Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, born in Petrovichi in the Russian SFSR on an uncertain date between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920. He celebrated his birthday on January 2. His parents, Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and Judah Asimov, were Russian Jews, and the family came to the United States in 1923, arriving by way of Liverpool on the RMS Baltic when Asimov was three. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1928, and made his name in a century when science, mass publishing, and science fiction were all expanding quickly.

Asimov’s appetite for reading began early. He taught himself to read at age five and later taught his sister to read as well. His parents owned a succession of candy stores, and everyone in the family was expected to work there. Those stores sold newspapers and magazines, giving him steady access to reading material he could not otherwise have afforded, including pulp science fiction magazines. He began reading science fiction at age nine, just as the genre was becoming more science-centered, and he was also a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library during his formative years.

His education took him through New York City public schools, including Boys High School in Brooklyn, from which he graduated at 15. He briefly attended the City College of New York, then accepted a scholarship to Seth Low Junior College, a branch of Columbia University in Downtown Brooklyn. He first studied zoology, but switched to chemistry after his first semester because he disliked dissecting an alley cat. After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1936, he completed his Bachelor of Science degree at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus in 1939.

During his lifetime, Asimov was counted with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers. He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He is best known for hard science fiction, especially the Foundation series, about a fallen space empire. The first three Foundation books won the one-time Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966. His other major series include the Galactic Empire books and the Robot series, with works such as The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, both written in the mid-1950s. In Foundation and Earth in 1986, he linked the far future of Foundation to the Robot stories, making a unified future history.

Asimov also wrote mysteries, fantasy, popular science, and many kinds of non-fiction. His work covered nine of the ten Dewey decimal system categories. His popular science books often explained ideas historically, moving back to the simplest stage of the subject; examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery. He wrote on chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, literary criticism, the Bible, and Shakespeare. He also wrote more than 380 short stories, including “Nightfall,” voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1964.

Asimov died on April 6, 1992. He had also served as president of the American Humanist Association, and his name has been given to an asteroid, a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda’s humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards. Readers still return to his words because he joined curiosity with clarity. Whether he was imagining empires in space or explaining science step by step, he wrote as if knowledge belonged to ordinary people who were willing to keep asking questions.