In the opening scene of Nolan’s Prestige, Michael Caine explains what a magic trick consists of - a pledge, a turn, and the hardest part - the Prestige. This is what Asimov’s stories are like. He starts with an ordinary world with something slightly extraordinary about it, takes you around on a tour through the wonders of the world to distract you and slowly builds up the mystery in plain sight, until the big reveal in the final act.

A great trick Asimov uses is that he does exposition exclusively using dialogue. In a sci-fi novel nothing can be taken for granted, you do not even know if gravity works the way it’s supposed to. In bad novels there are pages upon pages describing the world, but in Asimov’s books there invariably is an outsider, much like us the reader, who learns about the world by talking to others and along way teaches us about it.

While The Gods Themselves is nowhere close to the best books I’ve read written by Asimov, it is certainly a good one. If anything I would say that this book is quite audacious and more experimental than his other books. There is a (middle) section of the book which is set entirely on a different planet and it is one big imaginative leap. The creatures there are non-humanoid (dunno if he has any other non-humanoid stories) and it is quite amazing to see how he builds their world and endows these creatures with anthropomorphic qualities.