Yup, as soon as I saw the title I thought of Nightfall - probably my all-time favourite Asimov story :)

The End of Eternity and Nightfall (the novel with Robert Silverberg, not the short story) are Asimov's greatest novels.

When I was growing up, Nightfall was considered to be the greatest SF short story ever written. I'm not sure what the current ranking of it is but it is well worth reading.

I started in the world of sci-fi books with Nightfall from Asimov, short but extremely interesting. Then I followed with Ubik from Philip Dick, I recommend it 100%.

Quite correct. But his stories are also published as anthology. Nightfall is there (1969). So that list might be complete.

Case in point is Nightfall by Ernst and Young.

Asimov's Nightfall exists in 2 versions, as a short story and as a novel.

#460 on this list is "The Complete Stories Volume 1" which includes the short story version (as well as many other all-time-classic stories).

Pitch Black's planet situation reminded me of Nightfall (Asimov/Silverberg)[0], though there weren't six suns like in the book, and the occurrence of the "night" in the movie seemed to be shorter increments?

[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99245.Nightfall

If you haven't listened to quality reading in a while, check out Escape Pod's reading of Asimov's short story, Nightfall:

http://escapepod.org/2007/04/05/ep100-nightfall/

I know that you're being fatuous but in case anyone doesn't get the reference, check out Nightfall by Asimov - it's a classic sci-fi short story.

http://www.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/nightfall.pdf

I'm going to put my vote in for an old one Nightfall by Asimov and Silverberg.
http://smile.amazon.com/Nightfall-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553290991...

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy first, and Nightfall (both the short story and the later novelization) second.

Then definitely track down Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series:

https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Macmillan%27s+B...

and:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1107

Think Roadside Picnic x 100, because that's the quantity of really excellent science fiction stories and ideas you can expect.

A free (but bad) translation of 'Self Discovery' by Vladimir Savchenko is available if you search. I used this, together with my own physical copy, to make a proper ebook - let me know if you want a copy; I can't locate it at this moment...

And, in my opinion, the finest science fiction short story ever written (apologies to Asimov's Nightfall and Godwin's The Cold Equations): Nine Minutes, by Genrikh Altov https://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/science-fiction4.asp

How is his stuff hard science? He made up the positronic brain, and his whole psychohistory was just absurd; if anything, the idea of a brilliant cabal of scientists and technicians using psychohistory to predict the future is just dressed up witchcraft than real science. Stuff like Nightfall is just embarrassing.

Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight.

Dorsai and Dickson's stuff had issues too, but he was much better at writing people as well as ideas, and he's had a longer, better overall career at writing science fiction and fantasy. Asimov was probably the first household name writer, but really needs to be viewed a lot more critically then the fandom does.

I saw your post this morning and it reminded me of the "To The Reader" opening of Nightfall by Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg. So now that I'm home I pulled it off my dead tree shelf for you :)

"Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms--that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of 'miles,' or 'hands,' or 'cars,' or 'computers,' they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own invormation-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the 'mile' that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.

In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful."

Many years ago I collected short stories I enjoyed in an Evernote list. Here it is if you want some inspiration. :)

Asimov, Isaac - "Nightfall"

Asimov, Isaac - "The Last Question"

Barthelme, Donald - "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby"

Beckett, Samuel - "That Time"

Bisson, Terry - They're Made Out of Meat

Boyle, T. C. - The Hit Man

Carver, Raymond - Little Things

Chekhov, Anton - "The Bet"

Dick, Philip K - "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"
Gibson, William - Dogfight ("...he had nobody to tell it to. Nobody at
all.")

Hemingway, Ernest - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Hemingway, Ernest - Hills Like White Elephants

Makkai, Rebecca - "The Briefcase"

Bradbury, Ray - "The Veldt"

Saroyan, William - "Seventy Thousand Assyrians"

thank you for reminding me of a couple more great stories!

But, if you believe these are superior writings to the one in TFA you should probably expand on why.

IMO The Last Question is so loved because it hits readers with a much stronger emotional force than Nightfall or The Dead Past. Possibly it's the usage of that specific formula, at the end, which already carries so much weight.

I, for one, believe only another short fiction had the same effect on me when i first read it as a kid: Frederic Brown's "Sentry".

I think you are talking about Nightfall by Asimov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_short_story_...

"His science fiction in general wasn't particularly that good"

I think you have to consider it in context, and compare it to other SF at the time.

There's a reason why he was one of the "Big Three" of that time, and why Foundation series and his Nightfall novelette were acclaimed so highly.

I can't stand reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I can tell that SF fans in the early to mid-20th century thought he was great. I think Dune is simplistic in how it portrays ecosystems and economies, but I recognize that it was the book which really got people to start taking those ideas serious when writing SF.

You'll note that both have been turned into movies, as have several of Asimov's works, so it's not like he's mediocre.

But yes, Asimov wrote with a mid-20th century viewpoint, which dates the material. (Just like early Niven has such a 1970s/Los Angeles viewpoint.[0]) And here we are, post-New Wave, post-cyperpunk, even post-space-opera-revival. Our views have changed, and we now have different expectations and higher standards.

In his non-fiction works, I quite enjoyed the broad coverage in "Asimov's Guide to Science".

[0] Consider that "Puppeteers" comes because on the human ship which met them there was "a camp revival of the ancient Time for Beany TV show featuring Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent." Compare to Cordwainer Smith, whose works, I think, are not so easily dated.

Sounds like the plot to Nightfall by Isaac Asimov.