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process and sometimes made them marvel at the wonders of the universe, and even sometimes experience what is still beyond our abilities to experience. Those things all were important to Asimov. In Opus 100 he recounted how some people teased him about his refusal to get into an airplane and told him, "You don't know what you're missing." "Hah!" he wrote. ''I've floated in Saturn's rings. They don't know what they're missing."
But the scientific emphases of the juvenile novels, with sizable chunks (attractive and digestible chunks) of scientific description dropped into the middle of them, were leading Asimov out of science fiction into science writing. He wrote in Opus 100:
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One of the special delights of writing science fiction is mastering the art of interweaving science and fiction; in keeping the science accurate and comprehensible without unduly stalling the plot. This is by no means easy to do and it is as easy to ruin everything by loving science too much as by understanding it too little.
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In my case, I loved science too much. I kept getting the urge to explain science without having to worry about plots and characterization.
First, however, Asimov finished The End of Eternity (1955). This novel and The Naked Sun (1957) were the last novels of his nearly twenty-year career as a science-fiction writer until he returned in the 1970s with The Gods Themselves and in the 1980s with his bestsellers. His 1960s and 1970s novels were to be surrounded by oceans of nonfiction books. Fantastic Voyage (1966) was a better-than-competent novelization of a screenplay, but the creative act was the screenplay, and even that was a collaboration. It was written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and sometime science-fiction writer and editor of Planet Stories Jerome Bixby and adapted by sometime science-fiction writer David Duncan. The Gods Themselves (1972) was an important afterthought that will be taken up in Chapter 7.
The End of Eternity had its origin in an advertisement in a pre-1945 Time magazine. Typically, Asimov had been checking out bound copies of the magazine from the Boston University library and leafing through them nostalgically. In one he noticed an advertisement that for a moment looked like "the familiar mushroom cloud of the nuclear bomb." Then, as he looked closer, he recognized it as Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Asimov began to wonder under what circumstances a drawing of a nuclear bomb might be published in a magazine many years before 1945.
On December 7, 1953, he began work on a novelette titled "The End

 
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