<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992) was a popular and prolific writer of both science fiction and science fact.

Life

He was born in Russia, but his parents fled the poverty and pogroms of their native land when he was three years old. They lived in Brooklyn, and the whole family worked in their candy store. Isaac loved to read and grew up fluent in both English and Yiddish.

He began selling science fiction stories to the pulps in his teens. He attended Columbia University, graduating in 1939. During World War II he worked at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station, with fellow sf writers Robert A. Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp. After a brief hitch as a military draftee in 1946 he returned to Columbia, earning a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1948. He then joined the faculty of Boston University, where he remained a tenured member for life, though he stopped actually teaching in the 1950s. He wrote science fiction through the mid-50s, but he was developing an even more successful career as a science popularizer and explainer. He wound up writing several hundred books, covering every area in the Dewey Decimal System except philosophy.

He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942; they had two children, then divorced in 1973 after a lengthy separation, whereupon he married Dr. Janet Jeppson, to whom he remained married for the remainder of his life. He died in 1992 of AIDS, contracted from a transfusion.

Work

Asimov is best known for two series: the Foundation stories and the Robot series. The former appeared in serial form in Astounding, then as the books Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). They tell of the fall of a galactic empire; of Hari Seldon, who invented a social science, psychohistory, that enabled him to foresee that fall and mitigate it; and of how his followers used his methods to rule the galaxy in better ways. In a genre where might so often makes right, they offered a scenario in which victory goes to the side with the best map of the situation.

The Robot series was based on the concept of positronic (a term he invented) robots that are programmed to protect humans, to follow orders, and to protect themselves, in that order. The fix-up I, Robot (1950) sketched the history of their development, some of it through the work of the scientist Susan Calvin, one of the smartest and strongest female characters to appear in the science fiction of those days. Three later robot novels, The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), and The Robots of Dawn (1983) pair up the human detective Elijah Baley with the robot R. Daneel Olivaw. They are among the first combined science fiction/detective novels. It had been feared that the two genres would not work together because it would be too easy for the author to bring a futuristic novum to explain the mystery, but Asimov, like others after him, was able to avoid that temptation.

After years of writing almost nothing but nonfiction, Asimov returned in 1982, with Foundation's Edge, a sequel to the Foundation trilogy. This was the beginning of a project to combine the Foundation and Robot stories into a single future; Robots and Empire (1985), as might be guessed from its title, bridged the two series and explained away apparent contradictions.

Along with the series, Asimov has written well-known stories: "Nightfall" (1941), the tale of a world with so many suns that darkness is a feared rarity, was retroactively voted the best science fiction story ever when SFWA was putting together the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology. "The Last Question" (1956), the tale of what happens when someone asks the world computer if entropy can be reversed, is what critic Michael Moorcock has called a "shaggy-god story." It is a story known to many people who don't realize that it was a story written by an author.

Asimov won the Hugo Award six times: The Foundation Trilogy won a special all-time best series award, in 1966, beating out The Lord of the Rings, which was then less well known. The Gods Themselves(1973) and Foundation's Edge (1983) won the Best Novel award. "The Bicentennial Man" (1977) and "Gold" (1992) were voted Best Novelette, and the memoir I, Asimov was chosen as Best Related Work in 1995.