World Season Calendar

yi, יצחק אזימאװ
, birth_date =
, birth_place = Petrovichi, Russian SFSR
, spouse =
, relatives =
, children = 2
, death_date =
, death_place = Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
, nationality = Russian (1920–1922)
Soviet (1922–1928)
American (1928–1992)
, occupation = Writer, professor of biochemistry
, years_active = 1939–1992
, genre = Science fiction ( hard SF, social SF), mystery, popular science
, subject = Popular science, science textbooks, essays, history, literary criticism
, education = Columbia University ( BA, MA, PhD)
, movement = Golden Age of Science Fiction
, module =
, signature = Isaac Asimov signature.svg

Isaac Asimov ( ; 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction.

Asimov's most famous work is the ''Foundation'' series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the ''Galactic Empire'' series and the ''Robot'' series. The ''Galactic Empire'' novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the ''Foundation'' series. Later, with '' Foundation and Earth'' (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories. He also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette " Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the '' Lucky Starr'' series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include '' Guide to Science'', the three-volume '' Understanding Physics'', and ''Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery''. He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism.

He was president of the American Humanist Association. Several entities have been named in his honor, including the asteroid (5020) Asimov,Minor Planet Center
(retrieved October 22, 2017). a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards.

Surname

Asimov's family name derives from the first part of (), meaning ' winter grain' (specifically rye) in which his great-great-great-grandfather dealt, with the Russian patronymic ending ''-ov'' added. Azimov is spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet. When the family arrived in the United States in 1923 and their name had to be spelled in the Latin alphabet, Asimov's father spelled it with an S, believing this letter to be pronounced like Z (as in German), and so it became Asimov. This later inspired one of Asimov's short stories, "Spell My Name with an S".

Asimov refused early suggestions of using a more common name as a pseudonym, and believed that its recognizability helped his career. After becoming famous, he often met readers who believed that "Isaac Asimov" was a distinctive pseudonym created by an author with a common name.

Life

Early life

Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, on an unknown date between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920, inclusive. Asimov celebrated his birthday on January 2.

Asimov's parents were Anna Rachel (née Berman) and Judah Asimov, a family of Russian Jewish millers. He was named Isaac after his mother's father, Isaac Berman. Asimov wrote of his father, "My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart", noting that "he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me".

In 1921, Asimov and 16 other children in Petrovichi developed double pneumonia. Only Asimov survived. He later had two younger siblings: a sister, Marcia (born Manya; June 17, 1922 – April 2, 2011), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929 – August 16, 1995), who was vice-president of the '' Long Island Newsday''.

Asimov's family travelled to the United States via Liverpool on the RMS ''Baltic'', arriving on February 3, 1923 when he was three years old. His parents spoke Yiddish and English with him, and he remained fluent in those; he never learned Russian. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five (and later taught his sister to read as well, enabling her to enter school in the second grade). His mother got him into first grade a year early by claiming he was born on September 7, 1919. In third grade he learned about the "error" and insisted on an official correction of the date to January 2. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1928 at the age of eight.

After becoming established in the U.S., his parents owned a succession of candy stores in which everyone in the family was expected to work. The candy stores sold newspapers and magazines, which Asimov credited as a major influence in his lifelong love of the written word, as it presented him with an unending supply of new reading material (including pulp science fiction magazines) as a child that he could not have otherwise afforded. Asimov began reading science fiction at age nine, at the time that the genre was becoming more science-centered. Asimov was also a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library during his formative years.

Education and career

Asimov attended New York City public schools from age five, including Boys High School in Brooklyn. Graduating at 15, he attended the City College of New York for several days before accepting a scholarship at Seth Low Junior College. This was a branch of Columbia University in Downtown Brooklyn designed to absorb some of the academically qualified Jewish and Italian-American students who applied to the more prestigious Columbia College, but exceeded the unwritten ethnic admission quotas which were common at the time. Originally a zoology major, Asimov switched to chemistry after his first semester because he disapproved of "dissecting an alley cat". After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1936, Asimov finished his Bachelor of Science degree at Columbia's Morningside Heights campus (later the Columbia University School of General Studies) in 1939.

After two rounds of rejections by medical schools, Asimov applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia in 1939; initially he was rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis, he completed his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948.Asimov, I. (1969) ''Opus 100'', Dell, pp. 143–144. During his chemistry studies, he also learned French and German.

In between earning these two degrees, Asimov spent three years during World War II working as a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station, living in the Walnut Hill section of West Philadelphia from 1942 to 1945. In September 1945, he was drafted into the post-war U.S. Army; if he had not had his birth date corrected while at school, he would have been officially 26 years old and ineligible. In 1946, a bureaucratic error caused his military allotment to be stopped, and he was removed from a task force days before it sailed to participate in Operation Crossroads nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. He served for almost nine months before receiving an honorable discharge on July 26, 1946. He had been promoted to corporal on July 11.

After completing his doctorate and a postdoc year with Dr. Robert Elderfield, Asimov was offered the position of associate professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine. This was in large part due to his years-long correspondence with Dr. William Boyd, a former associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University, who first reached out to compliment Asimov on his story '' Nightfall''. Upon receiving a promotion to professor of immunochemistry, Boyd reached out to Asimov, requesting him to be his replacement.Asimov, Isaac. ''In Memory Yet Green''. p. 546. Unfortunately, the initial offer of professorship was withdrawn and Asimov was offered the position of instructor of biochemistry instead, which he accepted. He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary (), maintaining this position for several years.Isaac Asimov Interview with Don Swaim
(1987) By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students. In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, because he had stopped doing research. After a struggle which lasted for two years, he kept his title, he gave the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class, and on October 18, 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 Gotlieb.

In 1959, after a recommendation from Arthur Obermayer, Asimov's friend and a scientist on the U.S. missile defense project, Asimov was approached by DARPA to join Obermayer's team. Asimov declined on the grounds that his ability to write freely would be impaired should he receive classified information, but submitted a paper to DARPA titled "On Creativity" containing ideas on how government-based science projects could encourage team members to think more creatively.

Personal life

Asimov met his first wife, Gertrude Blugerman (1917, Toronto, Canada – 1990, Boston, U.S.), on a blind date on February 14, 1942, and married her on July 26. The couple lived in an apartment in West Philadelphia while Asimov was employed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (where two of his co-workers were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein). Gertrude returned to Brooklyn while he was in the army, and they both lived there from July 1946 before moving to Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan, in July 1948. They moved to Boston in May 1949, then to nearby suburbs Somerville in July 1949, Waltham in May 1951, and, finally, West Newton in 1956. They had two children, David (born 1951) and Robyn Joan (born 1955). In 1970, they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he lived for the rest of his life. He began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, a psychiatrist and science-fiction writer, and married her on November 30, 1973, two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude.

Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. 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.

Asimov was afraid of flying, doing so only twice: once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station and once returning home from Oahu in 1946. Consequently, he seldom traveled great distances. 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, Asimov found enjoyment traveling on cruise ships, beginning in 1972 when he viewed the Apollo 17 launch from a cruise ship. On several cruises, he was part of the entertainment program, giving science-themed talks aboard ships such as the ''Queen Elizabeth 2''. He sailed to England in June 1974 on the for a trip mostly devoted to lectures in London and Birmingham, though he also found time to visit Stonehenge.

Asimov was an able public speaker and was regularly hired to give talks about science. He was a frequent participant at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. 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—in his later years—"mutton-chop" sideburns, and a distinct New York accent. He took to wearing bolo ties after his wife Janet objected to his clip-on bow ties. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle, but learned to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book ''Asimov Laughs Again'', he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".

Asimov's wide interests included his participation in his later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and in The Wolfe Pack, a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan. He was a prominent member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society, for whom he wrote an essay arguing that Professor Moriarty's work "The Dynamics of An Asteroid" involved the willful destruction of an ancient, civilized planet. He was also a member of the male-only literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers.Asimov, Isaac. ''I. Asimov, a Memoir'', New York, Doubleday, 1994, pp. 376–377. He later used his essay on Moriarty's work as the basis for a Black Widowers story, "The Ultimate Crime", which appeared in ''More Tales of the Black Widowers''.

In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. 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 as "special science consultant" on '' Star Trek: The Motion Picture'' for advice he gave during production.

Asimov was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and is listed in its Pantheon of Skeptics. In a discussion with James Randi at CSICon 2016 regarding the founding of CSICOP, Kendrick Frazier said that Asimov was "a key figure in the Skeptical movement who is less well known and appreciated today, but was very much in the public eye back then." He said that Asimov being associated with CSICOP "gave it immense status and authority" in his eyes.

Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. 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".

After his father died in 1969, Asimov annually contributed to a Judah Asimov Scholarship Fund at Brandeis University.

Illness and death

In 1977, Asimov suffered a heart attack. In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.

He died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, and was cremated. The cause of death was reported as heart and kidney failure. Ten years following Asimov's death, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public; Janet revealed it in her edition of his autobiography, '' It's Been a Good Life''."Widow reveals Isaac Asimov died from Aids", ''The Sunday Times'', March 17, 2002.

Writings

Overview

Asimov's career can be divided into several 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'' (1957). He began publishing nonfiction as co-author of 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, he wrote more nonfiction, particularly popular science books, and less science fiction. Over the next quarter-century, he wrote only four science fiction novels, and 120 nonfiction books.

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 many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories. Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin published about 60% of his work as of 1969, Asimov stating that "both represent a father image".

Asimov believed his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the ''Foundation'' series. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' credits his science fiction for introducing into the English language the words "robotics", "positronic" (an entirely fictional technology), and " psychohistory" (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations). 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" and the first-season episode "Datalore" called the positronic brain "Asimov's dream".

Asimov was so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology. He wrote several essays about psychology, and forewords for the books ''The Humanist Way'' (1988) and ''In Pursuit of Truth'' (1982), which were classified in the 100s category, but none of his own books were classified in that category.

According to UNESCO's ''Index Translationum database'', Asimov is the world's 24th-most-translated author.

Science fiction

Asimov became a science fiction fan in 1929, when he began reading the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store. At first his father forbade reading pulps until Asimov persuaded him that because the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, they must be educational. At age 18 he joined the Futurians science fiction fan club, where he made friends who went on to become science fiction writers or editors.

Asimov began writing at the age of 11, imitating ''The Rover Boys'' with eight chapters of ''The Greenville Chums at College''. His father bought him a used typewriter at age 16. His first published work was a humorous item on the birth of his brother for Boys High School's literary journal in 1934. In May 1937 he first thought of writing professionally, and began writing his first science fiction story, "Cosmic Corkscrew" (now lost), that year. On May 17, 1938, puzzled by a change in the schedule of ''Astounding Science Fiction'', Asimov visited its publisher Street & Smith Publications. Inspired by the visit, he finished the story on June 19, 1938, and personally submitted it to ''Astounding'' editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell met with Asimov for more than an hour and promised to read the story himself. Two days later he received a detailed rejection letter. This was the first of what became almost weekly meetings with the editor while Asimov lived in New York, until moving to Boston in 1949; Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and became a personal friend.

By the end of the month, Asimov completed a second story, "Stowaway". Campbell rejected it on July 22 but—in "the nicest possible letter you could imagine"—encouraged him to continue writing, promising that Asimov might sell his work after another year and a dozen stories of practice. On October 21, 1938, he sold the third story he finished, " Marooned Off Vesta", to ''Amazing Stories'', edited by Raymond A. Palmer, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. Asimov was paid $64 (), or one cent a word. Two more stories appeared that year, "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use" in the May ''Amazing'' and " Trends" in the July ''Astounding'', the issue fans later selected as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. For 1940, ISFDB catalogs seven stories in four different pulp magazines, including one in ''Astounding''. His earnings became enough to pay for his education, but not yet enough for him to become a full-time writer.

Asimov later said that unlike other Golden Age writers Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt—also first published in 1939, and whose talent and stardom were immediately obvious—he "(this is not false modesty) came up only gradually". Through July 29, 1940, Asimov wrote 22 stories in 25 months, of which 13 were published; he wrote in 1972 that from that date he never wrote a science fiction story that was not published (except for two "special cases"). By 1941 Asimov was famous enough that Donald Wollheim told him that he purchased " The Secret Sense" for a new magazine only because of his name, and the December 1940 issue of ''Astonishing''—featuring Asimov's name in bold—was the first magazine to base cover art on his work, but Asimov later said that neither he nor anyone else—except perhaps Campbell—considered him better than an often published "third rater".

Based on a conversation with Campbell, Asimov wrote " Nightfall", his 32nd story, in March and April 1941, and ''Astounding'' published it in September 1941. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written. In ''Nightfall and Other Stories'' Asimov 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 he created to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including him and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.

After writing "Victory Unintentional" in January and February 1942, Asimov did not write another story for a year. Asimov expected to make chemistry his career, and was paid $2,600 annually at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, enough to marry his girlfriend; he did not expect to make much more from writing than the $1,788.50 he had earned from 28 stories sold over four years. Asimov left science fiction fandom and no longer read new magazines, and might have left the industry had not Heinlein and de Camp been coworkers and previously sold stories continued to appear. In 1942, Asimov published the first of his ''Foundation'' stories—later collected in the ''Foundation'' trilogy: ''Foundation'' (1951), ''Foundation and Empire'' (1952), and '' Second Foundation'' (1953). The books describe the fall of a vast interstellar empire and the establishment of its eventual successor. They also feature his fictional science of psychohistory, in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted.

The trilogy and ''Robot'' series are his most famous science fiction. In 1966 they won the Hugo Award for the all-time best series of science fiction and fantasy novels. Campbell raised his rate per word, Orson Welles purchased rights to "Evidence", and anthologies reprinted his stories. By the end of the war Asimov was earning as a writer an amount equal to half of his Navy Yard salary, even after a raise, but Asimov still did not believe that writing could support him, his wife, and future children.

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 his introduction to the short story collection ''The Complete Robot'' (1982) that he was largely inspired by the tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creators.

The ''Robot'' series has led to film adaptations. With Asimov's collaboration, in about 1977, Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay of ''I, Robot'' that Asimov hoped would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction film ever made". The screenplay has never been filmed and was eventually published in book form in 1994. The 2004 movie ''I, Robot'', starring Will Smith, was based on an unrelated script by Jeff Vintar titled ''Hardwired'', with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after the rights to Asimov's title were acquired. (The title was not original to Asimov but had previously been used for a story by Eando Binder.) Also, one of Asimov's robot short stories, "The Bicentennial Man", was expanded into a novel ''The Positronic Man'' by Asimov and Robert Silverberg, and this was adapted into the 1999 movie '' Bicentennial Man'', starring Robin Williams.

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, David Brin

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