Obid asimov biography of george

We are informed in the Publisher’s Note to Falling in love with statues: artificial humans from Pygmalion to the present that George Hersey passed away (in 2007, at the age of 80) before he could complete the final editing of his book. It is entirely a good thing, however, that University of Chicago Press went ahead with publishing it. (And doing a nice job of it; this is a good-looking, carefully proofed book, with 98 well-produced halftones.) There can be no doubt that Falling in love with statues would have been a more fully developed work if Hersey had lived to oversee its completion. It poses some big questions—about the ontological ambiguities of artificial and biotic life, about how the role of statuary in ancient gemenskap foreshadows modern obsessions with robotics, cybernetics, and genetic engineering—which ultimately it gestures towards rather than seriously engages. There are some odd lacunae as well; Daedalus, for instance, receives only two brief mentions. Yet

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Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book

In these postmodernist episodes of high comedy, Don Webb turns Ovid's classic work, The Metamorphosis, on its head

Awarded the 1988 Illinois State University/Fiction Collective Prize through a nationwide fiction competition, Webb's first book of fiction, Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book, explores the theme of change in hitherto unimagined manifestations—from the everyday to the mysterious to the miraculous. These eight dozen "metamorphoses" are widely funny, profound, and—like change itself—always surprising.

With rare originality and breadth, Webb draws upon Egyptian mythology, molecular biology, classical poetry, contemporary pop culture, literary theory, Eastern mysticism, and science fiction, composing them into an offbeat fugue on the theme of transformation.

"Metamorphosis No. 39" resurrects the ancient Egyptian gods, Set, Toth, and Osiris, who return to amerika to mastermind a plot to alter contemporary consciousness. Their scheme includes the broa

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Isaac Asimov

The author of nearly five hundred books, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is esteemed as one of the finest writers of science fiction and scientific fact in the twentieth century.

Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, to middle-class Jewish parents in Petrovichi, Russia, then part of the Smolensk district in the Soviet Union. His family immigrated to the United States in 1923, settling in Brooklyn, New York, where they owned and operated a candy store. In 1934, while attending Boys High School of Brooklyn, Asimov published his first story, "Little Brothers," in the school newspaper. A year later he entered Seth Low Junior College, an undergraduate college of Columbia University. He transferred to the main campus in 1936, where he switched his major from biology to chemistry. During the next two years Asimov's interest in history grew and he read numerous books on the subject. He also read science fiction magazines and wrote stories. His first professionally published story