It's been said that he put very little of himself into his work, but his collection Earth Is Room Enough provides significant evidence to the contrary. The title, the closest the volume comes to an intentional theme, refers to the absence of spacefaring tales; everything here is Earth-bound, everything here has to do with futures that confront us before we leave the home planet. But reading it today, it's also clear that much of it comes from where the man lived, from the heart of the bookish Brooklyn kid whose voluminous mind marked him as different from his earliest youth. Nobody's saying that it wasn't great to be Asimov the much-lionized celebrity, but a surprising percentage of these reprinted tales—not all of them, by any means, but enough to echo from story to story—have resonances regarding how hard it also must have been, sometimes, to be Asimov the driven genius.

"Jokester" is the tale of a Grand Master (meaning something different here than it does in the field of science fiction, but analogous enough in a social sense) who uses his skill at joke telling as a means of bridging the gap between himself and other people, but who still feels apart from them to the extent that he considers the ones who laugh at his punch lines "fools." (Asimov was, of course, a dedicated jokester himself.) "The Immortal Bard" has a time-traveling Shakespeare attend a modern-day seminar dedicated to his work, and of course flunk; "Kid Stuff" has a well-known writer of elf fantasy so socially stigmatized by the disreputable fruits of his imagination that he keeps his profession a secret from the neighbors.

Making other people happy

In "Someday," children of the future are entertained by positronic appliances known as Bards that generate fairy tales for their amusement. Eleven-year-old Niccolo Mazetti kicks and abuses his Bard, whose output he derides as babyish; he and his friend Paul mess with its programming a little and unknowingly leave it stewing in resentment, to the point where it consoles itself with a self-pitying story about being abused and unappreciated.

"The Author's Ordeal," a poem written with apologies to W.S. Gilbert, depicts the process of plotting a space opera as comically incompatible with living in the world as it is, "for your plot-making mind will stay deaf, dumb and blind to the dull facts of life that hound you."

"Dreaming Is a Private Thing" may be Asimov's most graphic explication of the subject, in its portrait of a future where professional Dreamers record experiences that others can buy and play back. Mogul Jesse Weill, a leader in the business, deals with a day filled with crises that include the plight of a desperately unhappy star Dreamer who cannot turn his talent off and who desperately wishes to quit so he can have a normal life. Discussing the matter with an associate, Weill compares the Dreamer's dilemma with that of a TV writer he once knew, who answered the classic question about where he got his crazy ideas by complaining, "When I go to bed, I can't sleep for the ideas dancing in my head. When I shave, I cut myself; when I talk, I lose track of what I'm saying ... and always because ideas, situations, dialogues are spinning and twisting in my mind. I can't tell you where I get my ideas. Can you tell me, maybe, your trick of not getting ideas, so I, too, can have a little peace."

Concluding the anecdote, Weill says of Dreamers, but by clear implication also of compulsive writers, "Through the years, I've found out one thing. It's their business, making people happy. Other people."