been mimicked many times since but were once original).
( )

The blurb on the back of this collection of short stories says:

“Nightfall two is the second half of one of the largest collection of Isaac Asimov’s short science fiction yet to appear. As in Nightfall one each story in the volume has been selected and prefaced by the author himself.”

This volume was published in 1970 and the stories have been collected from 1951 to 1968. There are fifteen stories and I enjoyed about half of them with “Its such a beautiful day” being a stand out story for me. Asimov’s prefaces are entertaining as he dredges his memory to tell his audience how he came to write each story. He is not afraid to tell us something about himself in the process. He is not frightened to be a little self deprecating but when he says in one of the introductions that:

“With my usual modesty, I attributed my success entirely to an incredible fluency of ideas and a delightful facility in writing”

Tongue firmly in cheek perhaps, but he is right in saying that he is able to come up with good stories, because there is a good variety of science fiction tales in this collection: from a whimsical story like ‘What If’ that takes place on a train journey in the present time to an intergalactic war with an alien species, some time in the distant future. Generally the stories from the early 1950’s are better than those from the sixties, but this could be due to the fact that he wrote fewer stories in the 1960’s. In his preface to ‘The up to date Sorcerer’ he says he set out to write a humorous story and he succeeded because it made him laugh when he re-read it. Sorry its just not funny and when he tries to write something sexy for Playboy Magazine in the ‘What is this thing called love’ he is again wide of the mark. However he is spot on with ’Sally’ a story about driverless cars.

Good well written science fiction stories from mainly the 1950’s and so 3.5 stars. ( )

As one of the world’s most prolific authors, and one of the true giants of science fiction, it can be difficult to know where to start with Asimov. As a child I read a few stories and was soon hooked, but perusing his oeuvre takes some time. For anyone interested in wetting their fingers with this master of science fiction, however, the Nightfall anthology is a great place to start.

Put together by Asimov in the late sixties, it was his attempt to address what he felt was an undue amount of attention to the short story which gives the collection its name. Nightfall was published in 1941 when Asimov was just 21 years old, but was immediately recognised by the magazine editor as being worthy of a bonus rate. Unwilling to accept that his best work was written basically at the beginning of his career, this collection is an opportunity for readers to judge for themselves, whether Nightfall deserves such high praise, and whether or not Asimov’s writing style had improved in the intervening period.

This second volume contains fifteen short stories published between 1951 and 1967 (“In a Good Cause–” (1951), “What If–” (1952), “Sally” (1953), “Flies” (1953), “Nobody Here But–” (1953), “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” (1954), “Strikebreaker” (1957), “Insert Knob A In Hole B” (1957), “The Up-To-Date Sorcerer” (1958), “Unto the Fourth Generation” (1959), “What is This Thing Called Love?” (1961), “The Machine that Won the War” (1961), “My Son, the Physicist” (1962), “Eyes Do More Than See” (1965), and “Segregationist” (1967)). In comparison to the first volume, this is much more of a mixed bag in terms of quality. Given that Asimov set out to prove that Nightfall wasn’t his only decent short story, a lot of the choices contained in this volume seem to have more in the way of anecdotal value. For instance, “What If-” was written as a bet between Asimov and his wife as to whether he could base a story around something as simple as their train journey; the two-page “Insert Knob A In Hole B” was written during a television panel discussion, when he was challenged to write a story on the spot (he admits in the preface that he had expected the challenge to come up and prepared accordingly). Similarly other stories were written at the behest of editors seeking to fulfil a particular niche, including one for Playboy.

As with the first volume, each story is prefaced by a small introduction, which partly makes up for the lower quality of the stories. The stories are obviously a lot shorter in this volume, and as a result have a much broader range of backgrounds, so there is certainly a chance that at least something will appeal to every reader. Nevertheless, there’s little denying that this volume can’t live up to the standards set by Nightfall One. ( )