THE ETHICIST
Isaac Asimov's prolific output of both fiction and nonfiction was exceeded only by his wide range of interests and boundless curiosity. More than a writing machine, he was an art lover and a critic with a close affinity for the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, whose works popped up in many of his short stories. He also belonged to The Wolfe Pack, a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. His life as a scientific investigator was never more evident than in his appreciation for another popular sleuth of the day—Sherlock Holmes—and Asimov was a devoted member of The Baker Street Irregulars. He once penned an essay on Professor Moriarty's dastardly deeds.
Asimov was also a member of the all-male literary banqueting club, the Trap Door Spiders. The group served as the impetus for his fictional sleuths, the Black Widowers. 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.
Anxious to give back to a world that had been so fortuitous for him, Asimov joined the American Humanist Association (AHA), which in turn honored him in 1984 as Humanist of the Year. The award was in significant part not only for his humanistic traits but also for those he imbedded in many of the characters—both humanoid and otherwise—who inhabited his fictional worlds. One of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto, Asimov served as the group's honorary president from 1985 until his death in 1992. His successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. Asimov was also a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, with whom he stayed in close touch through the years, even garnering film credit as a "special science consultant" on Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Together with Carl Sagan, Asimov was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), providing the “glue” that lent it "immense status and authority" for investigating popular paranormal claims and dispensing superstition and fallacy. As the author once said, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
Although astutely brilliant, Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of two people he felt was his intellectual superior. The other was computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. Nice company. Asimov was a long-time member and vice president of Mensa International, although he never flaunted his membership, claiming some members were "brain-proud and aggressive" about their intellect.
Upon his father's death in 1969, Asimov founded and funded the Judah Asimov Scholarship Fund at Brandeis University, awarding needy students from New York State funds to help with their college education.
A true writer's writer, Asimov said in 1969, "The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes."
In reality, 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. Even there, however, he wrote several essays about psychology, along with forewords for the books The Humanist Way (1988) and In Pursuit of Truth.
According to UNESCO's Index Translationum database, Asimov is the world's 24th-most-translated author. His prolific output took a back seat to his deep-rooted belief in his fellow human beings, though, for whom he worked tirelessly toward taming the problems of not only the world we know but also the universe about which we've only begun to question.
THE AUTHOR
Born in Petrovichi, Russia, on January 2, 1920, Isaac Asimov became one of the most prolific American writers in history. Recognized as part of Science Fiction's "Holy Grail" of writers, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein, Asimov soared to the heights of science fiction where he remained for more than five decades. His most popular works included Nightfall (1941), Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), Second Foundation (1953), The Caves of Steel (1954), The End of Eternity (1955), The Naked Sun (1957), and The Gods Themselves (1972), which won both Hugo and Nebula awards.
"I received the fundamentals of my education in school," Asimov wrote, "but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it."
Asimov was born of Judah Asimov and Anna Rachel Berman Asimov. His father was educated within the confines of Orthodox Judaism, although religion wasn't central to the child's upbringing. His father "didn't even bother to have me bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen," Asimov said.
In 1923, Judah Asimov moved his family to the United States, where they settled in New York. There, young Isaac learned to read before he entered school. He had a photographic memory, which helped immensely in his studies, and he taught himself to read at five. His parents owned several candy stores in which everyone in the family was expected to work. The stores also sold magazines and newspapers, which Asimov credited with influencing his lifelong love of the written word and providing him an endless supply of reading material, including pulp science fiction magazines that he wouldn't have been able to afford. He recalled reading science fiction at age nine just as the genre was growing more science-oriented.
Asimov also loved Greek mythology, including The Iliad, along with the plays of Shakespeare, various histories, and miscellaneous other “things” he discovered at his local library. Before long, after outgrowing the branch's offerings, he set out to discover every public repository of books within walking distance to see what new and exciting prospects he might find there.
By the time he was eleven, Asimov began imitating the pulp-magazine writing style of the day. He sold his first story, Marooned Off Vesta, at the age of eighteen. One of the magazines running his stories was Astounding Science Fiction, which John W. Campbell Jr., who encouraged and trained many of the field's rising writers, edited. Fredrik Pohl, a few weeks older than Asimov, edited Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, both of which also bought several of Asimov's pieces.
After leaving Boys High School in Brooklyn, an elite school at the time, Asimov enrolled in Columbia College, an offshoot of the University in New York, where he majored in chemistry. He was graduated in 1939 and received his M.A. in 1941, also the year in which he published his breakthrough work, Nightfall, which some critics call the best science fiction story ever written. The poetic saga depicts a world with six suns, at least one of which is always shining—with predictably destructive results.
Most of Asimov's books are pure adventure and good entertainment, offering solutions to all kinds of problems faced by society and technology. Among his most popular works are the Foundation novels, based loosely on Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and, of course, stories about robots.
In 1942, Asimov married Gertrude Blugerman, with whom he eventually had two children before the couple separated. He entered the service during WWII, working at the U.S. Naval Air Experimental Station alongside Robert A. Heinlein. After the war, he joined Boston University's School of Medicine, where he was made an associate professor of biochemistry in 1955.
Asimov's first novel, Pebble in the Sky, was published by Doubleday in 1950. His first nonfiction book written for the general public, The Chemicals of Life (1954), was released by Abelard-Schuman. In the late fifties, the author began writing other nonfiction books. He felt that Americans trailed the Russians in their gap of knowledge and set out to define outer space and science in ways that were both interesting and easy to understand. He continued writing these books for the next twenty-five years.
Calling himself a "born explainer," Asimov once met Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who asked him how it felt to know everything. Asimov replied, "I only know how it feels to have the reputation of knowing everything. Uneasy." He later was quoted as saying that, whenever he had to write about something he knew little about, he closed his eyes and typed "very, very fast."
His The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960) and other books on literary topics were well received over the years.
Asimov remarried in 1973, choosing author and psychoanalyst Janet Opal Jeppson for his mate. Jeppson began writing science fiction in the 1970s, mostly for children. Her early works were published under the name J. O. Jeppson. She created the Norby Chronicles, depicting the adventures of a robot, in collaboration with her husband.
Despite Asimov's mental acuity, he lacked physical prowess. He never did swim or ride a bicycle, although he finally learned to drive a car after moving to Boston. In his humor book, Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels."
Of Asimov's wide range of work, his first Foundation trilogy is considered his best. Set in the far future, the space opera depicts the period between the fall and the rise of a new Galactic Empire. The mysterious inventor of psychohistory, Hari Seldon, has established two Foundations to control this development. The first is public and based on the physical sciences. The second is private and copes with those unknown factors that Hari Seldon hadn't anticipated. The grand scheme is thrown away when the "Mule," a mutant warlord, bursts upon the scene. The Mule uses his ability to manipulate minds by direct force to give history a new direction. According to the science of psychohistory, the behavior of all humanity can be predicted by purely statistical means.
The final part of the trilogy involves the efforts of the Second Foundation to get history back on course and avoid detection and destruction by the First, which perceives it as a rival. Beyond this epic future history, Asimov wrote The End of Eternity, which examines the paradoxes of time travel. He also wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels under pen name Paul French.
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine was founded by Davis Magazines as a quarterly in 1977. It moved to a monthly from 1979 and a four-weekly from 1981. IASFM was a success from the start, and its stories won numerous awards. Its title changed in 1992 to the only slightly less cumbersome Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine when a new publisher bought it out. George Scithers was the magazine’s first editor, and Asimov wrote a 1,500-word editorial for every issue. The author took pride in answering his readers' letters.
The "Three Laws of Robotics," a set of programmed instructions, make up Asimov's Robot stories. The author formulated the laws with John W. Campbell, Jr.: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law, and 3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Asimov introduced the three laws in Liar! (1941) about a telepathic robot. Most of his Robot stories, collected as I, Robot (1950) and The Rest of the Robots (1964), revolve around various interpretations of these laws. They are also the basis for the novels, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957), introducing the detective team of Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, a human-form robot. The books were set respectively on an overpopulated Earth and a barely populated colony world.
In all, Asimov authored nearly five hundred books, many of them on his IBM Selectronic III typewriter, working from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. His strength as a fiction writer was in his great skill to develop logically interesting ideas within a conventional story frame, which did not have many sensual or visual references. His critics noted that the stories resembled "a diagram on a blackboard," as Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove described Asimov's Empire in Trillion Year Spree (2001). But that never bothered the author. "I make no effort to write poetically or in a high literary style," he admitted.
The author planned to release his last work, I. Asimov, a collection of vivid sketches of important people and events in his life, before his death. It was not to be. Isaac Asimov died in 1992 at New York University Hospital of heart and kidney failure. I, Asimov was edited by Janet Asimov and published posthumously two years later.
Of his own demise, Asimov once opined: "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
And that, I believe, is true.
For complimentary review copies of D. J. Herda’s latest books, check out his Website at www.djherda.org, as well as his most recent publisher, Elektra Press. And happy reading!