Asimov was never quite happy with the novelization because although he was able to change some of the scientific details, it was not entirely his own work.

The latter is a novelization that Asimov wrote from the 1966 film of the same name. It is about a group of scientists who shrink to microscopic size in order to enter a human brain so that they can retrieve memories from a comatose colleague.ĭespite the title, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain is not a sequel to Fantastic Voyage. So I am rather fond of this book for personal reasons.Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1987. That did, however, drill the name into my head and since I liked Fantastic Voyage so much, when the time that I ran across more books by Isaac Asi-whosit, I started picking them up, too. I can remember that for several years afterwards I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the author’s name, it was so strange-looking. (The first was Environments Out There.) The movie Fantastic Voyage had been playing in theaters, and although I hadn’t seen it yet, all of my friends had and raved about it right and left, so when I got a chance to buy the book through a elementary school book club, I snatched it right up.

It is also rather important to me, because it’s the second book by Asimov I bought. While this, then, may not be first-rank Asimov, it remains a worthwhile and interesting book. His fiction-writing skills had not deserted him and are finely intermingled with his non-fiction writing skills. In particular, he manages to gloss over the problems of miniaturization rather neatly and take advantage of the opportunity to tell a surprising amount about the human body.

This is also the only sf novel Asimov wrote in the 1960’s, as his focus had shifted almost entirely to non-fiction after Sputnik and would remain there until The Gods Themselves was published six years later.įor all that the basic plot of the movie is not Asimov’s, he still tells the story well. It actually represents an improvement on the screenplay in a number of ways, but Asimov was still sufficiently disappointed in it that he was willing to rewrite the same basic scenario his way twenty years later as Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (which is distinctly worse than Fantastic Voyage). This is a novel which is not really Asimov’s responsibility, inasmuch as it is a novelization of somebody else’s screenplay.

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov