Книга: Isaac Asimov «The Gods Themselves»

Isaac Asimov (/ˈaɪzək ˈæzɨməv/ eye-zək az-i-məv; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; Yiddish: אייזיק יודאָוויטש אסימאוו; c. January 2, 1920^[1] – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.^[2] His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (Although his only work in the 100s -- which covers philosophy and psychology -- was a foreword for The Humanist Way).^[3]

Isaac Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime.^[4] Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series;^[5] his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson.^[6] He wrote many short stories, among them "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

The prolific Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much non-fiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include his Guide to Science, the three volume set Understanding Physics, Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as numerous works on astronomy, mathematics, the Bible, William Shakespeare's works and chemistry subjects.

Asimov was a long-time member and Vice President of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs."^[7] He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association.^[8] The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars,^[9] a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and one Isaac Asimov literary award are named in his honor.

Biography

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920^[1] in Petrovichi in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (near the modern border with Belarus) to Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and Judah Asimov, a family of Jewish millers. While his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.^[1]

The family name derives from озимые (ozimiye), a Russian word for winter grains in which his great-grandfather dealt, to which a patronymic suffix was added. His name in Russian was originally Isaak Ozimov (Russian: Исаак Озимов); but he was later known in Russia as Ayzyek Azimov (Айзек Азимов),^[10] a Russian Cyrillic adaptation of the American English pronunciation. Asimov had two younger siblings; a sister, Marcia (born Manya,^[11] June 17, 1922-April 2, 2011^[12]), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929-August 16, 1995^[13]).

His family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. Since his parents always spoke Yiddish and English with him, he never learned Russian.^[14] Growing up in Brooklyn, New York City, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five^[15] and remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English.^[16] Asimov wrote of his father, "My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart", and "he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me."^[17]

His parents owned a succession of candy stores, and everyone in the family was expected to work in them.

Education and career

Asimov began reading science fiction pulp magazines at a young age. His father, as a matter of principle, forbade reading the pulps, as he considered them to be trash, but Asimov persuaded him that the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, so they were educational. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen—after he discovered science fiction fandom—he was selling stories to the science fiction magazines. John W. Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, had a strong formative influence on Asimov and eventually became a personal friend.^[18]

Asimov attended New York City Public Schools, including Boys High School, in Brooklyn, New York.^[19] From there he went on to Seth Low Junior College for two years, then to Columbia University for the remainder of his master's degree, from which he graduated in 1939, eventually returning to earn a PhD in biochemistry in 1948. In between, he spent three years during World War II working as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for almost nine months before receiving an honorable discharge. In the course of his brief military career, he rose to the rank of corporal on the basis of his typing skills, and narrowly avoided participating in the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944

After completing his doctorate, Asimov joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine, with which he remained associated thereafter.^[20] From 1958, this was in a non-teaching capacity, as he turned to writing full-time (his writing income had already exceeded his academic salary). Being tenured meant that he retained the title of associate professor, and in 1979 the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimov's personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at the university's Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gottlieb. The collection fills 464 boxes, or seventy-one meters of shelf space.

Personal life

Asimov married Gertrude Blugerman (1917, Canada–1990, Boston) on July 26, 1942. They had two children, David (b. 1951) and Robyn Joan (b. 1955). In 1970 they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to Manhattan, where he lived for the rest of his life. He immediately began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, and married her two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude in 1973.^[21]

Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces.^[22] In the third volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading.^[23]

Asimov was afraid of flying,^[24] only doing so twice in his entire life (once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station, and once returning home from the army base in Oahu in 1946)^[24] He seldom traveled great distances, partly because his aversion to flying complicated the logistics of long-distance travel. This phobia influenced several of his fiction works, such as the Wendell Urth mystery stories and the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. 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 such as the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2.^[24]

Asimov was an able public speaker and was a frequent fixture at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable.^[24] He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards, and was pleased to give autographs. He was of medium height, stocky, with mutton chop whiskers and a distinct Brooklyn accent. His physical dexterity was very poor . He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle; however, he did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".^[25]

Asimov's wide interests included his participation in his later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan^[24] and in The Wolfe Pack,^[26] a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan.^[27] He was a prominent member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society.^[24] He was also a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.^[28]

In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. From 1985 until his death in 1992, he served as president of the AHA, an honorary appointment; his successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. He was also a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and earned a screen credit on Star Trek: The Motion Picture for advice he gave during production (generally, confirming to Paramount Pictures that Roddenberry's ideas were legitimate science-fictional extrapolation).

Illness and death

Asimov suffered a heart attack in 1977, and had triple bypass surgery in December 1983. When he died in New York City on April 6, 1992, his brother Stanley reported heart and kidney failure as the cause of death.^[29] 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 Asimov's autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, revealed that the myocardial and renal complications were the result of an infection by HIV, which he had contracted from a blood transfusion received during his bypass operation.^[30] Janet Asimov wrote in the epilogue of It's Been a Good Life that Asimov's doctors advised him against going public, warning that the anti-AIDS prejudice would likely extend to his family members. Asimov's family considered disclosing his condition after his death, but the controversy that erupted when Arthur Ashe announced his own HIV infection (also contracted from a blood transfusion during heart surgery) convinced them otherwise. Ten years later, after most of Asimov's doctors had died, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the AIDS story should be made public.^[31]

Writings

Overview

Rowena Morrill depicts Asimov enthroned with symbols of his life's work

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 wrote 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 published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are, however, many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories.^[32]

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 (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations) 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 words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word psychohistory, the word robotics continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov's original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with "positronic brains" giving Asimov full credit for "inventing" this fictional technology. His fictional writings for space and time are similar to the writings of Brian W Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Gregory Benford.

Science fiction

Asimov first began reading the science fiction pulp magazines sold in his family's confectionery store in 1929. He came into contact with science fiction fandom in the mid-1930s, particularly the circle that became the Futurians. He began writing his first science fiction story, "Cosmic Corkscrew", in 1937, but failed to finish it until June 1938, when he was inspired to do so after a visit to the offices of Astounding Science Fiction. He finished "Cosmic Corkscrew" on June 19, and submitted the story in person to Astounding editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell rejected "Cosmic Corkscrew", but encouraged Asimov to keep trying, and Asimov did so. Asimov sold his third story, "Marooned Off Vesta", to Amazing Stories magazine in October, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. He continued to write and sometimes sell stories to the science fiction pulps.

In 1941, he published his 32nd story, "Nightfall", which has been described as one of "the most famous science-fiction stories of all time".^[33] In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written.^[34] In his short story collection 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 archetypal example of social science fiction, a term coined by Asimov to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including Asimov and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.

By 1941 Asimov had begun selling regularly to Astounding, which was then the field's leading magazine. From 1943 to 1949, all of his published science fiction appeared in Astounding.

In 1942 he published the first of 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, due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another,^[20] 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 positronic 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. Asimov notes in one of his biographical pieces that he was largely inspired by the almost relentless tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creator. One such robot story, a short titled "The Bicentennial Man", was made into a film starring Robin Williams.

The 2004 film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was based on a script by Jeff Vintar entitled Hardwired, with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after acquiring the rights to the I, Robot title.^[35] 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.

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, Gregory Benford 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 chemistry article, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At the time, Asimov was preparing his own doctoral dissertation, and for the oral examination to follow that. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his graduate school evaluation board at Columbia University, Asimov asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym, yet it appeared under his own name because of a mistake by the publisher. 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". The stuttering Asimov was sent out of the room then. After a 20-minute or so wait, he was summoned back into the Examination Room and congratulated as "Dr. Asimov."

In 1949, the book publisher Doubleday's science fiction editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted Asimov's unpublished novelette "Grow Old Along With Me" (40,000 words) for publication, but requested that it be extended to a full novel of 70,000 words. The book appeared under the Doubleday imprint in January 1950 with the title of Pebble in the Sky. The Doubleday company went on to publish five more original science fiction novels by Asimov in the 1950s, along with the six juvenile Lucky Starr novels, the latter under the pseudonym of "Paul French". Doubleday also published collections of Asimov's short stories, beginning with The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955. The early 1950s also saw the Gnome Press company publishing one collection of Asimov's positronic robot stories as I, Robot and his Foundation stories and novelettes as the three books of the Foundation Trilogy. More positronic robot stories were republished in book form as The Rest of the Robots.

When new science fiction magazines, notably Galaxy magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, appeared in the 1950s, Asimov began publishing short stories in them as well. He would later refer to the 1950s as his "golden decade". A number of these stories are included in his Best of anthology, including "The Last Question" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and potentially reverse the process of entropy. It was his personal favorite and considered by many to be equal 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 thing 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.

In December 1974, former Beatle Paul McCartney approached Asimov and asked him if he could write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue; he wished to make a film about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by a group of extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney's group Wings, then at the height of their career. Intrigued by the idea, although he was not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov quickly produced a "treatment" or brief outline of the story. He adhered to McCartney's overall idea, producing a story he felt to be moving and dramatic. However, he did not make use of McCartney's brief scrap of dialogue, and probably as a consequence, McCartney rejected the story. The treatment now exists only in the Boston University archives.

Beginning in 1977, Asimov 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 the stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's 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 Magazine, ostensibly dedicated to popular science, but with Asimov having complete editorial freedom. The first of the F&SF columns appeared in November 1958, and they followed uninterrupted thereafter, with 399 entries, until Asimov's terminal illness. 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.

Asimov wrote several essays on the social contentions of his time, 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.

It is a mark of the friendship and respect accorded Asimov by Arthur C. Clarke that the so-called "Asimov-Clarke Treaty of Park Avenue", put together as they shared a cab ride along Park Avenue in New York, stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself).^[36] Thus the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: "In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer."

Coined terms

Asimov coined the term "robotics" in his 1941 story Liar!,^[37] though he later remarked that he believed then that he was merely using an existing word, as he stated in Gold ("The Robot Chronicles"), though while acknowledging the Oxford Dictionary reference, he incorrectly states that the word was first printed about one third of the way down the first column of page 100, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942 printing of his short story Runaround .^[38][39]

Asimov also coined the term Spome in a paper entitled, “There’s No Place Like Spome” in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments,^[40] originally presented as a paper to the American Chemical Society on September 13, 1965. It refers to any system closed with respect to matter and open with respect to energy capable of sustaining human life indefinitely.

Other writings

In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was also greatly interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote 14 popular history books, most notably The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966), The Roman Empire (1967), The Egyptians (1967) and The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968).

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 1,300-page volume in 1981. Complete 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. His interest in literature manifested itself in several annotations of literary works, including Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970), Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost (1974), and The Annotated Gulliver's Travels (1980).

Asimov was also a noted mystery author and a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He began by writing science fiction mysteries such as his Wendell Urth stories but soon moved on to writing "pure" mysteries. He only published two full-length mystery novels but he wrote a fair number of stories about the Black Widowers, a group of men who met monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea for the Widowers from his own association in a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders and all of the main characters (with the exception of the waiter, Henry, whom he admitted resembled Wodehouse's Jeeves) were modeled after his closest friends.^[41]

Toward 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. He even created a slim volume of Sherlockian limericks (and embarrassed one fan by autographing her copy with an impromptu limerick that rhymed 'Nancy' with 'romancy'). Asimov featured Yiddish humor in Azazel, The Two Centimeter Demon. The two main characters, both Jewish, talk over dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, about anecdotes of "George" and his friend Azazel. 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'" (although his full name was printed on the paperback edition, first published 1972).

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 a decade after his death. It's Been a Good Life (2002), edited by Janet, is a condensed version of his three autobiographies. He also published three volumes of retrospectives of his writing, Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984).

In 1987, the Asimovs co-wrote How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort. In it they offer advice on how to maintain a positive attitude and stay productive when dealing with discouragement, distractions, rejection and thick-headed editors. The book includes many quotations, essays, anecdotes and husband-wife dialogues about the ups and downs of being an author.

Asimov and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry developed a unique relationship during Star Trek's initial launch in the late 1960s. Asimov wrote a critical essay on Star Trek's scientific accuracy for TV Guide magazine. Roddenberry retorted respectfully with a personal letter explaining the limitations of accuracy when writing a weekly series. Asimov corrected himself with a follow-up essay to TV Guide claiming despite its inaccuracies, that Star Trek was a fresh and intellectually challenging science fiction television show. The two remained friends to the point where Asimov even served as an advisor on a number of Star Trek projects.

In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., "D-73" instead of December 1. An extra Year Day is added for a total of 365 days.^[42]

Awards

• 1957 – Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award, for Building Blocks of the Universe
• 1960 – Howard W. Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association for The Living River
• 1962 – Boston University's Publication Merit Award
• 1963 – special Hugo Award for "adding science to science fiction" for essays published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
• 1963 – Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[43]
• 1965 – James T. Grady Award of the American Chemical Society (now called the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry)
• 1966 – Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award for the Foundation series
• 1967 – Westinghouse Science Writing Award
• 1972 – Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Gods Themselves^[44]
• 1973 – Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Gods Themselves^[45]
• 1973 – Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for The Gods Themselves^[45]
• 1977 – Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Bicentennial Man
• 1977 – Nebula Award for Best Novelette for The Bicentennial Man
• 1981 – An asteroid, 5020 Asimov, was named in his honor
• 1983 – Hugo Award for Best Novel for Foundation's Edge^[46]
• 1983 – Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for Foundation's Edge^[46]
• 1987 – Nebula Grand Master award, a lifetime achievement award^[47]
• 1992 – Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Gold
• 1995 – Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book for I. Asimov: A Memoir
• 1996 – A 1946 Retro-Hugo for Best Novel of 1945 was given at the 1996 WorldCon to The Mule, the 7th Foundation story, published in Astounding Science Fiction
• 1997 – Posthumous induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
• 2009 – A crater on the planet Mars, Asimov,^[48] was named in his honor

• 14 honorary doctorate degrees from various universities

Writing style

Characteristics

One of the most common impressions of Asimov's fiction work is that his writing style is extremely unornamented. In 1980, science fiction scholar James Gunn, professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas wrote of I, Robot:^[49]

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.

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. Sharply drawn characters 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. Asimov addresses this criticism at the beginning of his book Nemesis:^[50]

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Some details of Asimov's imaginary future technology as he described in the 1940s and 1950s have not aged well. For example, he described powerful robots and computers from the distant future using punched cards or punched tape and engineers using slide rules. In one dramatic scene in Foundation and Empire, a character gets the news by buying a paper at a vending machine. Of course, this charge could be leveled at virtually any writer of science fiction and has little critical impact.

In addition, his stories also have occasional internal contradictions: names and dates given in The Foundation Series do not always agree with one another, for example. Some such errors may plausibly be due to mistakes the characters make, since characters in Asimov stories are seldom fully informed about their own situations. Other contradictions resulted from the many years elapsed between the time Asimov began the Foundation series and when he resumed work on it; occasionally, advances in scientific knowledge forced him to revise his own fictional history. Other than 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.

In fairness, Gunn's and Patrouch's respective studies of Asimov both take the stand that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's 1982 book goes into considerable depth commenting upon each of Asimov's novels published to that date. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction (nor does Patrouch), but he does call some passages in The Caves of Steel "reminiscent of Proust." When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose "need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society".

Although he prided himself on his unornamented prose style (for which he credited Clifford D. Simak as an early influence), Asimov 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 affects 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.^[51] (John Campbell advised Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This advice helped Asimov create "Reason", one of the early Robot stories. See In Memory Yet Green for details of that time period.) Patrouch found that the interwoven and nested flashbacks of The Currents of Space did serious harm to that novel, to such an extent that only a "dyed-in-the-kyrt^[52] Asimov fan" could enjoy it. 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 though the traditional interests of literature (such as symbolism and characterization) are often somewhat lacking or even absent, a fascination with the Foundation and Robot metaseries remains. He determines that the purposeful complexities of the narrative build unusual symmetric and recursive structures to be perceived by the mind's eye. This volume contains some of the most scholarly and in-depth criticism of Asimov to date.^{[citation needed]}

Limitations

Alien life

Asimov was also criticized for the general absence of sexuality and of extraterrestrial life 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 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. The book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972,^[44] and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973.^[45] Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves, the part that deals with those themes.^[53]

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 nonvisual 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.

Gender and social issues

Others have criticized him for a lack of strong female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings, such as Gold ("Women and Science Fiction"), 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 August 25, 1985 Washington Post's "Book World" section reports of Robots and Empire as follows:^{[citation needed]}

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.

It may be noted, however, that in fact The Naked Sun (1957) deals with social issues as a core part of its central setting and motivation, depicts genetic engineering in the guise of eugenics as a fundamental part of that society, presents the reader with inverted arcologies where a single person is the focal point of the artificial environment as well as a hero who hails from a "normal" arcology on Earth. Meanwhile, totally artificial birth, although not specifically cloning, is the aim of the leaders of the society, sexual want is the major driving force of the main female character (albeit veiled in 1950s sensibilities), and the entire story is used to make the point that too much order is ultimately a stagnant dead end to be avoided.^{[citation needed]}

Views

Religion

Isaac Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, and a rationalist.^[54] He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. During his childhood, his father and mother observed Orthodox Jewish traditions, though not as stringently as they had in Petrovichi; they did not, however, force their beliefs upon young Isaac. Thus he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the Torah represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the Iliad recorded Greek mythology. As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.

For a brief while, his father worked in the local synagogue to enjoy the familiar surroundings and, as Isaac put it, "shine as a learned scholar"^[55] versed in the sacred writings. This scholarship was a seed for his later authorship and publication of Asimov's Guide to the Bible, an analysis of the historic foundations for both Old and New Testaments. For many years, Asimov called himself an atheist; however, he considered the term somewhat inadequate, as it described what he did not believe rather than what he did. Eventually, he described himself as a "humanist" and considered that term more practical. He did however continue to identify himself as a non-observant Jew^[56] as stated in his introduction to Jack Dann's anthology of Jewish science fiction, Wandering Stars: "I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never undergone that curious puberty rite, the bar mitzvah. It doesn't matter. I am Jewish."

In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote, "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."^[57] The same memoir states his belief that Hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who "slandered God by inventing Hell".^[58]

Politics

Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal, and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in a television interview during the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy about what he considered an "irrationalist" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late 1960s and onwards. In his second volume of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recalled meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffman; Asimov's impression was that the 1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return.

He vehemently opposed Richard Nixon, considering him "a crook and a liar." He followed the unfolding events of Watergate day-to-day, and was pleased when the president was forced to resign. He was dismayed over the pardon extended to Nixon by his successor: "I was not impressed by the argument that it has spared the nation an ordeal. To my way of thinking, the ordeal was necessary to make certain it would never happen again."

Social issues

Asimov considered himself a feminist even before Women's Liberation became a widespread movement; he joked that he wished women to be free "because I hate it when they charge".^[59] More seriously, he argued that the issue of women's rights was closely connected to that of population control. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuality must be considered a "moral right" on population grounds, as must all consenting adult sexual activity that does not lead to reproduction.^[60] He issued many appeals for population control, reflecting a perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich.

Environmental issues

Asimov's defense of civil applications of nuclear power even after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident damaged his relations with some of his fellow liberals. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov,^[60] he states that although he would prefer living in "no danger whatsoever" than near a nuclear reactor, he would still prefer a home near a nuclear power plant than in a slum on Love Canal or near "a Union Carbide plant producing methyl isocyanate" (referring to the Bhopal disaster).

In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York City on the shrinking tax base caused by the middle-class flight to the suburbs. His last non-fiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with his long-time friend science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer.

Other authors

Asimov stated, both in his autobiography and in several essays, that he enjoyed the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. He paid tribute to The Lord of the Rings in a "Black Widowers" story. (In his letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had previously interviewed him for Daily Telegraph Magazine, Tolkien said that he enjoyed the science fiction of Isaac Asimov.)

He admired a number of his contemporaries, in particular fellow science-fiction author and science writer Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he entered into the lighthearted "Treaty of Park Avenue," which stipulated that Clarke was free to refer to himself as the best science fiction writer in the world (Asimov being second-best), provided he admitted that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (Clarke being second-best). He freely acknowledged a number of his fellow writers as superior to himself in talent, saying of Harlan Ellison, "He is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the world, far more skilled at the art than I am."

Influence

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, has stated that it was Asimov's concept of psychohistory that inspired him to become an economist.^[61]

John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed:

It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style.^{[62][unreliable source?]}

Selected bibliography

Including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there are currently 515 items in Asimov's bibliography—not counting his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books (based on his personal count), Asimov published Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984), celebrating his writing; he did not choose to do this for his 400th book, however. Asimov's writings span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for Philosophy. However, if his foreword for The Humanist Way is included, he has been published in all categories.^[3]

According to UNESCO's Index Translationum database, Asimov is the world's 17th most-translated author, just behind Arthur Conan Doyle and ahead of Pope John Paul II.^[63]

There is an online exhibit displaying features, visuals, and descriptions of some of the over 600 books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts included in the West Virginia University Libraries’ virtually complete Asimov Collection. Many first, rare, and autographed editions are in the Libraries’ Rare Book Room. Book jackets and autographs are presented online along with descriptions and images of children’s books, science fiction art, multimedia, and other materials in the collection.^[64]

For a listing of Asimov's books in chronological order within his future history, see the Foundation Series list of books.

Science fiction

"Greater Foundation" series

The Robot series was originally separate from the Foundation series. The Galactic Empire novels were originally published as independent stories. Later in life, Asimov synthesized them into a single coherent 'history' that appeared in the extension of the Foundation series.

• The Robot series:
  • The Caves of Steel. 1954. ISBN 0-553-29340-0.  (first Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
  • The Naked Sun. 1957. ISBN 0-553-29339-7.  (second Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
  • The Robots of Dawn. 1983. ISBN 0-553-29949-2.  (third Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
  • Robots and Empire. 1985. ISBN 978-0-586-06200-5.  (sequel to the Elijah Baley trilogy)

• Galactic Empire novels:
  • Pebble in the Sky. 1950. ISBN 0-553-29342-7. 
  • The Stars, Like Dust. 1951. ISBN 0-553-29343-5. 
  • The Currents of Space. 1952. ISBN 0-553-29341-9. 

• Original Foundation trilogy:
  • Foundation. 1951. ISBN 0-553-29335-4. 
  • Foundation and Empire. 1952. ISBN 0-553-29337-0. , Published with the title 'The Man Who Upset the Universe' as a 35c Ace paperback, D-125, in about 1952
  • Second Foundation. 1953. ISBN 0-553-29336-2. 

• Extended Foundation series:
  • Foundation's Edge. 1982. ISBN 0-553-29338-9. 
  • Foundation and Earth. 1986. ISBN 0-553-58757-9.  (last of the Foundation series)
  • Prelude to Foundation. 1988. ISBN 0-553-27839-8.  (occurs before "Foundation")
  • Forward the Foundation. 1993. ISBN 0-553-40488-1.  (occurs after "Prelude to Foundation" and before "Foundation")

Lucky Starr series (as Paul French)

• David Starr, Space Ranger (1952)
• Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953)
• Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954)
• Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956)
• Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter (1957)
• Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958)

Norby Chronicles (with Janet Asimov)

• Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot (1983)
• Norby's Other Secret (1984)
• Norby and the Lost Princess (1985)
• Norby and the Invaders (1985)
• Norby and the Queen's Necklace (1986)
• Norby Finds a Villain (1987)
• Norby Down to Earth (1988)
• Norby and Yobo's Great Adventure (1989)
• Norby and the Oldest Dragon (1990)
• Norby and the Court Jester (1991)

Novels not part of a series

Novels marked with an asterisk * have minor connections to the Foundation series.

• The End of Eternity (1955) *
• Fantastic Voyage (1966) (a novelization of the movie)
• The Gods Themselves (1972)
• Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987) (not a sequel to Fantastic Voyage, but a similar, independent story)
• Nemesis (1989) *
• Nightfall (1990), with Robert Silverberg
• The Ugly Little Boy (1992), with Robert Silverberg (aka: Child of Time)
• The Positronic Man (1993) *, with Robert Silverberg

Short story collections

See also List of short stories by Isaac Asimov

• I, Robot. 1950. ISBN 0-553-29438-5. 
• The Martian Way and Other Stories. 1955. ISBN 0-837-60463-X. 
• Earth Is Room Enough. 1957. ISBN 0-449-24125-4. 
• Nine Tomorrows. 1959. ISBN 0-449-24084-3. 
• The Rest of the Robots. 1964. ISBN 0-385-09041-2. 
• Through a Glass, Clearly. 1967. ISBN 0-860-25124-1. 
• Nightfall and Other Stories. 1969. ISBN 0-449-01969-1. 
• The Early Asimov. 1972. ISBN 0-449-02850-X. 
• The Best of Isaac Asimov. 1973. ISBN 0-722-11256-4. 
• Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. 1975. ISBN 0-385-05077-1. 
• The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories. 1976. ISBN 0-575-02240-X. 
• The Complete Robot. 1982. 
• The Winds of Change and Other Stories. 1983. ISBN 0-385-18099-3. 
• The Alternate Asimovs. 1986. ISBN 0-385-19784-5. 
• The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. 1986. 
• Robot Dreams. 1986. ISBN 0-441-73154-6. 
• Azazel. 1988. 
• Robot Visions. 1990. ISBN 0-451-45064-7. 
• Gold. 1995. ISBN 0-553-28339-1. 
• Magic. 1996. ISBN 0-002-24622-8. 

Mysteries

Novels

• The Death Dealers (1958), republished as A Whiff of Death
• Murder at the ABA (1976), also published as Authorized Murder

Short story collections

Black Widowers series

• 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)
• Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990)
• The Return of the Black Widowers (2003)

Other mysteries

• Asimov's Mysteries (1968)
• The Key Word and Other Mysteries (1977)
• The Union Club Mysteries (1983)
• The Disappearing Man and Other Mysteries (1985)
• The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (1986)

Nonfiction

Popular science

Collections of Asimov's essays — originally published as monthly columns in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

1. Fact and Fancy (1962)
2. View from a Height (1963)
3. Adding a Dimension (1964)
4. Of Time, Space, & Other Things (1965)
5. From Earth to Heaven (1966)
6. Science, Numbers and I (1968)
7. The Solar System and Back (1970)
8. The Stars in Their Courses (1971)
9. The Left Hand of the Electron (1972)
10. The Tragedy of the Moon (1973)
11. Of Matters Great & Small (1975)
12. The Planet that Wasn't (1976)
13. Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)
14. Road to Infinity (1979)
15. The Sun Shines Bright (1981)
16. Counting the Eons (1983)
17. X Stands for Unknown (1984)
18. The Subatomic Monster (1985)
19. Far as Human Eye Could See (1987)
20. The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
21. Out of the Everywhere (1990)
22. The Secret of the Universe (1990)

Other science books by Asimov

• The Chemicals of Life (1954) ISBN 9780451624185
• Inside the Atom (1956) ISBN 978-0-200-71444-0
• Only a Trillion (1957) ISBN 978-0441631216
• Building Blocks of the Universe (1957; revised 1974) ISBN 0200710990 ISBN 978-0200710992
• The World of Carbon (1958) ISBN 978-0020913504
• The World of Nitrogen (1958) ISBN 978-0020914006
• Words of Science and the History Behind Them (1959) ISBN 978-0395065716
• The Clock We Live On (1959) ISBN 978-0200711005
• Asimov on Numbers (1959) ISBN 978-0517371459
• The Wellsprings of Life (1960) ISBN 978-0-451-03245-4
• Life and Energy (1962) ISBN 978-0380009428
• The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation (1963) ISBN 978-0451024305, ISBN 978-0451627070 (revised)
• The Human Brain: Its Capacities and Functions (1963) ISBN 978-0451628671
• Planets for Man (with Stephen H. Dole) (1964, reprinted by RAND 2007) ISBN 978-0-8330-4226-2 [1]
• The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1965)
  • The title varied with each of the four editions, the last being Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984) ISBN 978-0140172133
• The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar (1966) ISBN 9780380015962
• The Neutrino (1966) ASIN B002JK525W
• Is Anyone There? (1967), ISBN 0385084013 – where he used the term Spome
• Photosynthesis (1968) ISBN 978-0465057030
• Our World in Space (1974) ISBN 978-0821204344
• Please Explain (1975) ISBN 978-0440968047
• Asimov On Astronomy (1975) ISBN 978-0517279243
• Asimov On Physics (1976) ISBN 978-0385009584
• The Collapsing Universe (1977), ISBN 0-671-81738-8
• Extraterrestrial Civilizations (1979) ISBN 978-0449900208
• Visions of the Universe with coauthor Kazuaki Iwasaki (1981) ISBN 978-0939540013
• Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos (1982) ISBN 978-0517546673
• Understanding Physics (1988) [1966] ISBN 978-0880292511
  • Vol. I, Motion, Sound, and Heat ISBN 978-0451003294
  • Vol. II, Light, Magnetism, and Electricity ISBN 978-0451619426
  • Vol. III, The Electron, Proton, and Neutron ISBN 978-0451626349
• Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989), second edition adds content thru 1993, ISBN 9780062701138
• Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991) ISBN 9780062700360
• Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space (1991) ISBN 9780449220597
• Atom: Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos (1991) ISBN 9781439509005
• Mysteries of deep space: Quasars, Pulsars and Black Holes (1994) ISBN 9780836811339
• The Moon (2003), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1591021223
• The Sun (2003), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1591021223
• Jupiter (2004), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1591021230
• The Earth (2004), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1591021773
• Venus (2004), revised by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-0-8368-3877-0

Annotations

• Asimov's Annotated "Don Juan"
• Asimov's Annotated "Paradise Lost"
• Asimov's Annotated "Gilbert and Sullivan"
• Asimov's The Annotated "Gulliver's Travels"
• Familiar Poems, Annotated

Guides

• Asimov's Guide to the Bible, vols I and II (1981), ISBN 0-517-34582-X
• Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, vols I and II (1970), ISBN 0-517-26825-6

Autobiography

• In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954, (1979, Doubleday)
• In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978, (1980, Doubleday)
• I. Asimov: A Memoir, (1994, Doubleday)
  • It's Been a Good Life, (2002), condensation of Asimov's three volume biography by his widow, Janet Jeppson Asimov

Other Nonfiction

• Opus 100 (1969), ISBN 0-395-07351-0
• Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (1971)
• The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971), ISBN 0-451-07199-9
• Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1972), ISBN 0-385-17771-2
• Lecherous Limericks (1976), ISBN 0-449-22841-X
• More Lecherous Limericks (1976), ISBN 0-802-77102-5
• Still More Lecherous Limericks (1977), ISBN 0-802-77106-8
• Opus 200 (1979), ISBN 0-395-27625-X
• Our Federal Union (1975), ISBN 0-395-2283-3
• Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), ISBN 0-517-36111-6
• A Grossery of Limericks, with John Ciardi (1981), ISBN 0-393-33112-1
• The Roving Mind (1983) (collection of essays). New edition published by Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-573-92181-5
• Opus 300 (1984), ISBN 0-395-36108-7
• Limericks, Two Gross, with John Ciardi (1985), ISBN 0-393-04530-7
• Asimov Laughs Again (1992)

Selected Books by Dewey Decimal Category

• Hallucination Orbit: Psychology In Science Fiction, (000)
• Asimov's Guide to the Bible, (200)
• Why are the Rain Forests Vanishing?, (300)
• Words from History, (400)
• Realm of Numbers, (500)
• The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation, (600)
• Visions of the Universe, (700)
• The Do-It-Yourself Bestseller: A Workbook, (800)
• The Greeks: A Great Adventure, (900)

Television and film appearances

• "To Tell The Truth", CBS, approximately 1968, playing the "real" Isaac Asimov. Only one panel member guessed correctly, on the grounds that Asimov wore glasses and somebody writing so many books would have to wear glasses.
• The Nature of Things 1969
• "ABC News" coverage of Apollo 11, 1969, with Fred Pohl, interviewed by Rod Serling
• "David Frost" interview program, August 1969. This is the show in which Frost asked Asimov if he had ever tried to find God and, after some initial evasion, Asimov answered, "God is much more intelligent than I—let him try to find me."
• The Dick Cavett Show 1970
• Target... Earth? 1980
• NBC TV, 1982 "Speaking Freely" interviewed by Edwin Newman 1982
• ARTS Network talk show hosted by Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin, approximately 1982. Other guests included Harlan Ellison and James Gunn.
• Oltre New York 1986
• Voyage to the Outer Planets and Beyond 1986
• Bill Moyers interview 1988^[65]
• Stranieri in America 1988

References

Sources

External links

• Isaac Asimov Home Page
• Isaac Asimov Wikia Page that contains overview to some of his books
• Isaac Asimov at the Internet Book Database of Fiction {Work in Progress}
• Isaac Asimov at the Internet Movie Database
• Isaac Asimov at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Works by or about Isaac Asimov in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Isaac Asimov on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• Real-life robots obey Asimov's laws
• Isaac Asimov: A Prolific and Polymathic American Writer
• Isaac Asimov was Born 90 Years Ago Today by The Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2010
• P.S. 99: The Isaac Asimov School for Science and Literature
• Frederik Pohl on Asimov
• Isaac Asimov biography at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame

By Isaac Asimov

• 15-Book Reading Order as Suggested by Asimov From "Author's Note" of "Prelude to Foundation" Doubleday 1988 hardcover edition
• Works by Isaac Asimov at Project Gutenberg (one work, the 1952 short story "Youth")