Isaac Asimov

Subject:

Comments:
: Isaac Asimov seems to be an archetypical Idiosyncratic character; an highly imaginative introvert with several quirks and fears. : Jan : case text: : Asimov was a teetotaler in later life, mainly because in all of his experiences with drinking alcoholic beverages, just one or two drinks were sufficient to get him drunk. On the day he passed the oral examination for his Ph.D., he drank five Manhattans in celebration, and his friends had to carry him back to school and try to sober him up. His wife told him that he spent that entire night in bed giggling every once in a while and saying "Doctor Asimov". : He was completely inept at any athletic activity that required any coordination; he never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle. Spending even ten minutes in the summer sun turned his skin a bright red. In the army he had the worst score in his company on the physical-conditioning test (though he had the highest score on the intelligence test). He was afraid of needles and the sight of blood. : Asimov discovered that he was claustrophiliac, meaning that he was fond of enclosed places. He was quite comfortable in small rooms with no windows, and always insisted on using artificial lighting when he worked. He considered the underground cities on Earth in The Caves of Steel as the ultimate windowless enclosures. : He did not allow anyone to call him by any nicknames, except for a few old friends who had been calling him Ike for years. : Asimov hated it when his name was misspelled in print or mispronounced by others. His desire to have his name spelled correctly even resulted in a 1957 short story, "Spell my Name with an 's'". : (Notable instances of his name being misspelled occurred on the cover of the November 1952 issue of Galaxy, which contained "The Martian Way", and on his 1976 Nebula Award for "The Bicentennial Man".) : When in 1939 he wrote a letter to Planet Stories, which printed it and spelled his name "Isaac Asenion", he quickly fired off an angry letter to them. (His friend Lester Del Rey took great delight in referring to him as "Asenion" for many years afterward. On the other hand, Asimov himself referred to positronic robots with the Three Laws as "Asenion" robots in The Caves of Steel.) : Asimov was quite perturbed when Johnny Carson, host of the Tonight Show, pronounced his first name as I-ZAK, with equal emphasis on both syllables, during an appearance on the television show in New York in 1968. : : -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- : Biographical (literary) : When did he start writing? : When he was eleven years old he began writing The Greenville Chums at College, which he planned to be the first book in a series. After writing only eight chapters about the adventures of boys living in a small town, he gave up after recognizing the fact that he didn't know what he was talking about. However he made a very important discovery in the process. After he wrote the first two chapters, he told the story he had written so far to a friend at school during lunchtime. When he stopped, his friend demanded that he continue. When Asimov explained that he had told him all that he had so far, the friend asked to borrow the book when he was finished reading it. Asimov was astonished to discover that his friend thought that he was retelling a story that he read. The implied compliment impressed him so much that, from that day on, Asimov took himself seriously as a writer. : Asimov's first published writing was a column he did for his high school newspaper. His first accepted piece was a humorous essay entitled "Little Brothers", which appeared in The Boys High Recorder, his high school's semi-annual literary publication, in 1934, and is reprinted in Before the Golden Age. He wrote it in a creative writing class he took that year; a class which almost convinced him to give up writing. : What was his first published story? : After John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, rejected his short stories "Cosmic Corkscrew", "Stowaway" and "This Irrational Planet" in June, July, and September of 1938, "Marooned Off Vesta" was accepted for publication by Amazing Stories in October and was published January 10, 1939. : What awards did he win for his writing? : Asimov was presented a special Hugo award in 1963 for "adding science to science fiction" for his essays in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. : The Foundation Series was awarded the Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award in 1966. : The Gods Themselves won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for best novel in 1973. : "The Bicentennial Man" was awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for best novelette in 1977. : Foundation's Edge was presented with the Hugo for best novel in 1983. : In 1987, he was awarded the special lifetime Nebula Grandmaster award. : "Gold" was presented with the Hugo for best novelette in 1992. : I. Asimov: A Memoir won the Hugo Award for best nonfiction in 1995. : "The Mule", the seventh Foundation story published in Astounding Science Fiction (which appeared in book form as part two of Foundation and Empire), was awarded a 1946 Retro-Hugo for Best Novel of 1945 at the 1996 WorldCon. : He was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1997. : He won the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award in 1957 for his book Building Blocks of the Universe. : He was awarded the Howard W. Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association in 1960 for his book The Living River. : He received the James T. Grady Award of the American Chemical Society in 1965. : He was presented with the Westinghouse Science Writing Award in 1967. : He was awarded fourteen honorary doctorate degrees from various universities. : What is Asimov's last book? : Asimov's publishers have on more than one occasion published the Good Doctor's "last" book as a marketing ploy. The six titles most often so-described are: : Asimov Laughs Again (the last book he saw published before his death, published in 1992) : Forward the Foundation (his last Foundation novel, published in 1993) : Frontiers II (his last -- to date -- essay collection, published in 1993) : I. Asimov: A Memoir (his last autobiographical volume, published in 1994) : Gold (his last -- to date -- anthology of science fiction stories, published in 1995) : Magic (his last -- to date -- anthology of fantasy stories, published in 1996) : All this, however, does not preclude the possibility of more books by Asimov being published in the future. There are, for example, enough uncollected F&SF science essays for one more collection, and probably enough uncollected Black Widower stories. Additional volumes could be published in the "Complete Stories" series, as well as other anthologies (e.g., "The Honest-to-goodness Complete Robot Stories Book"). : All we can say for certain is that with his death, Asimov appears to have stopped writing. He has, by no means, stopped publishing. It is therefore probably meaningless to refer to Asimov's "last" book in absolute chronological terms. : Of his own work, what were Asimov's favorite and least favorite novels? What were his favorite and least favorite stories? : Asimov's favorite novel was The Gods Themselves, largely because of the middle section, which was both absolutely brilliant and included non-humans and sex. (Asimov had often been accused of being unable to write stories with non-humans or sex and therefore leaving them out of his work.) : His least favorite novel was The Stars Like Dust. It was scheduled for serialization in Galaxy, then edited by Horace Gold. Gold absolutely insisted on including a subplot about the characters ransacking the Galaxy for an ancient document which would utterly revolutionize their political order. In the end, it turns out that the document is "gur Pbafgvghgvba bs gur Havgrq Fgngrf" (rot-13 coding added as spoiler protection, as if this sub-par novel could be truly "spoiled" by giving away plot points). : Asimov loathed the subplot and bitterly resented being forced to add it. He offered to his editor at Doubleday, Walter Bradbury, to remove it for the hardcover publication, but Bradbury liked the subplot and insisted it be left in. : Then to add insult to injury, when the first paperback edition was published by Ace, they changed the title (for the worse) and totally gutted the novel, to the point that Asimov could hardly recognize it. : Asimov's three favorite stories were (in order): "The Last Question", "The Bicentennial Man", and "The Ugly Little Boy" (all found in The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, among other places). : Among his least favorite stories were: : "Black Friar of the Flame" (found in The Early Asimov). The story was his first attempt at a "future historical" and was bounced around from editor to editor until it was finally published. It was revised a half-a-dozen times and rejected ten times in a two-year-period. Asimov was so bitter over the story's history that he swore never again to revise anything more than twice, and he would even fight over having to do a second revision. : (This is his least favorite story among those that most Asimov fans are likely to have ever read. He also implies in The Early Asimov that it is his least favorite story of all time, but this is clarified in In Joy Still Felt.) : His all-time least favorite story was "The Portable Star" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1955). As with "A Woman's Heart," Asimov never authorized its anthologization. He describes it as a sleazy attempt to cash in on the new interest in sex in sf started by Philip Jose Farmer's 1952 story, "The Lovers." : He also published a story, "A Woman's Heart" in the June 1957 Satellite which he considered so trivial that he never included it in any of his collections. : : --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Optional Link URL:
Link Title:
Optional Image URL:

Follow us on Twitter | Achieve your goals | Comments? Write to Becca