The Unauthorized Autobiography of Dr. Science

In his later years, he moved to Idaho with his wife Ellen Carr Lederman, who survives him. She took care of him after he was diagnosed with dementia. In , he sold his Nobel prize to raise money for medical funds. Beneath the flashy title were witty anecdotes, cogent explanations of science, and wisdom. Librarians Authors Referees Media Students. Login Become a Member Contact Us.

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In the time it would take to salvage such a failure, I could write a new piece altogether and have infinitely more fun in the process". He submitted "failures" to another editor. One of the most common impressions of Asimov's fiction work is that his writing style is extremely unornamented. Except for two stories—" Liar! 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. Asimov addressed such criticism at the beginning of 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. Gunn cited examples of a more complex style, such as the climax of "Liar! Sharply drawn characters occur at key junctures of his storylines: Susan Calvin in "Liar! Other than books by Gunn and Patrouch, a relative dearth of "literary" criticism exists on Asimov particularly when compared to the sheer volume of his output.

Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary Biography 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.

Gunn's and Patrouch's respective studies of Asimov both state that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's book comments in detail on each of Asimov's novels. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction nor does Patrouch , but calls some passages in The Caves of Steel "reminiscent of Proust ". When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose "need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society". Although he prided himself on his unornamented prose style for which he credited Clifford D.

Simak as an early influence [13] [] , and said in that his style had not changed, [] 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. This advice helped Asimov create " Reason ", one of the early Robot stories.

1. Dharma Coaching: Klarheit und Gelassenheit finden (German Edition).
2. Quand vient la nuit (French Edition).
3. The Vault of Whiz-Dumb.

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 lives in the "present" and another group starts in the "past", beginning 15 years earlier and gradually moving toward the time period of the first group.

Asimov attributed the lack of romance and sex in his fiction to the "early imprinting" from starting his writing career when he had never been on a date and "didn't know anything about girls". He claimed he wrote The Gods Themselves to respond to these criticisms, [] which often came from New Wave science fiction and often British writers.

The second part of three of the novel is set on an alien world with three sexes, and the sexual behavior of these creatures is extensively depicted. 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. The nature of the rejection led him to believe that Campbell may have based his bias towards humans in stories on a real-world racial bias.

Unwilling to write only weak alien races, and concerned that a confrontation would jeopardize his and Campbell's friendship, he decided he would not write about aliens at all. 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. Asimov was criticized for a lack of strong female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings, such as Gold "Women and Science Fiction" , he acknowledges this and responds by pointing to inexperience.

His later novels, written with more female characters but in essentially the same prose style as his early science-fiction stories, brought this matter to a wider audience. In , Asimov's humans were stripped-down masculine portraits of Americans from , 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.

However, some of his robot stories, including the earliest ones, featured the character Susan Calvin , a forceful and intelligent woman who regularly out-performed her male colleagues. There is a perennial question among readers as to whether the views contained in a story reflect the views of the author. The answer is, "Not necessarily—" And yet one ought to add another short phrase "—but usually.

Isaac Asimov was an atheist , a humanist , and a rationalist. During his childhood, his father and mother observed Orthodox Jewish traditions, though not as stringently as they had in Petrovichi; they did not, however, force their beliefs upon young Isaac. Thus, he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the Torah represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the Iliad recorded Greek mythology.

For a brief while, his father worked in the local synagogue to enjoy the familiar surroundings and, as Isaac put it, "shine as a learned scholar" [] versed in the sacred writings. This scholarship was a seed for his later authorship and publication of Asimov's Guide to the Bible , an analysis of the historic foundations for both the Old and New Testaments. For many years, Asimov called himself an atheist ; however, he considered the term somewhat inadequate, as it described what he did not believe rather than what he did.

Eventually, he described himself as a " humanist " and considered that term more practical. He did, however, continue to identify himself as a nonobservant Jew, as stated in his introduction to Jack Dann 's anthology of Jewish science fiction, Wandering Stars: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason.

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. Likewise he said about religious education: If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

The same memoir states his belief that Hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist " crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment.

If an afterlife existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who "slandered God by inventing Hell". I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. An unsympathetic reader might think that I am "burlesquing" Christianity, but I am not. Then too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion.

Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal , and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the s and in a television interview during the early s he publicly endorsed George McGovern.

He was unhappy about what he considered an "irrationalist" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late s and onwards. Asimov's impression was that the s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return. Because of his academic background, the bureau briefly considered Asimov as a possible candidate for known Soviet spy ROBPROF, but found nothing suspicious in his life or background.

Though from a Jewish family, Asimov appeared to hold an equivocal attitude towards Israel. In his first autobiography, he indicates his support for the safety of Israel, though insisting that he was not a Zionist. Asimov especially worried about the safety of Israel given that it has been created among hostile neighbours, and that Jews have merely created for themselves another "Jewish ghetto". Asimov believed that " science fiction In a interview by Bill Moyers , Asimov proposed computer-aided learning , where people would use computers to find information on subjects in which they were interested.

Also, the one-to-one model would let students learn at their own pace. Asimov's defense of civil applications of nuclear power even after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident damaged his relations with some of his fellow liberals. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov , [] he states that although he would prefer living in "no danger whatsoever" than near a nuclear reactor, he would still prefer a home near a nuclear power plant than in a slum on Love Canal or near "a Union Carbide plant producing methyl isocyanate ", the latter being a reference to the Bhopal disaster.

In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York City on the shrinking tax base caused by the middle-class flight to the suburbs, though he continued to support high taxes on the middle class to pay for social programs. His last nonfiction book, Our Angry Earth , co-written with his long-time friend, science fiction author Frederik Pohl , deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as overpopulation , oil dependence , war , global warming , and the destruction of the ozone layer.

It's going to destroy it all You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. Asimov enjoyed the writings of J.

I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction". This 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.

Asimov became a fan of mystery stories at the same time as science fiction. He preferred to read the former to latter because "I read every [science fiction] story keenly aware that it might be worse than mine, in which case I had no patience with it, or that it might be better, in which case I felt miserable". In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written, far better than the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Hercule Poirot is the best detective fiction has seen.

Why should I not use as my model what I consider the best? Paul Krugman , holder of a Nobel Prize in Economics , has stated Asimov's concept of psychohistory inspired him to become an economist. John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed, "It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style. Christian , "understood better than Isaac Asimov what synoptic thinking is all about.

His almost books—which he wrote as a specialist, a knowledgeable authority, or just an excited layman—range over almost all conceivable subjects: Through a series of developments of absorbing lack of interest as far as these pages are concerned , I found myself doing research on a biochemical topic. In that area of study I obtained my Ph.

But even that was too wide a subject. From books to nonfiction, to science, to chemistry, to biochemistry—and not yet enough. The orchard had to be narrowed down further. To do research, I had to find myself a niche within biochemistry, so I began work on nucleic acids And at about that point, I rebelled! I could not stand the claustrophobia that clamped down upon me. I looked with horror, backward and forward across the years, at a horizon that was narrowing down and narrowing down to so petty a portion of the orchard.

What I wanted was all the orchard, or as much of it as I could cover in a lifetime of running I have never been sorry for my stubborn advance toward generalization. To be sure, I can't wander in detail through all the orchard, any more than anyone else can, no matter how stupidly determined I may be to do so. Life is far too short and the mind is far too limited. But I can float over the orchard as in a balloon. Depending on the counting convention used, [] and including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there may be currently over books in Asimov's bibliography— as well as his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism.

For his th, th, and th books based on his personal count , Asimov published Opus , Opus , and Opus , celebrating his writing. Asimov was so prolific that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category , philosophy and psychology. An online exhibit in West Virginia University Libraries ' virtually complete Asimov Collection displays features, visuals, and descriptions of some of his over books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts.

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. For a listing of Asimov's science fiction books in chronological order within his future history, see the Foundation series list of books. The Robot series was originally separate from the Foundation series. The Galactic Empire novels were published as independent stories, set earlier in the same future as Foundation.

Later in life, Asimov synthesized the Robot series into a single coherent "history" that appeared in the extension of the Foundation series. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. American science-fiction and non-fiction writer. For other uses with the name Asimov, see Asimov disambiguation. Janet Opal Jeppson m. Roboethics Ethics of AI Machine ethics. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

August Learn how and when to remove this template message. Isaac Asimov bibliography categorical , Isaac Asimov bibliography chronological , and Isaac Asimov bibliography alphabetical. Isaac Asimov short stories bibliography. Autobiographies of Isaac Asimov.

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In Memory Yet Green. The date of my birth, as I celebrate it, was January 2, It could not have been later than that. It might, however, have been earlier. Allowing for the uncertainties of the times, of the lack of records , of the Jewish and Julian calendars , it might have been as early as October 4, There is, however, no way of finding out. My parents were always uncertain and it really doesn't matter. I celebrate January 2, , so let it be.

In his comments on the poem, Asimov wrote that originally it was "Why, stars above, it's Asimov", and when someone suggested to use "mazel tov" instead, Asimov accepted this as a significant improvement. There are three very simple English words: Now leave out the two h's and say it again and you have Asimov. My estimate is that Isaac received about , letters in his professional career.

And with the compulsiveness that has to be a character trait of a writer of almost books, he answered 90 percent of them. He answered more than half with postcards and didn't make carbons of them. But with the , letters he received, there are carbons of about 45, that he wrote. Nightfall, and other stories. I wrote a novel in which pictured a world in which everyone lived in underground cities, comfortably enclosed away from the open air. People would say, "How could you imagine such a nightmarish situation?

When Israel was founded in and all my Jewish friends were jubilant, I was the skeleton at the feast. I said, "We are building ourselves a ghetto. We will be surrounded by tens of millions of Muslims who will never forgive, never forget and never go away. But don't Jews deserve a homeland? Actually, I feel that no human group deserves a "homeland" in the usual sense of the word.

I am not a Zionist, then, because I don't believe in nations, and Zionism merely sets up one more nation to trouble the world.

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Isaac Asimov Home Page. Retrieved July 2, Retrieved March 5, So [Walter Bradbury] said, 'Use a pseudonym. I choose Paul French and Retrieved September 4,