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Dr. Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6,
1992, Russian Айзек Азимов IPA: /ˈaɪzək ˈæzɪmˌɔf/) was a Russian-born American
author and biochemist, a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer
best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.
Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series, which he later combined with
two of his other series, the Galactic Empire Series and Robot series. He also
wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as a great amount of non-fiction. Asimov
wrote or edited over 500 volumes and an estimated 90,000 letters or postcards,
and he has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except
Philosophy. Asimov was by general consensus a master of the science-fiction
genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, was considered to
be one of the "Big Three" science-fiction writers during his lifetime.
Asimov was a long-time member of Mensa, albeit
reluctantly — he described them as "intellectually combative." The asteroid 5020
Asimov is named in his honor.
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Biography
Asimov was born around January 2, 1920 (his date of
birth for official purposes—the precise date is not certain) in Petrovichi
shtetl of Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia) to Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and
Judah Asimov, a Jewish family of millers. They emigrated to the United States
when he was three years old; since the parents always spoke Yiddish and English
with little Isaac, he never learned Russian. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York,
he taught himself to read at the age of five, and remained fluent in Yiddish as
well as English. His parents owned a candy store and everyone in the family was
expected to work in it. He saw science fiction magazines in the store and began
reading them. In his mid-teens, he began to write his own stories and soon was
selling them to pulp magazines.
He graduated from Columbia University in 1939 and
took a Ph.D. in chemistry there in 1948. In between, he spent three years during
World War II working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental
Station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for
just under nine months before receiving an honorable discharge. In the course of
his brief military career, he rose to Corporal on the basis of his typing skills
and narrowly avoided participating in the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini
Atoll. After gaining his doctorate, he joined the faculty of Boston University,
with which he remained associated thereafter, but in a non-teaching capacity.
The university ceased to pay him a salary in 1958, by which time his income from
writing already exceeded his income from his academic duties. Asimov remained on
the faculty as an associate professor, being promoted in 1979 to full professor,
and his personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at Boston University's
Mugar Memorial Library, where they consume 464 boxes on 71 meters of shelf
space. In 1985, he became President of the American Humanist Association and
remained in that position until his death in 1992; his successor was his friend
and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
He married Gertrude Blugerman on July 26, 1942,
with whom he had two children, David (b. 1951) and Robyn Joan (b. 1955). After
an extended separation, they were divorced in 1973, and Asimov married Janet O.
Jeppson later that year.
Asimov was a claustrophile; that is, he enjoyed
small, enclosed spaces. In his first volume of autobiography, he recalls a
childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station,
within which he imagined he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of
passing trains.
Asimov was afraid of flying, only doing so twice in
his entire life (once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental
Station in Philadelphia during the Second World War and once returning home from
the army base in Oahu in 1946). He seldom traveled great distances, partly
because his aversion to aircraft made the logistics of long-distance travel
extremely complicated. In his later years, he found he enjoyed traveling on
cruise ships, and on several occasions he became part of the cruises'
"entertainment", giving science-themed talks on ships like the RMS Queen
Elizabeth 2.
His physical dexterity was very poor. He never
learned how to swim or ride a bicycle, although he did learn to drive a car and
found he enjoyed it. He did not learn to operate a car until after he moved to
Boston, Massachusetts; in his jokebook Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston
driving as "anarchy on wheels".
Asimov died on April 6, 1992. He was survived by
his second wife, Janet, and his children from his first marriage. Ten years
after his death, Janet Asimov's edition of Isaac's autobiography, It's Been a
Good Life, revealed that his death was caused by AIDS; he had contracted HIV
from an infected blood transfusion during heart bypass surgery in 1983. The
actual cause of death was heart and renal failure as complications of AIDS.
Janet Asimov claims that Isaac's doctors encouraged them not to reveal his
illness, while the doctors claim it was Janet herself who wanted to keep it
secret.
Intellectual positions
Isaac Asimov was a humanist and a rationalist. He
did not oppose genuine religious conviction in others but was against
superstitious or unfounded beliefs.
Asimov was a progressive on most political issues,
and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party. In a television interview in
the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy at what he
saw as an irrationalist tack taken by many progressive political activists from
the late 1960s onwards. His defense of civil applications of nuclear power even
after the Three Mile Island incident damaged his relations with some on the
left. He issued many appeals for population control reflecting the perspective
articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich. In the
closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of
life that he perceived in New York on the shrinking tax base caused by middle
class flight to the suburbs. His last non-fiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991,
co-written with science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of
the environmental crisis such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone
layer.
Asimov's writing career
Overview
Asimov's career can be divided into several time
periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short
stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending
after publication of The Naked Sun. He began publishing nonfiction in 1952,
co-authoring a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism.
Following the brief orbit of the first man-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR
in 1957, his production of nonfiction, particularly popular science books,
greatly increased, with a consequent drop in his science fiction output. Over
the next quarter century, he would write only four science fiction novels.
Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the
publication of Foundation's Edge. From then until his death, Asimov would
publish several sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together
in a way he had not originally anticipated.
In his own view, Asimov believed that his most
enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation
Series (see Yours, Isaac Asimov, p. 329). Furthermore, the Oxford English
Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing the words positronic (an
entirely fictional technology), psychohistory (frequently used in a different
sense than the imaginary one Asimov employed) and robotics into the English
language. Asimov coined the term robotics without suspecting that it might be an
original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of
mechanics, hydraulics and so forth. (The original word robot derives from the
Czech word for "forced labor", robota, and was first employed by the playwright
Karel Capek.) Unlike his other two coinages, the word robotics continues in
mainstream and technical use with Asimov's original definition.
Science fiction
Asimov began contributing stories to science
fiction magazines in 1939, "Marooned Off Vesta" being his first published story,
written when he was 18. Two and a half years later, he published his 32nd short
story, "Nightfall" (1941), which has been described as one of "the most famous
science-fiction stories of all time". In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of
America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written. In
his short anthology Nightfall and Other Stories he wrote, "The writing of
'Nightfall' was a watershed in my professional career ... I was suddenly taken
seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the
years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a 'classic'".
"Nightfall" is an archetypical example of social
science fiction, a term coined by Asimov to describe a new trend in the 1940's,
led by authors including Asimov and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera
and toward speculation about the human condition.
In 1942 he began his Foundation stories—later
collected in the Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire
(1952), and Second Foundation (1953)—which recount the collapse and rebirth of a
vast interstellar empire in a universe of the future. Taken together, they are
his most famous work of science fiction, along with the Robot Series. Many years
later, he continued the series with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and
Earth (1986) and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to
Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992). The series features his
fictional science of Psychohistory in which the future course of the history of
large populations can be predicted.
His robot stories—many of which were collected in
I, Robot (1950)—were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of
rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines
that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the
subject. One such short story, "The Bicentennial Man", was made into a movie
starring Robin Williams.
The recent film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was
based on the Hardwired script by Jeff Vintar with Asimov's ideas incorporated
later after acquiring the rights to the I, Robot title. It is not related to the
I, Robot script by Harlan Ellison, who collaborated with Asimov himself to
create a version that captured the spirit of the original. Asimov is quoted as
saying that Ellison's screenplay would lead to "the first really adult, complex,
worthwhile science fiction movie ever made". The screenplay was published in
book form in 1994, after hopes of seeing it in film form were becoming slim.
See: I, Robot, [4]
Besides movies, his Foundation and robot stories
have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by
well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, and
David Brin. These appear to have been done with the blessing, and often at the
request of, Asimov's widow Janet Asimov.
In 1948 he also wrote a spoof science article, "The
Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At the time, Asimov was
preparing for his own doctoral dissertation. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from
his Ph.D. evaluation board, he asked his editor that it be released under a
pseudonym, yet it appeared under his own name. During his oral examination
shortly thereafter, Asimov grew concerned at the scrutiny he received. At the
end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said "Mr.
Asimov, tell us something about the thermodynamic properties of the compound
thiotimoline." After a twenty-minute wait, he was summoned back into the
Examination Room and congratulated as "Dr. Asimov."
He continued writing short stories for science
fiction magazines in the 1950s, which he referred to as his golden decade. A
number of these are included in his Best of anthology, including "The Last
Question" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and reverse entropy.
It was his personal favorite and considered by many to be a contender to
"Nightfall". Asimov wrote of it in 1973,
Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea
all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and
scarcely had to change a word. This sort of things endears any story to any
writer.
Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my
readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a
story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They
don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably "The
Last Question". This has reached the point where I recently received a
long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. Asimov, there's a
story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—" at which point I
interrupted to tell him it was "The Last Question" and when I described the plot
it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read
minds at a distance of a thousand miles.
Beginning in 1977, he lent his name to Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and penned an
editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure
Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series,
published as magazines (in the same manner as stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's "anthologies").
Popular science
During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov shifted
gears somewhat, and substantially decreased his fiction output (he published
only four adult novels between 1957's The Naked Sun and 1982's Foundation's
Edge, two of which were mysteries). At the same time, he greatly increased his
non-fiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik
in 1957 engendered public concern over a "science gap", which Asimov's
publishers were eager to fill with as much material as he could write.
Meanwhile, the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction invited him to
continue his regular non-fiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly
companion magazine Venture Science Fiction, ostensibly dedicated to popular
science, but with Asimov having complete editorial freedom. The first of the
F&SF columns appeared in November of 1958, and they followed uninterrupted
thereafter, with 399 entries, until Asimov's terminal illness took its toll.
These columns, periodically collected into books by his principal publisher,
Doubleday, helped make Asimov's reputation as a "Great Explainer" of science and
were referred to by him as his only pop-science writing in which he never had to
assume complete ignorance of the subjects at hand on the part of his readers.
The popularity of his first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man's
Guide to Science, also allowed him to give up most of his academic
responsibilities and become essentially a full-time freelance writer.
He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two
volumes—covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969—and
then combined them into one 1300-page volume in 1981. Replete with maps and
tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the
history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as
biographical information about the important characters.
Asimov also wrote several essays on the social
contentions of his day, including "Thinking About Thinking" and "Science: Knock
Plastic" (1967).
The great variety of information covered in
Asimov's writings once prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, "How does it feel to know
everything?" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the reputation
of omniscience—"Uneasy". (See In Joy Still Felt, chapter 30.) In the
introduction to his story collection Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon admitted that
he relied upon Asimov's science popularizations (and the Oxford English
Dictionary) to provide his knowledge of entropy.
Other
In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was
also greatly interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote fourteen
popular history books, most notably The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The
Roman Republic (1966) and The Roman Empire (1967).
Never entirely lacking wit and humor, towards the
end of his life Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly
written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975.
Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov's love of puns, contains 144
limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. Asimov's Treasury of
Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor
theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt
change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to
the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some
extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a
response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by
"J") and The Sensuous Man (by "M"), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man
under the byline "Dr. 'A'", but with his full name prominently displayed on the
cover.
Asimov published two volumes of autobiography: In
Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980). A third autobiography, I.
Asimov: A Memoir, was published in April 1994. The epilogue was written by his
widow Janet Asimov shortly after his death. It's Been a Good Life (2002), edited
by Janet, is a condensed version of his three autobiographies.
Literary themes
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
Much of Asimov's fiction dealt with themes of
paternalism. His first robot story, "Robbie", concerned a robotic nanny. As the
robots grew more sophisticated, their interventions became more wide-reaching
and subtle. In "Evidence", a robot masquerading as a human successfully runs for
elective office. In "The Evitable Conflict", the robots run humanity from behind
the scenes, acting as nannies to the whole species.
Later, in Robots and Empire, a robot develops what
he calls the Zeroth Law of Robotics, which states that "A robot may not injure
humanity, nor, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm". He also
decides that robotic presence is stifling humanity's freedom, and that the best
course of action is for the robots to phase themselves out. A non-robot novel,
The End of Eternity, features a similar conflict and resolution.
In The Foundation Series (which did not originally
have robots), a scientist implements a semi-secret plan to create a perfect
society over the course of 1000 years. This series has its version of Platonic
guardians, called the Second Foundation, to perfect and protect the plan. When
Asimov stopped writing the series in the 1950s, the Second Foundation was
depicted as benign protectors of humanity. When he revisited the series in the
1980s, he made the paternalistic themes even more explicit.
Foundation's Edge introduced the planet Gaia,
obviously based on the Gaia hypothesis. Every animal, plant, and mineral on Gaia
participated in a shared consciousness, forming a single super-mind working
together for the greater good. In Foundation and Earth, the protagonist must
decide whether or not to allow the development of Galaxia, a larger version of
Gaia, encompassing the entire galaxy.
Foundation and Earth introduces robots to the
Foundation universe. Two of Asimov's last novels, Prelude to Foundation and
Forward the Foundation, explore their behavior in fuller detail. The robots are
depicted as covert operatives, acting for the benefit of humanity.
Another frequent theme, perhaps the reverse of
paternalism, is social oppression. The Currents of Space takes place on a planet
where a unique plant fiber is grown; the agricultural workers there are
exploited by the aristocrats of a nearby planet. In The Stars, Like Dust, the
hero helps a planet that is oppressed by an arrogant interplanetary empire, the
Tyranni.
Often the victims of oppression are either Earth
people (as opposed to colonists on other planets) or robots. In "The
Bicentennial Man", a robot fights prejudice to be accepted as a human. In The
Caves of Steel, the people of Earth resent the wealthier "Spacers" and in turn
treat robots (associated with the Spacers) in ways reminiscent of how whites
treated blacks, such as addressing robots as "boy". Pebble in the Sky shows an
analogous situation: the Galactic Empire rules Earth and its people use such
terms as "Earthie-squaw", but Earth is a theocratic dictatorship that enforces
euthanasia of anyone older than sixty. One hero is Bel Arvardan, an upper-class
Galactic archeologist who must overcome his prejudices. The other is Joseph
Schwartz, a 62-year-old twentieth-century American who had emigrated from
Europe, where his people were persecuted (he is quite possibly Jewish), and is
accidentally transported forward in time to Arvardan's period. He must decide
whether to help a downtrodden society that thinks he should be dead.
Yet another frequent theme in Asimov is rational
thought. He invented the science-fiction mystery with the novel The Caves of
Steel and the stories in Asimov's Mysteries, usually playing fair with the
reader by introducing early in the story any science or technology involved in
the solution. Later, he produced non-SF mysteries, including the novel Murder at
the ABA (1976) and the "Black Widowers" short stories, in which he followed the
same rule. In his fiction, important scenes are often essentially debates, with
the more rational, humane—or persuasive—side winning.
Criticisms
One of the most common impressions of Asimov's
fiction work is that his writing style is extremely unornamental. In 1980, SF
scholar James Gunn wrote of I, Robot that
Except for two stories—"Liar!" and "Evidence"—they
are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot
develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of
local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and
the style is, at best, transparent. [...] The robot stories—and, as a matter of
fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.
This description applies well to a large proportion
of Asimov's fiction, including that written after 1980. Gunn observes that there
are places where Asimov's style rises to the demands of the situation; he cites
the climax of "Liar!" as an example. One should not overlook the sharply drawn
characters which occur at key junctures of his storylines: in addition to Susan
Calvin in "Liar!" and "Evidence", we find Arkady Darell in Second Foundation,
Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels.
(In Forward the Foundation, Seldon becomes a partial mirror of Asimov himself.)
Asimov was also criticised for the lack of sex and
aliens in his science fiction. Asimov once explained that his reluctance to
write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astounding's
editor John Campbell rejected one of his early science fiction stories because
the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. He decided that,
rather than write weak alien characters, he would not write about aliens at all.
Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms he wrote The Gods Themselves,
which contains aliens, sex, and alien sex. Asimov said that of all his writings,
he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves.
Others have criticised him for a lack of strong
female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings, he
acknowledges this, and responds by pointing to inexperience. His later novels,
written with more female characters but in essentially the same prose style as
his early SF stories, brought this matter to a wider audience. For example, the
25 August 1985 Washington Post's "Book World" section reports of Robots and
Empire as follows:
In 1940, Asimov's humans were stripped-down
masculine portraits of Americans from 1940, and they still are. His robots were
tin cans with speedlines like an old Studebaker, and still are; the Robot tales
depended on an increasingly unworkable distinction between movable and unmovable
artificial intelligences, and still do. In the Asimov universe, because it was
conceived a long time ago, and because its author abhors confusion, there are no
computers whose impact is worth noting, no social complexities, no genetic
engineering, aliens, arcologies, multiverses, clones, sin or sex; his heroes (in
this case R. Daneel Olivaw, whom we first met as the robot protagonist of The
Caves of Steel and its sequels) feel no pressure of information, raw or cooked,
as the simplest of us do today; they suffer no deformation from the winds of the
Asimov future, because it is so deeply and strikingly orderly.
A considerable portion of such criticism boils down
to the charge that Asimov's works are not cyberpunk, and/or are dated.
Some details of Asimov's imaginary future
technology as described by him more than fifty years ago have not aged well. He
has, for example, described powerful robots and computers from the distant
future as still using punch cards or punch tape and engineers using slide rules.
His stories also have occasional internal contradictions. Some stories state,
for instance, that robots cannot lie, while in others robots lie in order to
obey the Three Laws of Robotics (i.e., they are ordered to lie or must lie to
protect a human being).
Other than the books by Gunn and Patrouch, there is
a relative dearth of "literary" criticism on Asimov (particularly when compared
to the sheer volume of his output). Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary
Biography (1981) gives a possible reason:
His words do not easily lend themselves to
traditional literary criticism because he has the habit of centering his fiction
on plot and clearly stating to his reader, in rather direct terms, what is
happening in his stories and why it is happening. In fact, most of the dialogue
in an Asimov story, and particularly in the [Foundation] trilogy, is devoted to
such exposition. Stories that clearly state what they mean in unambiguous
language are the most difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is
little to be interpreted.
Although he prided himself on an unornamented prose
style, he also enjoyed giving his longer stories complicated narrative
structures, often by arranging chapters in non-chronological ways. Some readers
have been put off by this, complaining that the nonlinearity is not worth the
trouble and adversely impacts the clarity of the story. For example, the first
third of The Gods Themselves begins with Chapter 6, then backtracks to fill in
earlier material [5]. (In fairness, one should note that John Campbell advised
Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This tidbit of
advice helped Asimov create "Reason," one of the early Robot stories. See In
Memory Yet Green for details of that time period.) Asimov's tendency to contort
his timelines is perhaps most apparent in his later novel Nemesis, in which one
group of characters live in the "present" and another group starts in the
"past", beginning fifteen years earlier and gradually moving toward the time
period of the first group.
In 2002, Donald Palumbo, an English professor at
East Carolina University published Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and
Robots, and Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction. This
includes a review of Asimov's narrative structures that compares them with the
scientific concepts of fractals and chaos. Palumbo finds that a fascination with
the Foundation and Robots metaseries remains, and determines that the purposeful
complexities of the narrative build unusual symmetric and recursive structures
to be perceived by the mind's eye. This volume is one of the most scholarly and
in-depth criticism of Asimov to date.
John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of
Asimov's written output, once observed,
It has been pointed out that most sf writers since
the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or
deliberately avoiding anything like his style. [6]
In the Hugo Award-winning novella, "Gold", Asimov
describes an author clearly based on himself who has one of his books (The Gods
Themselves) adapted into a "compu-drama", essentially photo-realistic computer
animation. The director criticizes the fictionalized Asimov ("Gregory Laborian")
for having an extremely non-visual style making it difficult to adapt his work,
and the author explains that he relies on ideas and dialogue rather than
description to get his points across. Ironically, the story mimics the same
style the author in it uses to describe his work, and it can be seen as an
answer to some of Asimov's critics.
Quotes
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to
live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
"Early in my school career, I turned out to be an
incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was
saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would
occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked."
"I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of
God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in
rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or
defending."
"If I could trace my origins to Judas Maccabaeus or
King David, that would not add one inch to my stature. It may well be that many
East European Jews are descended from Khazars, I may be one of them. Who knows?
And who cares?"
"In 1936, I first wrote science fiction. It was a
long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel...which died. I remember one
sentence, 'Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer.'. That was the first
Asimovian science-fiction sentence."
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my
fingers."
"Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the
1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was
television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people
owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets
and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime."
"No one can possibly have lived through the Great
Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the
Depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe
economically."
"True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the
United States is steadily dumbing down."
"Until I became a published writer, I remained
completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject...they
would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged
me with rules."
"When I read about the way in which library funds
are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more
way to destroy itself."
"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation
Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no
one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled
or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus
for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what
I want to be remembered for", September 20, 1973, Yours, Isaac Asimov, page 329.
Selected bibliography
In addition, see the complete bibliography. Asimov
aspired to write 500 books but did not quite reach that total; he wrote over 463
titles. If all titles, charts, and edited collections are counted, there are
currently 509 items in his complete bibliography. Asimov could have written an
Opus 400, which would have been a celebration of his 400th title; the
bibliography lists only up to his commemorative Opus 300.
Science fiction
"Greater Foundation" series
The Robot series:
The Caves of Steel (1954), ISBN 0553293400 (first
Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
The Naked Sun (1957), ISBN 0553293397 (second
Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
The Robots of Dawn (1983), ISBN 0553299492 (third
Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
Robots and Empire (1985) (sequel to the Elijah
Baley trilogy)
The Positronic Man (1993) (with Robert Silverberg,
a novel based on Asimov's earlier short story "The Bicentennial Man")
Galactic Empire series:
Pebble in the Sky (1950)
The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
The Currents of Space (1952)
Foundation series:
Foundation (1951), ISBN 0553293354
Foundation and Empire (1952), ISBN 0553293370
Second Foundation (1953), ISBN 0553293362
Foundation's Edge (1982), ISBN 0553293389
Foundation and Earth (1986), ISBN 0553587579
Prelude to Foundation (1988), ISBN 0553278398
Forward the Foundation (1993), ISBN 0385247931
(hardcover), ISBN 0553404881 (paperback)
Novels not part of a series
The End of Eternity (1955)
Fantastic Voyage (1966) (a novelization of the
movie featuring a team of American scientists traveling within a human body)
The Gods Themselves (1972)
Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987) (not
a sequel to the first Fantastic Voyage, but an independent story)
Nemesis (1989)
Nightfall (1990) (with Robert Silverberg, a novel
based on the earlier short story)
The Ugly Little Boy (1992) (with Robert Silverberg,
a novel based on an earlier short story)
(While primarily independent, some of these novels
have very minor connections to the Foundation series.)
Short story collections
I, Robot (1950), ISBN 0553294385
The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955)
Earth Is Room Enough (1957)
Nine Tomorrows (1959)
The Rest of the Robots (1964)
Nightfall and Other Stories (1969)
The Early Asimov (1972)
The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973)
Buy Jupiter and Other Stories (1975)
The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (1976)
The Complete Robot (1982)
The Winds of Change and Other Stories (1983)
Robot Dreams (1986)
Azazel (1988)
Gold (1990)
Robot Visions (1990) ISBN 0-451-45064-7
Magic (1995)
Mysteries
Novels
The Death Dealers (1958) (later republished as A
Whiff of Death)
Murder at the ABA (1976) (also published as
Authorized Murder)
Short story collections (Black Widowers and others)
Asimov's Mysteries (1968)
Tales of the Black Widowers (1974)
More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980)
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984)
The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (1986)
Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990)
Return of the Black Widowers (2003) contains
stories uncollected at the time of Asimov's death, in addition to contributions
by Charles Ardai and Harlan Ellison
Nonfiction
Popular science
Adding a Dimension (1964)
Asimov on Numbers (1959)
Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989,
second edition extends to 1993)
Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991)
The Chemicals of Life (1954)
The Clock We Live On (1959)
The Collapsing Universe (1977) ISBN 0-671-81738-8
The Earth (2004, revised by Richard Hantula)
Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos (1982)
The Human Brain (1964)
Inside the Atom (1956)
Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space (1991)
The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1965)
Jupiter (2004, revised by Richard Hantula)
Life and Energy (1962)
The Neutrino (1966)
Our World in Space (1974)
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)
Science, Numbers and I (1968)
The Secret of The Universe (1990)
The Solar System and Back (1970)
The Sun (2003, revised by Richard Hantula)
The Sun Shines Bright (1981)
The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar (1966)
Venus (2004, revised by Richard Hantula)
Views of the Universe (1981)
Words of Science and the History Behind Them (1959)
The World of Carbon (1958)
The World of Nitrogen (1958)
Annotations
Asimov's Annotated "Don Juan"
Asimov's Annotated "Paradise Lost"
Asimov's Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan
The Annotated "Gulliver's Travels"
Guides
Asimov's Guide to the Bible, vols I and II (1981),
ISBN 0-517-34582-X
Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
Other
Opus 100 (1969)
The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971)
Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and
Technology (1972)
Opus 200 (1979)
Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979)
****
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