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.
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".
>...The book's title was Svirsky's, chosen as a deliberate homage to George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). Asimov feared the title would be seen as elitist and condescending, and he suggested Everyone's Guide to Science as an alternative, but Svirsky refused. Years later, when he was confronted by annoyed feminists who asked why the book was restricted to men, Asimov would claim that the "intelligent man" of the title referred to himself;[3] thus anticipating the title Asimov's Guide to Science adopted for the third edition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Man%27s_Guide_...
Is this your immature way of asking for an example of what I am addressing in my comment?
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".