Isaac Asimov’s 100th Birth Anniversary

Photo courtesy of Roberlan Borges

January 2020 marks the 100th birth anniversary of noted science fiction and popular science writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). He was born on January 1st, 1920, in Russia, but his family emigrated to America three years later. Asimov spent his childhood working in his parents’ candy store in Brooklyn, where he developed the habits that allowed him to write almost 500 books during his lifetime. It’s also where he had the opportunity to read science fiction pulp magazines such as “Amazing Stories” that would inspire his career - first in science fiction and later in popular science writing. You can read more about his early life in his autobiography I. Asimov.

Asimov earned a Ph.D. in chemistry in the 1940s and was a college professor in the 1950s but continued to pursue his writing career, making his first sale of a story in 1938. He continued for the next two decades to write such seminal science fiction works as Foundation and, in a collection of robot stories called I, Robot, he introduced to the world the famous Three Laws of Robotics. The full story of how Asimov and other writers revolutionized the genre of science fiction can be found in the recent book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Asimov is perhaps best remembered for his groundbreaking science fiction novels and short story collections, but what I liked to read most were his popular science books like Asimov’s Guide to Science and Science, Numbers, and I. He had a way of making the theories and discoveries of science interesting and accessible to the non-scientist. I also loved reading his annotated versions of classic texts, such as The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels. His thoughtful and informative annotations illuminated the literary works and gave them a historical context. For me, it made them even more enjoyable to read. There seemed to be no genre that Asimov could not master. For example, if you wanted to improve your store of jokes, you could read the humor collection Asimov Laughs Again.

Asimov was a writer for many types of readers. The science fiction reader, the literary reader, and the lay reader wishing to improve his knowledge of science. I appreciated Asimov because he was one of those rare birds in the modern world, a true Renaissance man. He had a passion for learning as much about the universe we live in as was possible during a human lifetime.  The enthusiasm he had for the world around him shines through in his work, and for that reason alone his books are still well worth checking out.

- Michael, West Windsor Branch