High in their fortified city, protected by brutal mercenaries, the Sarkites live in magnificient luxury. Below them, in the eternal Spring of Florina, the most beautiful planet in the Galaxy, the native Florinians labor ceaselessly in dire poverty to produce the precious kyrt fiber that brings wealth to their masters, the Squires of Sark. Suddenly there is a cryptic warning from space.
Members of the First Foundation establish contact with the telepathic robots of the planet Gaia and with their aid go on to search for humanity's long-lost ancestral planet, Earth. This is the sixth volume in the Foundation selection of books.
A miniature demon's power to grant wishes forms the recurring theme for 18 cautionary, satirical tales by sf veteran Asimov. Previously published only in magazines, the adventures of Azazel and his summoner, George Bitternut, will attract readers who enjoy flights of fantasy and logic couched as tall tales. For large sf/fantasy collections.
In the year 2100, mankind on Earth, settlers in a lunar colony and aliens from the para-universe, a strange universe parallel in time to our own, are faced with a race against time to prevent total destruction of the Earth. The invention of the Inter-Universe Electron Pump has threatened the rate of hydrogen fusion in the sun, leading, inevitably, to the possibilty of a vast explosion -- and the vapourisation of the Earth exactly eight minutes later...
"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973) and Robot Dreams (1986), as well as the retrospective Opus 100 (1969). It is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac.
