The Stars in their Courses

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The Stars in their Courses
The Stars in their Courses.jpg
First edition
Author Isaac Asimov
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesEssays from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
GenreScience
Publisher Doubleday
Publication date
1971
Media typePrint (Hardback and Paperback)
Preceded by The Solar System and Back  
Followed by The Left Hand of the Electron  

The Stars in their Courses is a collection of seventeen scientific essays by American writer Isaac Asimov. It is the eighth in a series of books collecting his essays from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 1969 to September 1970). Doubleday & Company first published the collection in 1971.

Essay piece of writing often written from an authors personal point of view

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument — but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have traditionally been sub-classified as formal and informal. Formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

Isaac Asimov American science-fiction and non-fiction writer

Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He was known for his works of science fiction and popular science. Asimov was a prolific writer who wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in 9 of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification.

<i>The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction</i> digest magazine

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Fantasy House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first issue was titled The Magazine of Fantasy, but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. F&SF was quite different in presentation from the existing science fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single column format, which in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley "set F&SF apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine".

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