This is a list of short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov is principally known for his science fiction, but he also wrote mystery and fantasy stories.

This list includes Asimov's Foundation short stories, which were later collected into three novels known as the Foundation Trilogy.

Published stories

In this table, "year" refers to the year of publication, and in the case of magazines means the cover date (which is not always the year when the magazine actually appeared on sale). Alternative titles appear in brackets. (383 stories appear on this list.)

The collection I, Robot also contains a linking text at the beginning and end of the book, and in between some (but not all) of the stories, which form a framing story not found anywhere else.

A play by Asimov called The Story Machine, which is an adaptation of his short story "Someday", was published in the February 1958 issue of Plays.^[7]

In 1950 Asimov wrote a comic strip called "Star Empire" (art by Charles Schneeman). The first page appeared in the May 1990 issue of Argosy.^{[8][9][10][11]}

Unpublished stories

Nine stories which Asimov wrote early in his career were never published anywhere, and are now lost.^[27] They were:

1. (1938)^[28] "Cosmic Corkscrew" (9,000 words)
2. (1938)^[29] "This Irrational Planet" (3,000 words)
3. (1938)^[30] "Paths of Destiny" (6,000 words)
4. (1938)^[30] "Knossos in Its Glory" (6,000 words)
5. (1939)^[31] "The Decline and Fall" (6,000 words)
6. (1939)^[32] "Life Before Birth" (6,000 words)
7. (1939)^[32] "The Brothers" (6,000 words)
8. (1940)^[33] "The Oak" (6,000 words)
9. (1941)^[34] "Masks" (1,500 words)

In the 1972 anthology The Early Asimov, Asimov listed two other stories which he thought had also been lost:^[35] "The Weapon" (1938) and "Big Game" (1941). However, they were subsequently found ("The Weapon" had in fact been published under a pseudonym in 1942, which Asimov had forgotten). They were collected in In Memory Yet Green (1979) and Before the Golden Age (1974), respectively.^[36][37] (They are included in the above list of published stories.)

In his autobiography, Asimov wrote "Since February 1941, I have never written a piece of fiction that has not, in one way or another, seen print."^[38]

See also

• Isaac Asimov book series bibliography
• Isaac Asimov bibliography

References

External links

• Asimovonline.com
• Susan Stepney (collates stories to collections)
• Isaac Asimov at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Storypilot (1938–1952) and 1953–1995
• Asimovreviews.net