"The Backward Look" was purchased by George Scithers, and appeared in the September 1979 issue of Asimov's, with an interior illustration by Jack Gaughan.

A good case could be made for the proposition that the late Isaac Asimov was the most famous SF writer of the last half of the twentieth century. He was the author of almost five hundred books, including some of the best-known novels in the genre (I, Robot and the Foundation trilogy, for example); his last several novels kept him solidly on the nationwide bestseller lists throughout the 80s; he won two Nebulas and two Hugos, plus the prestigious Grandmaster Nebula; he wrote an enormous number of nonfiction books on a bewilderingly large range of topics, everything from the Bible to Shakespeare, and his many books on scientific matters made him perhaps the best-known scientific popularizer of our time; his nonfiction articles appeared everywhere from Omni to TV Guide; he was one of the most sought-after speakers in the country, and appeared on most of the late-night and afternoon talk shows of his day, and even did television commercials-and he was also the only SF writer famous enough to have had an SFmagazine named after him, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. A mere sampling ofAsimov's other books, even restricting ourselves to science fiction alone, would include The Stars Like Dust, The Currents of Space, The Gods Themselves, Foundation's Edge, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire, Foundation's Earth, and two expansions of famous Asimov short stories into novel form, The Ugly Little Boy and Nightfall, written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg. His most recent fiction titles include the novel Forward the Foundation, and the posthumous collections Gold and Fantasy.

Asimov was almost as well-known in the mystery field as he was in SF, for novels such as Murder at the ABA as well as for the long-running series of stories about that club of suave amateur investigators, The Black Widowers.