Dr. Isaac Asimov (
1920-
1992) was born in
Petrovichi,
Russia to
Jewish parents who emigrated to
Brooklyn when he was three. Perturbed by the long walk to the public library, he began to write his own stories at age 11, starting with
The Greenville Chums at College. Eight chapters later, he abandoned the work when he realized he had no idea what he was writing about, having yet to attend college.
Exposed to the then brand new
genre of
science fiction through
pulp magazines in his family's candy store, where he worked, he began submitting stories to them.
John W. Campbell at
Astounding Science Fiction rejected his first three submissions, but
Astounding Stories published the fourth, "
Marooned Off Vesta," in
1939.
He spent most of
World War II working at the
Philadelphia Naval Yard participating in scientific experiments and later served a year in
Army at the tail end of the conflict. In
1948 he earned his
PhD in
biochemistry from
Columbia University and started teaching at
Boston University. Preferring teaching and general science writing to, in his words, being merely a mediocre research scientist, he quit in
1958 to become a full-time writer.
And quite a writer he was, probably one of the most prolific in history. Depending on how you count them, he wrote around 500 books. It's been said that he wrote a book on every subject except
animal husbandry. It isn't true that he has a book in every category of the
Dewey Decimal System (he has no books in the 100s,
philosophy), but his accomplishment of having so many books in so many different categories may be unsurpassed. Asimov, "the great explainer," wrote mostly about science, about every possible branch of science it seems, but also wrote a number of volumes on
literature and
history. He also wrote plenty of fiction, including humor and mysteries.
And of course, he is remembered for being one of the most important early writers of science fiction. His accomplishments include:
• The
Foundation trilogy (well, it was originally a trilogy anyway) about a galactic empire and a new science called "
psychohistory" which can predict the future with astounding accuracy. Asimov was inspired by
Edward Gibbon's
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In
1966, it won a
Hugo award for best all-time novel series.
• The
Robot Trilogy. When John Campbell said that it was impossible to write a science fiction
detective story, Asimov promptly wrote
The Caves of Steel, featuring police officer
Elijah Bailey and lifelike robot R.
Daneel Olivaw. The sequels were
The Naked Sun and
The Robots of Dawn.
• The robot short stories, especially
I, Robot. Many of them feature
U.S.Robots employee
Susan Calvin investigating robot screw-ups and mysteries. For these stories, Asimov created the
Three Laws of Robotics and coined the word "
robotics".
• The novels
The End of Eternity and
The Gods Themselves.
• The short stories "
Nightfall", "
The Bicentennial Man", and "
The Ugly Little Boy", all made into films.
•
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, a pulp magazine that still exists.
Some critics dismiss his importance to the genre. A common complaint is that he could not write about aliens or sex. True, most of his stories were about humans and robots, but he wrote about both aliens and sex quite well in
The Gods Themselves, and was proud of the novel because of that. Asimov's writing usually was not very exotic and contained little action, but as (I think)
Orson Scott Card said, "Asimov's talk
is action." But his seemingly tame writing and the fact that his innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed by the genre make it easy for some to mistakenly overlook his accomplishments.
In
1987 he was named a
Nebula Grandmaster. He died of
heart and
kidney failure in
1992.