Fact and Fancy is a collection of seventeen scientific essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

s by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...

. It was the first of a series of books collecting essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Doubleday & Company first published it in March 1962. It was also published in paperback by Pyramid Books

Pyramid Books

Jove Books, formerly Pyramid Books, is a paperback publishing company, founded in 1949 by Almat Magazine Publishers . The company was sold to the Walter Reade Organization in the late 1960s. It was acquired in 1974 by Harcourt Brace which renamed it to Jove in 1977 and continued the line as an...

 as part of The Worlds of Science

The Worlds of Science

The Worlds of Science is a series of science book paperbacks by various authors published by Pyramid Books in the 1960s. The series included both reprints of works originally published independently and new works written especially for the series. Prominent contributors included Isaac Asimov and L...

 series.

The only essay that did not appear in Fantasy and Science Fiction was "Our Lonely Planet", which first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction.

Contents

• Part I: The Earth and Away
  • Life's Bottleneck (April 1959)
  • No More Ice Ages? (January 1959)
  • Thin Air (December 1959)
  • Catching Up with Newton (December 1958)
  • Of Capture and Escape (May 1959)
• Part II: The Solar System
  • Catskills in the Sky (August 1960)
  • Beyond Pluto (July 1960)
  • Steppingstones to the Stars (October 1960)
  • The Planet of the Double Sun (June 1959)
• Part III: The Universe
  • Heaven on Earth (May 1961)
  • Our Lonely Planet (November 1958)
  • The Flickering Yardstick (March 1960)
  • The Sight of Home (February 1960)
  • Here It Comes; There It Goes (January 1961)
• Part IV: The Human Mind
  • Those Crazy Ideas (January 1960)
  • My Built-in Doubter (April 1961)
  • Battle of the Eggheads (July 1959)