Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992) was an American writer of Russian birth and a professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He is one of the most prolific authors of the twentieth century, and his name is tied to the move of science fiction from cheap magazines into a literature of ideas. During his lifetime he was counted, alongside Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, among the "Big Three" of the genre. His lasting contribution lies in imagining societies and machines grounded in real science, and in explaining that science to a general audience.

He was born in Petrovichi in what was then the Russian SFSR, and his birthday is usually given as January 2, 1920, although the exact date is uncertain: his mother had given a different one so he could start school early. In 1923 the family moved to New York and settled in Brooklyn, where his parents ran candy stores that also sold newspapers and magazines. He taught himself to read before the age of five. He never learned Russian; at home the family spoke Yiddish and English. It was among those magazines that he first encountered science fiction, and at nineteen he began publishing stories in the pulp magazines. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Columbia University in 1939 and a doctorate in 1948. During the Second World War he worked as a civilian chemist at a naval facility in Philadelphia. He then taught in Boston, but by about 1952 he was earning more from writing than from the university, and he eventually confined his academic role to lecturing.

His output falls into recognisable phases. Early on, science fiction dominated: his short stories began in 1939 and his first novel, Pebble in the Sky, appeared in 1950. That phase closed in 1958 with The Naked Sun. For roughly twenty-five years he wrote mostly non-fiction, and from 1982 he returned to fiction with sequels that linked his Foundation, Robot and Galactic Empire series into a single future history. His prose is clear and direct, and his popular science books trace each subject back to its simplest beginnings. He also wrote mysteries, fantasy, and guides to the Bible and Shakespeare, and his bibliography runs to more than five hundred volumes.

He described himself as a humanist and a rationalist. He opposed superstition without dismissing the sincere faith of others, held progressive political views, supported the Democratic Party, and defended civilian nuclear power. He served as president of the American Humanist Association. He suffered a heart attack in 1977 and bypass surgery in 1983, during which he received a blood transfusion that was later found to carry HIV. The infection was kept private for years and was not made public until 2002. He died in New York in 1992. His legacy includes the Foundation series, which received a one-time Hugo Award in 1966 as the best all-time series, and the story "Nightfall", voted in 1964 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as the best short science fiction story of all time. An asteroid has carried his name since 1981, and his robot stories and their laws remain part of popular culture.