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to nonfiction, resulting in a steady stream on all aspects of science, plus other subjects as diverse as geology, Paradise Lost, set theory, the Bible, and Sherlockian limericks.
Asimov returned to writing science fiction in 1972 with the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning The Gods Themselves. He suffered a heart attack in 1977, but subsequent bouts with angina did little to diminish his literary output. He published several collections of science fiction and mystery short stories in the late 1970s, continued writing science columns for a number of magazines, and in 1980 lent his imprimatur to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which is still published today. He began writing science fiction novels on a regular basis again with Foundation's Edge (1982), the "fourth novel in the Foundation Trilogy" and winner of the 1983 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. It was in this novel that Asimov first suggested a merging of his Foundation and robots series, a promise he made good on over the course of his final science fiction novels: The Robots of Dawn (1983), Robots and Empire (1985), Prelude to Foundation (1988), and Forward the Foundation (1993).
Asimov's last decades were spent in New York City, where he lived with his second wife, Janet Opal Jeppson, whom he married in 1973. At the time of his death from complications of heart disease on April 6, 1992, he had produced nearly four hundred books, including novels, story collections, popular science, anthologies, and many works of fiction and nonfiction for juveniles. I, Asimov (1994), a posthumous collection of personal reminiscences, extends his two autobiographical memoirs, In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980).
Critical Extracts
Fritz Leiber
Here (The Stars, Like Dust) is a science fiction novel of spies and counter-spies set in a far future when man's spaceships have explored distant stars and man's culture has spread to many planets of this galaxy. First serialized in a magazine, The Stars, Like Dust tells of a time when empires hold sway in space and man's little home planet is almost forgotten. Yet it turns out that poor old Earth still has a most important message for the future.

 
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