For the current generation, I never miss a chance to mention Gamow's non-fiction.
It's unfortunate that works of great non-fiction writers evaporate away from our cultural consciousness after their death.
It makes me sad that there will be a generation, or maybe it's already upon us, one that has not delighted in Martin Gardner.
That's because he was only the second-best sci-fi writer but the best science writer in the world at the time [Clarke-Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue|https://sfandfantasy.co.uk/php/the-big-3.php]
I did not know about this. Arthur C Clarke was indeed my favourite at that time (even now).
Asimov, however, killed it with his two goosebump-good shorts, Nightfall and Last Question.
Stop what you’re doing and read The Star.
That's a bit of an overstatement? There's Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, ... Darwin, Newton, Einstein, ... Jefferson, Decartes, .... (you get the idea).
It is a competitive field; what's sufficient to win attention in the current generation is often not enough for future generations, which have their own contemporary writers.
I am the same, though frustratingly he still somehow managed to weave his casual misogyny into even his non-fiction works.
I’m willing to believe it, but I didn’t notice any in the time I was reading his fiction.
In The Building Blocks Of The Universe's section on Calcium:
> Another way of getting round the problem of hard water is to manufacture compounds that behave like soap but don't form insoluble compounds with calcium. Many types of such detergents have been put on the market in the last ten years, and hard water is far less of a problem for the housewife than it used to be.
Reads like '90s era comedy, ala "women be cleaning, amirite?", without even the lazy backdoor of "its just a joke".
Is this your immature way of asking for an example of what I am addressing in my comment?
But maybe it's just because I started reading his works long after their initial release. In particular, I was quite surprised to later learn that "Asimov's New Guide to Science" was originally published as "The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science".
Everything Is Fields By David Tong (Early 2027)
Six Math Essentials By Terence Tao (November 2026)
The Proof in the Code By Kevin Hartnett (June 2026, Preorder Available)
For a historic overview of mathematics with (accessible) formulas I highly recommend “Journey through genius: The great theorems of mathematics”.
If you haven’t tried it already I highly recommend Hacker News.
Launched by Thomas Lin, the founding editor of Quanta Magazine, in
partnership with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Quanta Books is an editorially
independent subsidiary of the Simons Foundation, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to advancing the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic
sciences.