Isaac Asimov - Misplaced Pages

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Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992) was an American author and biochemist, a highly successful and extraordinarily prolific writer best known for his works of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. He published about 500 volumes. He was a long-time member of Mensa.

Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia but his family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., graduating from Columbia University in 1939 and taking a Ph.D. there in 1948. He then joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter, but in a non-teaching capacity.

Asimov began contributing stories to science fiction magazines in 1939; his most famous single story is arguably "Nightfall" (1941). In 1942 he began his Foundation stories -- later collected in the Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953) -- which recount the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in the universe of the future and may be his most famous work of science fiction. He continued the series with Foundation's Edge in 1982 and Foundation and Earth in 1986 and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation in 1988.

His robot stories -- many of which were collected in his collection, I, Robot (1950) -- were begun at about the same time and promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws Of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers' treatment of the subject.

He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes -- the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969 -- and then combined them into one 1300-page volume in 1981. Replete 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 other novels and collections of stories include:

SciFi Novels

(later novels here)

Murder Mysteries

The Death Dealers (1958) (later republished as A Whiff of Death)
Murder at the ABA (1976)

SciFi Short Story Collections

(and others -- need to check dates)

The short story, The Bicentennial Man was made into a movie starring Robin Williams. His Nightfall (1941) is thought by many to be the finest science fiction short story ever written.

Among Asimov's books on various topics in science or general information, written with lucidity and humour, are:

He also 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 second wife, Janet Asimov (née Jeppson), shortly after his death.

Asimov also wrote several essays on the social contentions of his day, including "Thinking About Thinking" and "Science: Knock Plastic" (1967).

Isaac Asimov died on April 6, 1992 after getting infected with HIV from tainted blood transfused during a 1983 surgical procedure. The fact that AIDS was the cause of his death was only revealed ten years later in Janet Asimov's biography It's Been a Good Life.