I think Asimov gets rather a bad rap, but I may think too much of him because he was the first author I read. These are my personal favorites: The Stars Like Dust is about a revolution in his pre-Empire era. The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun deal with a pair of detectives trying to deal with cross-cultural investigations and each facing bigotry from one of the societies. Foundation and Foundation and Empire are probably the best known of his books, and I recommend them as a view of change in a society. Among his short story collections, I find I, Robot and Nightfall and Other Stories to be his best. The rest of his books are worth reading with a couple of exceptions. I did not like Second Foundation; I don't find secret societies reasonable, and the psi powers were overly powerful. The other books by him that I disliked can be summed up as the years 1982-86: Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth, Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire, and The Edge of Tomorrow. I wonder when Robots and Earth will be written?

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