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Search - List of Books by Isaac Asimov
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov ( ; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, ; c. January 2, 1920 – 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 9,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (The sole exception being the 100s: philosophy and psychology, although he did write a foreword for The Humanist way, which is published in the 100s).
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.Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; 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. He penned numerous 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, an accolade that many still find persuasive. 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, of course, 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." He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and one Isaac Asimov literary award are named in his honor.
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.Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; 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. He penned numerous 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, an accolade that many still find persuasive. 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, of course, 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." He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and one Isaac Asimov literary award are named in his honor.
Quotes more » « less
"A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.""All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.""And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.""Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.""Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.""From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.""He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.""Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.""I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.""I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.""I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.""I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.""I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.""If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.""If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.""Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.""It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.""It is not only the living who are killed in war.""It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.""It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.""John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.""Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.""Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.""Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.""No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.""Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.""People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.""Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.""Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.""Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.""The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'""The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.""The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.""There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.""Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.""To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.""Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.""When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.""Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
Biography more » « less
Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (during the Soviet times the settlement briefly belonged to Mahiljow guberniya of the Russian SFSR, then it was transferred to Smolensk Oblast of the RSFSR, now Russia
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, 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:
In December 1974, the 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").
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). 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."
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 several 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.
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.
Later, in The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, a robot develops what he calls the Zeroth Law of Robotics, which states that: "A robot may not injure humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm". He also decides that robotic presence is stifling humanity's freedom, and that the best course of action is for the robots to phase themselves out. A non-robot, time travel novel, The End of Eternity, features a similar conflict and resolution. The significance of the Zeroth Law is that it outweighs and supersedes all other Laws of Robotics: if a robot finds himself in a situation whereby he must murder one or more humans (a direct violation of the First Law of Robotics) in order to protect all of humanity (and preserve the Zeroth Law), then the robot's positronic programming will require him to commit murder for humanity's sake. Only highly advanced robots (such as Daneel and Giskard) could comprehend this law.
In The Foundation Series (which did not originally have robots), a scientist implements a semi-secret plan to create a new galactic empire over the course of 1,000 years. This series has its version of Platonic guardians, called the Second Foundation, to perfect and protect the plan. When Asimov stopped writing the series in the 1950s, the Second Foundation was depicted as benign protectors of humanity. When he revisited the series in the 1980s, he made the caretaker themes even more explicit.
Foundation's Edge introduced the planet Gaia, obviously based on the Gaia hypothesis. Every animal, plant, and mineral on Gaia participated in a shared consciousness, forming a single super-mind working together for the greater good. In Foundation and Earth, the protagonist starts searching for the Earth, thinking that there he could find the answer of why he decided, in Foundation's Edge, that Galaxia was the right choice to take. Gaia is one of Asimov's best attempts at exploring the possibility of a collective awareness, and is compounded further in Nemesis, in which the planet Erythro composed primarily of prokaryotic life has a mind of its own and seeks communion with human beings.
Foundation and Earth introduces robots to the Foundation universe. Two of Asimov's last novels, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, explore their behavior in fuller detail. The robots are depicted as covert operatives, acting for the benefit of humanity.
Another frequent theme is social oppression. The Currents of Space takes place on a planet where a unique plant fiber is grown; the agricultural workers there are exploited by the aristocrats of a nearby planet. In The Stars, Like Dust, the hero helps a planet that is oppressed by an arrogant interplanetary empire, the Tyranni.
Often the victims of oppression are either Earth people (as opposed to colonists on other planets) or robots. In "The Bicentennial Man", a robot fights prejudice to be accepted as a human. In The Caves of Steel, the people of Earth resent the wealthier "Spacers" and in turn treat robots (associated with the Spacers) in ways reminiscent of how whites treated blacks, such as addressing robots as "boy". Pebble in the Sky shows an analogous situation: the Galactic Empire rules Earth and its people use such terms as "Earthie-squaw", but Earth is a theocratic dictatorship that enforces euthanasia of anyone older than 60. One hero is Bel Arvardan, an upper-class Galactic archaeologist who must overcome his prejudices. The other is Joseph Schwartz, a 62-year-old 20th century American who had emigrated from Europe, where his people were persecuted (he is quite possibly Jewish), and is accidentally transported forward in time to Arvardan's period. He must decide whether to help a downtrodden society that thinks he should be dead.
Yet another frequent theme in Asimov is rational thought. He invented the science-fiction mystery with the novel The Caves of Steel and the stories in Asimov's Mysteries, usually playing fair with the reader by introducing early in the story any science or technology involved in the solution. Later, he produced non-SF mysteries, including the novel Murder at the ABA (1976) and the "Black Widowers" and "Union Club" short stories, in which he followed the same rule. In his fiction, important scenes are often essentially debates, with the more rational, humane...or persuasive...side winning.
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, 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, the 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). 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 Spome in a paper entitled, “There’s No Place Like Spome” in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments, 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.Asimov also coined the term Robotics in his 1942 story Runaround.Other writing
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 several 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.
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.
Literary themes
Much of Asimov's fiction dealt with the relationship between robot and humans and the effect upon both parties, though most particularly humans. His first robot story, "Robbie", concerned a robotic nanny. "Lenny" deals with the capacity of robopsychologist Susan Calvin to feel maternal love towards a robot whose positronic brain capacities are those of a 3-year-old. As the robots grew more sophisticated, their interventions became more wide-reaching and subtle. In "Evidence", the story revolves around a candidate who successfully runs for office who may be a robot masquerading as a human. In "The Evitable Conflict", the robots run humanity from behind the scenes, acting as nannies to the whole species.Later, in The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, a robot develops what he calls the Zeroth Law of Robotics, which states that: "A robot may not injure humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm". He also decides that robotic presence is stifling humanity's freedom, and that the best course of action is for the robots to phase themselves out. A non-robot, time travel novel, The End of Eternity, features a similar conflict and resolution. The significance of the Zeroth Law is that it outweighs and supersedes all other Laws of Robotics: if a robot finds himself in a situation whereby he must murder one or more humans (a direct violation of the First Law of Robotics) in order to protect all of humanity (and preserve the Zeroth Law), then the robot's positronic programming will require him to commit murder for humanity's sake. Only highly advanced robots (such as Daneel and Giskard) could comprehend this law.
In The Foundation Series (which did not originally have robots), a scientist implements a semi-secret plan to create a new galactic empire over the course of 1,000 years. This series has its version of Platonic guardians, called the Second Foundation, to perfect and protect the plan. When Asimov stopped writing the series in the 1950s, the Second Foundation was depicted as benign protectors of humanity. When he revisited the series in the 1980s, he made the caretaker themes even more explicit.
Foundation's Edge introduced the planet Gaia, obviously based on the Gaia hypothesis. Every animal, plant, and mineral on Gaia participated in a shared consciousness, forming a single super-mind working together for the greater good. In Foundation and Earth, the protagonist starts searching for the Earth, thinking that there he could find the answer of why he decided, in Foundation's Edge, that Galaxia was the right choice to take. Gaia is one of Asimov's best attempts at exploring the possibility of a collective awareness, and is compounded further in Nemesis, in which the planet Erythro composed primarily of prokaryotic life has a mind of its own and seeks communion with human beings.
Foundation and Earth introduces robots to the Foundation universe. Two of Asimov's last novels, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, explore their behavior in fuller detail. The robots are depicted as covert operatives, acting for the benefit of humanity.
Another frequent theme is social oppression. The Currents of Space takes place on a planet where a unique plant fiber is grown; the agricultural workers there are exploited by the aristocrats of a nearby planet. In The Stars, Like Dust, the hero helps a planet that is oppressed by an arrogant interplanetary empire, the Tyranni.
Often the victims of oppression are either Earth people (as opposed to colonists on other planets) or robots. In "The Bicentennial Man", a robot fights prejudice to be accepted as a human. In The Caves of Steel, the people of Earth resent the wealthier "Spacers" and in turn treat robots (associated with the Spacers) in ways reminiscent of how whites treated blacks, such as addressing robots as "boy". Pebble in the Sky shows an analogous situation: the Galactic Empire rules Earth and its people use such terms as "Earthie-squaw", but Earth is a theocratic dictatorship that enforces euthanasia of anyone older than 60. One hero is Bel Arvardan, an upper-class Galactic archaeologist who must overcome his prejudices. The other is Joseph Schwartz, a 62-year-old 20th century American who had emigrated from Europe, where his people were persecuted (he is quite possibly Jewish), and is accidentally transported forward in time to Arvardan's period. He must decide whether to help a downtrodden society that thinks he should be dead.
Yet another frequent theme in Asimov is rational thought. He invented the science-fiction mystery with the novel The Caves of Steel and the stories in Asimov's Mysteries, usually playing fair with the reader by introducing early in the story any science or technology involved in the solution. Later, he produced non-SF mysteries, including the novel Murder at the ABA (1976) and the "Black Widowers" and "Union Club" short stories, in which he followed the same rule. In his fiction, important scenes are often essentially debates, with the more rational, humane...or persuasive...side winning.
Awards
- 1957Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award, for Building Blocks of the Universe
- 1960Howard W. Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association for The Living River
- 1962Boston University's Publication Merit Award
- 1963special Hugo Award for "adding science to science fiction" for essays published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
- 1965James T. Grady Award of the American Chemical Society (now called the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry)
- 1966Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award for the Foundation series
- 1967Westinghouse Science Writing Award
- 1972Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Gods Themselves
- 1973Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Gods Themselves
- 1973Locus award for Best Science Fiction Novel for The Gods Themselves
- 1977Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Bicentennial Man
- 1977Nebula Award for Best Novelette for The Bicentennial Man
- 1981An asteroid, 5020 Asimov, was named in his honor
- 1983Hugo Award for Best Novel for Foundation's Edge
- 1983Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for Foundation's Edge
- 1987Nebula Grand Master award, a lifetime achievement award
- 1992Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Gold
- 1995Hugo Award for Best Nonfiction for I. Asimov: A Memoir
- 1996A 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
- 1997Posthumous induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
- 2009A crater on the planet Mars, Asimov, was named in his honor
- 14 honorary doctorate degrees from various universities
Writing Style more » « less
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:
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:
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:
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 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. (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 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.
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:
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 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. (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 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.
Alien Life more » « less
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. Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves, the part which deals with those themes.
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.
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 more » « less
Others have criticized him for a lack of strong female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings he acknowledges this, and responds by pointing to inexperience. His later novels, written with more female characters but in essentially the same prose style as his early SF stories, brought this matter to a wider audience. For example, the August 25, 1985 Washington Post's "Book World" section reports of Robots and Empire as follows:
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.
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.
Influence of Asimov on Others more » « less
John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed:
From its inception in 1961, the German pulp booklet space opera Perry Rhodan borrowed two of Asimov's central concepts...positronic brains and starship drives for near-instantaneous hyperspatial translation.
The comic book Magnus, Robot Fighter quoted Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics on the first page of the first issue. However, these laws were broken more often than not in the series.
The Three Laws of Robotics are also the main theme of a recent anime, The Time of Eve. The androids are in common use and respect the laws, but on the other hand seek independence within them, which is not acknowledged by humans.
The 2009 Astro Boy also mentions the Laws of Robotics. Although Asimov's name is not mentioned, the First Law is quoted, slightly paraphrased. One robot was built before the Laws were implemented, another has been reprogrammed without the Laws, but most robots very faithfully obey the Laws.
Star Trek - The Next Generation, in the episode "Datalore," gave credit to Asimov for conceiving the positronic brain, indispensable for androids.
A 2008 survival horror video game Dead Space' main protagonist Isaac Clarke, named after Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.
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.
From its inception in 1961, the German pulp booklet space opera Perry Rhodan borrowed two of Asimov's central concepts...positronic brains and starship drives for near-instantaneous hyperspatial translation.
The comic book Magnus, Robot Fighter quoted Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics on the first page of the first issue. However, these laws were broken more often than not in the series.
The Three Laws of Robotics are also the main theme of a recent anime, The Time of Eve. The androids are in common use and respect the laws, but on the other hand seek independence within them, which is not acknowledged by humans.
The 2009 Astro Boy also mentions the Laws of Robotics. Although Asimov's name is not mentioned, the First Law is quoted, slightly paraphrased. One robot was built before the Laws were implemented, another has been reprogrammed without the Laws, but most robots very faithfully obey the Laws.
Star Trek - The Next Generation, in the episode "Datalore," gave credit to Asimov for conceiving the positronic brain, indispensable for androids.
A 2008 survival horror video game Dead Space' main protagonist Isaac Clarke, named after Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.
Asimov and Tolkien more » « less
In his letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had previously interviewed him for Daily Telegraph Magazine, J.R.R. Tolkien said that he enjoyed the science fiction of Asimov. Asimov stated, both in his autobiography and in several essays, that he enjoyed the writings of Tolkien. He paid tribute to The Lord of the Rings in a "Black Widowers" story.
Selected Bibliography more » « less
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 across all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for Philosophy.
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.
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. You can view it here: WVU Libraries Asimov Collection.
For a listing of Asimov's books in chronological order within his future history, see the Foundation Series list of books.
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.
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. You can view it here: WVU Libraries Asimov Collection.
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")
- Further Extended Foundation series ... Second Foundation trilogy:
- [With approval of the Estate of Isaac Asimov]:
- Foundation's Fear (1997), ISBN 0-06-105243-4 hardcover (by Gregory Benford)
- Foundation and Chaos (1998), ISBN 0-06-105242-6 hardcover (by Greg Bear)
- Foundation's Triumph (1999), ISBN 0-06-105241-8 hardcover (by David Brin)
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)
- 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 essaysoriginally published as monthly columns in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction- Fact and Fancy (1962)
- View from a Height (1963)
- Adding a Dimension (1964)
- Of Time, Space, & Other Things (1965)
- From Earth to Heaven (1966)
- Science, Numbers and I (1968)
- The Solar System and Back (1970)
- The Stars in Their Courses (1971)
- The Left Hand of the Electron (1972)
- The Tragedy of the Moon (1973)
- Of Matters Great & Small (1975)
- The Planet that Wasn't (1976)
- Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)
- Road to Infinity (1979)
- The Sun Shines Bright (1981)
- Counting the Eons (1983)
- X Stands for Unknown (1984)
- The Subatomic Monster (1985)
- Far as Human Eye Could See (1987)
- The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
- Out of the Everywhere (1990)
- The Secret of the Universe (1990)
- The Chemicals of Life (1954)
- Inside the Atom (1956)
- Only a Trillion (1957)
- The World of Carbon (1958)
- The World of Nitrogen (1958)
- Words of Science and the History Behind Them (1959)
- The Clock We Live On (1959)
- Asimov on Numbers (1959)
- The Wellsprings of Life (1960)
- Life and Energy (1962)
- Its Structure and Operation (1963)
- The Human Brain (1964)
- 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)
- Planets for Man (with Stephen H. Dole)
- From Flat Earth to Quasar (1966)
- The Neutrino (1966)
- Is Anyone There? (1967), ISBN 0385084013 - where he used the term Spome
- Photosynthesis (1968)
- Our World in Space (1974)
- Please Explain (1975)
- Asimov On Astronomy (1975)
- Asimov On Physics (1976)
- The Collapsing Universe (1977), ISBN 0-671-81738-8
- Extraterrestrial Civilizations (1979)
- Visions of the Universe with coauthor Kazuaki Iwasaki (1981)
- Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos (1982)
- Understanding Physics (1988) [1966]
- Vol. I, Motion, Sound, and Heat
- Vol. II, Light, Magnetism, and Electricity
- Vol. III, The Electron, Proton, and Neutron
- Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989), second edition adds content thru 1993
- Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991)
- Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space (1991)
- Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos (1991)
- Quasars, Pulsars and Black Holes (1992)
- The Sun (2003), revised by Richard Hantula
- Jupiter (2004), revised by Richard Hantula
- The Earth (2004), revised by Richard Hantula
- Venus (2004), revised by Richard Hantula
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, (1979, Doubleday)
- In Joy Still Felt, (1980, Doubleday)
- I. Asimov: A Memoir, (1994, Doubleday)
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 more » « less
- Stranieri in America 1988
- Oltre New York 1986
- Voyage to the Outer Planets and Beyond 1986
- NBC TV, 1982 "Speaking Freely" interviewed by Edwin Newman 1982
- Target... Earth? 1980
- The Dick Cavett Show 1970
- The Nature of Things 1969
- "ABC News" coverage of Apollo 11, 1969, with Fred Pohl, interviewed by Rod Serling
- "To Tell The Truth", CBS, approximately 1968, playing the "real" Isaac Asimov.
- ARTS Network talk show hosted by Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin, approximately 1982. Other guests included Harlan Ellison and James Gunn.
- "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."
- Bill Moyers interview 1988
Sources more » « less
- Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green (1979, ISBN 0-380-75432-0).
- In Joy Still Felt (1980, ISBN 0-380-53025-2).
- I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994). ISBN 0-385-41701-2 (hc), ISBN 0-553-56997-X (pb).
- Yours, Isaac Asimov (1996), edited by Stanley Asimov. ISBN 0-385-47624-8.
- It's Been a Good Life (2002), edited by Janet Asimov. ISBN 1-57392-968-9.
- Goldman, Stephen H., "Isaac Asimov", in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 8, Cowart and Wymer eds., (Gale Research, 1981), pp. 15—29.
- Gunn, James. "On Variations on a Robot", IASFM, July 1980, pp. 56—81.
- Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982). ISBN 0-19-503060-5.
- The Science of Science-Fiction Writing (2000). ISBN 1-57886-011-3.
This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Isaac Asimov", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
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