And yet pure dystopian tales are as dull and unbearable as pure utopian ones. Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984, by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.
From Asimov's "Nowhere!" essay in the "Gold" collection.
And I'd like to say, Amazon.com's new full text search would have been very nice when trying to find this quote, except I don't think the Gold collection was released in the US, it doesn't seem to be on Amazon.com, only .co.uk (why are Amazon.com, .co.uk, .de etc. even different sites? Why do I need to create a new Amazon acount for each. Ebay manages to spread it's accounts around.)
I've been having a look through Amazon.co.uk at Asimov's work and damn he's written a lot of books. His "Guide To the Bible" is likely to be interesting, based on some of the comments he's made in the "Gold" essays.