In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954 (Doubleday, 732pp., $15.95). Opus 200. Isaac Asimov (Houghton Mifflin, 329pp., $10.95)

Science fiction readers devoted to the work of Isaac Asimov, that elder statesman of the field, will enjoy this account of his childhood, his growing up in Brooklyn, and the years in which he wrote the earliest (and most famous) of his works. Those familiar only with his popularization of science or those who don't know his work at all will probably not like the book and may even wonder what moved him to write it.

Biography is as close to impossible as art can be and two sorts of falsification are common: the bare recital of facts, in which the shape of a life gets lost, and the imposition of a novelistic “theme” from the outside. Both under- and over-interpretation are available to the third-person biographer – but what if the biographer happens also to be the subject?

Asimov has chosen the bare-facts route; after his childhood memories (which are charming) the book becomes a fairly dry list of professional facts and a considerable number of personal ones which ought to be more interesting than they are (Asimov is surprisingly candid about a good many things) but which remain uninterpreted and hence unconnected. Either the author does not want to make the effort to treat this vast mass of material as something that demands interpreting or else he modestly regards this work as merely a mine of information for some future secondstage biographer.

Where time has provided the interpretation, Asimov accepts it, and, in his account of his childhood, the young Isaac emerges as a distinct and delightful personality – as sunny, playful, and sensible as Asimov's own persona as a writer of nonfiction. His family's remembered eccentricities are lovingly presented, like his father's theories about germs and his mother's cooking. (Regarding the latter, the adult Asimov notes happily that anyone attempting to eat Eastern European Jewish cuisine without slow acclimatization is risking death by “pernicious dyspepsia,” but he loves it.) There is much fascinating material here about the lives of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the New York of the ’20s and ’30s, about the small businesses which drained the time and energy of whole families (the Asimovs were slaves to their seven-day-a-week candy store: a combination of newspaper stand, ice cream parlor, and miniature Woolworth's).