Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (ˈaɪzək ˈæzəməf; in Russian А́йзек Ази́мов —Áyzek Azímov—, original name: Исаáк Ю́дович Ози́мов —Isaak Yúmovovich Ozí— Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, Dec 20, 1919^Jul./ Jan 2, 1920^greg.-New York, United States, April 6, 1992) was a writer and professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine of Russian Jewish origin, naturalized American, known for being a prolific author of works of science fiction, history and popular science.

His most famous work is the Foundation Series, also known as the Trantor Trilogy or Cycle, which is part of the Galactic Empire series and later combined with his other great series on robots. He also wrote mystery and fantasy works, as well as a large number of nonfiction texts. In all, he signed more than 500 volumes and some 9,000 letters or postcards. His works have been published in 9 of the 10 categories of the Dewey Classification System.

Along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov was considered one of the "big three" writers of science fiction during his lifetime.

Most of his popular books explain scientific concepts along a historical line, going as far back as possible to times when the science in question was at an elementary stage. He often provides the nationality, birth and death dates of the scientists he mentions, as well as the etymologies of technical words.

He was a longtime member of Mensa, whose members he described as "intellectually combative." He enjoyed more than the presidency of the American Humanist Association, an organization of atheist ideology.

In 1981, an asteroid, (5020) Asimov, was named after him.

Biography

Isaac Asimov is considered to have been born on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (from 1929 to now Smolensk Oblast, Russian Federation, 400 km southwest of Moscow and 16 kilometers from the border with present-day Belarus).

His parents, Judah Asimov and Anna Rachel Berman, of Russian-Jewish origin, moved to New York on January 11, 1923, when the author was three years old.

His childhood was spent in the New York borough of Brooklyn, where young Isaac taught himself to read at the age of four or five; It should be noted that he never learned Russian.The future writer's youth was spent between studies and work in the different candy stores that his father ran in the Brooklyn neighborhood. It was among those shelves full of magazines that the young Asimov first encountered science fiction. He began writing in his early teens and, at age 19, began publishing his science fiction stories in fiction magazines called pulps .

She was so afraid of flying that she only traveled by plane twice in her life, which made her think she might have acrophobia. He also suffered from claustrophilia, the opposite of claustrophobia, that is, he liked small and closed places.

He graduated as a biochemist from Columbia University in 1939. Rejected for admission to New York University medical schools, he returned to Columbia and decided to pursue a graduate degree in chemistry, which he obtained in 1941. The following year, 1942, was particularly significant for Asimov; Leaving for the city of Philadelphia, he obtained a job as a chemical investigator in the shipyards of the US Navy, a job that he maintained during the course of World War II. In 1948 he received a doctorate in chemistry, which allowed him access to Boston University where he remained as an associate, but with no option to teach. The university stopped paying his salary in 1958, but by then the income from his work as a writer was greater than what he made from his university work. Asimov remained on the faculty as an associate professor, and in 1979 he was promoted to full professor. His personal papers from 1965 onwards are archived at Boston University's Mugar Memorial Library, where they occupy 464 boxes on 71 m of shelves. In 1985 he was elected Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, a position he held until his death in 1992. His successor was his friend and colleague Kurt Vonnegut. He was also an honorary vice president of the Mensa club until the death of its director Margot Seitelman on November 5, 1989.

Asimov married Gertrude Blugerman on July 26, 1942, with whom he had two children: David and Robyn, born respectively in 1951 and 1955. After a long period of separation they divorced in 1973 and at the end of that year Isaac married Janet Opal Jeppson.

Illness and death

In 1977, Asimov suffered a heart attack.^{[citation needed]} In December 1983, he underwent cardiovascular surgery in which he underwent triple coronary artery bypass grafting.. During an operation, he underwent a blood transfusion that turned out to be contaminated with the HIV virus. When the HIV infection was discovered, his doctors insisted on not making the information public due to the prejudice held at the time against infected by said disease.^{[citation required]}

Asimov died in New York on April 6, 1992, where he was cremated. He was survived by his widow Janet and the children from his first marriage, as well as his siblings. His brother Stanley reported the cause of death as heart and kidney failure.^{[citation needed]} The family chose not to disclose that death was due to the disease AIDS, since two days after the death there was a great public controversy when the tennis player Arthur Ashe announced that he had the same disease (also contracted in 1983 from a blood transfusion during coronary bypass surgery).^{[citation required]} Also the doctors continued to insist on keeping it a secret.

In 2002, when many of Asimov's treating doctors had died, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed to reveal that Isaac Asimov's death was due to AIDS. Janet Asimov went public with the information prior to the publication of the posthumous autobiography Asimov's ''It's Been a Good Life'' (2002), which Janet herself had edited and in which she herself revealed the circumstances of the contagion and his death.

Intellectual position

Isaac Asimov was a humanist and a rationalist. He did not oppose the genuine religious convictions of others, but he did stand up to superstitions and unfounded beliefs.

Asimov was a politically progressive and supporter of the United States Democratic Party. In a television interview in the early 1970s, he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was very disappointed when he saw what he considered irrational tactics of progressive activists from the late 1960s onwards.

His advocacy of civilian applications of nuclear power, especially after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, damaged his relations with the left. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov, he stated that he "preferred a house near a nuclear power plant than in a colony on the Love Canal or near a methyl isocyanate plant." from Union Carbide' (reference to the Bhopal disaster).

He published extensively on birth control, reflecting the perspective articulated by Paul R. Ehrlich, and in the last years of his life, Asimov decried the deterioration in the quality of life he perceived in New York City as fewer investments due to the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. His latest non-fiction book, Earth's Wrath, written together with another science fiction author, Frederik Pohl, deals with environmental issues such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer..

Works

Asimov's career can be divided into several periods. In his early years the dominant theme was science fiction, beginning with short stories in 1939. In 1950 he published his first novel, A Pebble in the Sky. This stage lasted until 1958, ending with the publication of El sol desnudo. He subsequently significantly decreased his production of fiction books while he turned to other subjects, and in the next 25 years he published only four science fiction books. Starting in 1982, the second stage of his activity in science fiction began with the publication of The Limits of the Foundation . From then until his death, Asimov would publish many sequels to his novels already written by him, giving them an overall treatment in a way he himself surely had not anticipated. There are an estimated 429 books written by Asimov.

Asimov thought his most enduring contributions would be the three laws of robotics and the Foundation Series (see Yours, Isaac Asimov, p. 329). Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary gives him credit for introducing the words positronics, psychohistory, and robotics into the English language. The first of these words applies to an entirely fictitious technology, albeit based on the name of the antimatter subatomic particle opposite to the electron, the positron, while the second is often used in a different sense from that employed by Asimov; however, the use of robotics continues to be applied in the sense given by Asimov.

Science dissemination

During the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Isaac Asimov substantially reduced his production of fiction and focused his interests on essays. Between The Naked Sun of 1957 and The Limits of the Foundation of 1982, he only published four novels, two of which were mysteries. In this same period, he greatly increased his literary output in other areas, writing almost always on scientific subjects. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 aroused public interest in science, an interest that Asimov's editors asked him to cover with whatever material he could write. At the same time, the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction invited him to continue his usual column, which he had started in the already closed bimonthly magazine of the same group, Venture Science Fiction, specializing in popular science, and gave Asimov complete freedom to publish. The first of his contributions to this monthly magazine F & amp; SF appeared in November 1958 and he continued since then with another 399 contributions, until his state of health prevented him from continuing. These columns, periodically collected into books by his main publisher, Doubleday, helped Asimov establish a reputation as a great popularizer of science and, according to him, were the only popular works he wrote in which he did not have to assume from his readers a Complete ignorance on the topics discussed. The popularity of his first major work, the Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, also enabled him to shed much of his academic responsibilities and essentially become a full-time writer..

Asimov published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes comprising the Old Testament (1967) and the New Testament (1969), then combined them into a single 1,300-page volume in 1981 Filled with maps and tables, the guide leads through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each and the political influences that had affected them, as well as biographical information on the important people.

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

The wide variety of information covered in Asimov's writings led Kurt Vonnegut to once ask him, "How does it feel to know everything?" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have this reputation of being omniscient: restless (see In Joy Still Felt , chapter 10). In the introduction to his collection of Slow Learner stories, American novelist Thomas Pynchon admitted that he drew from Asimov's popular science works and the Oxford English Dictionary all the knowledge of him about entropy.

His facet as a scientific popularizer stood out in his popular science book El Universo (published in English in 1966, in Spanish in 1971), in which he exposes, without using very technical language, everything the set of existing scientific certainties about the Universe through the description of different astronomical and physical facts.

Science Fiction

Among his science fiction works, the best known belong to the Trantor Cycle or the Foundations series. The original trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation) received the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Series of All Time. Later, he wrote The Boundaries of the Foundation and Foundation and Earth , which follow the events of Second Foundation . In Foundation and Earth , Asimov links the Foundation series with the robot novels by introducing one of his most well-known characters: R. Daneel Olivaw. His robot novels stand out for being police-type, for which Asimov is considered a pioneer in police science fiction. In robot novels (The Iron Vaults, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) Asimov creates another of his great characters: Elijah Baley. In Prelude to the Foundation and Towards the Foundation, Asimov narrates the origins of psychohistory, Hari Seldon's greatest creation. These novels also serve as a link between the robot and Foundation novels, featuring Hari Seldon's encounter with Daneel.

Asimov's work is no stranger to humor, in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction he published, in 1948, a pseudo-scientific and humorous article entitled The amazing endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline, whose subject was a substance that dissolves exactly 1.2 seconds "before" water is added to it.

His science fiction anthologies also stood out, especially the series The Golden Age of Science Fiction, in which he published in the form of a compilation the stories read by Asimov at age 11 and reread and selected in their maturity, adding at the beginning of them comments of the author and in which magazine it was published.

Timeline of Science Fiction Novels and Short Story Collections

Novels

• 1950: A pebble in the sky (Pebble in the Sky)
• 1951: In the star sand (The Stars Like Dust)
• 1951: Foundation (Foundation)
• 1952: Foundation and Empire (Foundation and Empire)
• 1952: The currents of space (The Currents of Space)
• 1952: Space Ranger (Lucky Starr. Space Ranger)like Paul French
• 1953: Second Foundation (Second Foundation)
• 1953: Pirates of asteroids (Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids)like Paul French
• 1954: Steel vaults (The Caves of Steel)
• 1954: The Oceans of Venus (Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus)like Paul French
• 1955: The End of Eternity (The End of Eternity)
• 1956: The Great Sun of Mercury (Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury)like Paul French
• 1957: The naked sun (The Naked Sun)
• 1957: The moons of Jupiter (Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter)like Paul French
• 1958: The rings of Saturn (Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn)like Paul French
• 1966: Awesome journey (Fantastic Voyage)
• 1972: The gods themselves (The Gods Themselves)
• 1976: Murder at the convention
• 1982: The limits of the Foundation (Foundation's Edge)
• 1983: The robots of dawn (The Robots of Dawn)
• 1985: Robots and Empire (Robots and Empire)
• 1986: Foundation and Earth (Foundation and Earth)
• 1987: Amazing journey 2: Brain destination. Fantastic Voyage II. Destination Brain
• 1988: Prelude to the Foundation (Prelude to Foundation)
• 1989: Némesis
• 1990: Last night (with Robert Silverberg)
• 1992: Son of time
• 1992: Cleon the emperor
• 1993: Towards the Foundation (Forward the Foundation, postuma)

Collections of stories

• 1950: I, robot (I, Robot)
• 1955: Martian / Deep down (The Martian Way and Other Stories). Including the stories in the 2010 compilation Complete stories 2
• 1957: The Earth is enough. / The dead past and other stories (Earth is Room Enough). Including the accounts in the 2010 compilation Complete stories 2
• 1959: Nine future (Nine Tomorrows). Including the stories in the 2010 compilation Complete stories 2
• 1964: The Rest of the Robots, published in Spanish in three volumes: The Robots / The rest of the robots / Again robots
• 1968: I'm in Puertomarte without Hilda. (Asimov's Mysteries). Including the accounts in the 2014 compilation Complete stories 3
• 1969: Nightfall and Other Stories, published in Spanish in three volumes with accounts in a different order: Eyes do something else to see, The machine that won the war and Fourth generation. Including the accounts in the 2014 compilation Complete stories 3
• 1972: The Early Asimov, published in Spanish in three volumes as "Isaac Asimov. Selection 1, 2 and 3" and later in 2009 in Complete stories 1
• 1973: The Best of Isaac Asimov (The Best of Isaac Asimov)
• 1974: Tales of the Black widows / Black widows club reports (Tales of the Black Widowers)
• 1975: Buy Jupiter (Buy Jupiter and Other Stories)
• 1976: The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (The Bicentennial Man)
• 1976: More stories of Black widows / More stories from the Black widows club (More Tales of the Black Widowers)
• 1980: File of Black widows (Casebook of the Black Widowers)
• 1982: Robots / The complete robot (The Complete Robot)
• 1983: The winds of change (The Winds of Change and Other Stories)
• 1986: Robot dreams (Robot Dreams)
• 1986: Parallel stories (The Alternate Asimovs)
• 1988: Azazel
• 1989: Chronicles (The Asimov Chronicles)
• 1990: The enigmas of the Black widows (Puzzles of the Black Widowers)
• 1990: Robot visions (Robot Visions)
• 1990: full stories I
• 1992: Total accounts II
• 1995: Goodbye to Earth (Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection)

Stories

• 1951: How they had fun! (The Fun They Had)

For a science fiction story, according to Asimov

• 1962: The Hugo 1955-1961 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1955-1961)
• 1971: The Hugo 1962-1967 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1962-1967)
• 1971: The Hugo 1968-1969 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1968-1969)
• 1973: The Hugo 1970-1972 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1970-1972)
• 1974: The Golden Age of Science Fiction 1, 2, 3 and 4 (Before the Golden Age)
• 1977: The Hugo Awards 1973-1975 (The Hugo Winners 1973-1975)
• 1979: The Golden Age of Fiction Science 1939-1940 (Asimov Presents the great SF Stories 1939-1940)
• 1980: The Golden Age of Fiction Science 1941 (Asimov Presents the great SF Stories 1941)
• 1980: The Golden Age of Fiction Science 1942-1943 (Asimov Presents the great SF Stories 1942-1943)
• 1981: The Golden Age of Fiction Science 1944-1945 (Asimov Presents the great SF Stories 1944-1945)
• 1981: The Best of Science Fiction of the 19th Century 1 and 2 (The best Science Fiction of the 19th Century)
• 1982: The Golden Age of Fiction Science 1946-1947 (Asimov Presents the great SF Stories 1946-1947)
• 1985: The Hugo 1976-1977 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1976-1977)
• 1985: The Hugo 1978-1979 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1978-1979)
• 1986: The Hugo 1980-1982 Awards (The Hugo Winners 1980-1982)

About science fiction

• 1981: About Science Fiction (Asimov on Science Fiction)
• 1992: The recipe for tyrannosaurus 1, 2 and 3 (The Tyrannosaurus Prescription)

Historical Disclosure

From 1965 to the mid-1970s, Asimov combines the literary creation of fiction with the dissemination of history through various books that cover the most important civilizations and historical periods. Such as the Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilization, going through the Middle Ages, the discovery of the New World and the formation of the United States. The author tries to attract the general public to the knowledge of history through a pleasant and simple narration. It is mostly about political/military history.

This series of works has been commonly and informally called Asimov's Universal History and is made up of 14 volumes, with maps and chronology included in each one.

Volumes of the series

• 1968: The Near East (Original title: The Near East)
• 1971: The Land of Canaan (Original title: The Land Of Canaan)
• 1967: The Egyptians (Original title: The Egyptians)
• 1965: The Greeks (Original title: The Greeks: A Great Adventure)
• 1966: The Roman Republic (Original title: The Roman Republic)
• 1967: The Roman Empire (Original title: The Roman Empire)
• 1970: Constantinople (Original title: Constantinople - The Forgotten Empire)
• 1970: The High Middle Ages (Original title: The Dark Ages)
• 1969: Formation of England (Original title: The Shaping of England)
• 1972: The formation of France (Original title: The Shaping of France)
• 1973: The training of North America (Original title: The Shaping of North America. From Earliest times to 1763)
• 1974: The Birth of the United States (1763-1816) (Original title: The Birth of the United States (1763-1816))
• 1975: The United States from 1816 to the Civil War (Original title: Our Federal Union - The Union States from 1816 to 1865)
• 1977: The United States from the Civil War to the First World War (Original title: The Golden Door - The United States from 1865 to 1918)
• 1991: The Millennium Step

Science dissemination

During the 1960s and 1970s, Isaac Asimov slowed down his production of fictional novels and short stories to devote himself almost entirely to popular science. In addition, from November 1958 until his death in 1992, he published a monthly scientific essay in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, most of which were later collected and edited. Below is a list of popular science books translated into Spanish:

• 1959: Stellar moments of science
• 1965: Brief history of chemistry
• 1967: Anybody there?
• 1969: Great ideas of science
• 1971: The Tragedy of the Moon (Recollection)
• 1971: The Universe. From the flat earth to the quasars
• 1977: 100 basic questions about science
• 1977: How We Discover Oil
• 1977: How we discover the numbers
• 1977: The electron is left-handed and other scientific tests (Recollection)

It is striking that one of his most well-known, complete, and interesting popular science books"Introduction to Science" edited in 1977.

• 1979: Alien civilizations
• 1980: Life and time
• 1980: The planet that wasn't (Recollection)
• 1981: Photosynthesis
• 1981: The Sun shines bright (Recollection)
• 1982: The noble gases
• 1983: The star of Bethlehem and other scientific essays (Recollection)
• 1984: The measurement of the Universe
• 1984: "X" represents the unknown (Recollection)
• 1984: The search for the elements
• 1984: As far as the eye reaches (Recollection)
• 1984: From Saturn to Pluto
• 1985: The subatomic monster (Recollection)
• 1985: Comet Halley
• 1986: New Guide to Science
• 1986: Genetic code
• 1986: Suns in explosion
• 1988: The relativity of error (Recollection)
• 1989: The Secret of the Universe (Recollection)
• 1990: History and chronology of science and discoveries
• 1991: Alpha Centauri. Next star
• 1991: Borders
• 1992: Origins
• 2000: Of the numbers and their history

Others

Asimov also wrote mystery stories (The Death Dealer, Murder at the Convention, The Black Widows Stories: Tales of the Black Widowers [1971,1972,1973,1974], More tales of the black widowers [1976] and The file of the black widowers [1980]) and fantasy (Azazel).

Towards the end of his life Asimov published a series of compilations of limericks (popular class of five-line humorous poems), most of which were his own work, beginning with Lewd Humorous Verses (1975). Limericks: Too Gross ( Verses: Too Gross ), whose title shows his love of puns, contains 144 Asimov limericks and an equal number from the poet John Ciardi. Asimov's Treasures of Humor is both a book of jokes and a treatise on Asimov's theory of humor. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is a sudden change of point of view that suddenly moves the focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Asimov published his autobiography in two volumes: In Memory Still Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980). A third autobiography, I, Asimov: Memoirs, was published in 1994. The afterword was written by his widow, Janet Asimov, shortly after Isaac's death. It's Been a Good Life (2002), written by Janet, is an abridged version of the three autobiographies.

Literary theme

Much of Asimov's fiction is based on the theme of paternalism. His first robot story, Robbie, tells the story of a robotic babysitter. As robots become more sophisticated, their interventions are more subtle. In Evidence a robot disguised as a human gets elected office. In The Avoidable Conflict, robots take center stage from Humanity, acting as babysitters for the human species.

Later, in Robots and Empire, a robot develops what is called the "Zero Law of Robotics", which states that "a robot cannot harm Humanity, or, by inaction, allow it to endanger itself. He also decides that the robotic presence is stifling the freedom of Humanity, so the best course of action is the disappearance by themselves, that of the robots. A non-robot story, Eternity's End, shows a similar conflict and resolution.

In the Foundation series, which originally had no robots, the character Hari Seldon develops the science called psychohistory through which an empire can be achieved after 1000 years. This series has its own version of Plato's guardians of the Republic in the book Second Foundation, who perfect and protect the plan. When Asimov finished writing the series in the 1950s, the Second Foundation were presented as the protectors of Humanity. When he revisits the series in the 1980s, he gives an even more explicit tone to the paternalistic theme.

In Foundation Boundaries he introduces the planet "Gaia", obviously based on the Gaia hypothesis. All animals, plants and minerals of Gaia participate in a common consciousness, forming a super-mind that works together for the common good. At the end of this novel, the protagonist Golan Trevize must decide whether or not to allow the development of "Galaxia", a greater version of Gaia that spans the entire galaxy. In addition, robots are introduced into the Foundation universe.

Even so, it is in Foundation and Earth that the first robots of the series appear and interact with the characters. And the subsequent prequels, Prelude to the Foundation and To the Foundation, explore his behavior in greater detail. Robots have been revealed as hidden benefactors of humanity.

Another frequent theme, perhaps the reverse of paternalism, is social oppression. Space Currents takes place on a planet where a unique fibro-vegetable grows, and the peasants are exploited by aristocrats from a nearby planet. The hero of "In the Star Arena" helps a planet that is oppressed by an arrogant interplanetary empire, the Tyranns.

The victims of oppression are often people on Earth (as opposed to colonists in space) or robots. In "The Bicentennial Man" a robot fights against prejudice to be accepted as a human. In Vaults of Steel, the people of Earth dislike the wealthy "spacers" from other planets and treat robots (associated with spacers) in much the same way that white Americans treated them. blacks in the early 20th century, for example, addressing them as boy. The pebble in the sky shows a similar situation: the Galactic Empire rules the Earth and its people use terms such as Earthie-squaw”, dirty earthling or just plain earthy., but Earth is a theocratic dictatorship that imposes euthanasia on everyone at the age of sixty. The heroes are Bel Arvardan, a galactic hidalgo who has to overcome his prejudices and Joseph Schwartz, a 60th-century 20th American who had emigrated from Europe, where his people were persecuted (he may well have been Jewish), and finds himself transported back in time to the time of Arvardan. He has to decide if he helps an oppressed society that doesn't consider him fit to continue living.

Another frequent theme of Asimov's is rational thought. He fused the detective mystery with science fiction in the novel Steel Vaults (1954) and in the Asimov Mysteries short stories, in which he generally played fair with the reader by introducing early all science and technology involved in the resolution of the plot. He later produced detective fiction, including the novel Murder at the Convention and Tales of the Black Widowers , in which he followed the same rule. Frequently in all of his fiction, the important scenes are essentially debates, with the most rational, the most caring, or simply the most persuasive side winning.

Electronic education

In a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, Asimov proposed e-learning, where people would use computers to find information on topics they were interested in, and this would make learning more interesting, since people would have the freedom to choose. what to learn and would help spread knowledge around the world.

Criticism of his work

The main criticisms of Asimov's early work revolved around the fact that he did not address issues of sexuality in his characters and that he did not include extraterrestrial creatures either, which in the eyes of some readers gave his books a certain coldness and difficult scientism to assimilate However, in his later works he tried to offset these criticisms by introducing this theme, either jokingly, as in Playboy and the Slime God, or seriously, as in the novel The Gods Themselves. (The Gods Themselves), written in 1972 and winner of the Hugo and Nébula awards, which seems to have been written as a response to these criticisms. In it he deals extensively with both themes. Asimov was especially satisfied with this work and considered the central part of the novel the best of his writings.

The reason for not including aliens in his works is explained by Asimov himself in one of his books, in one of the comments prior to the story (which, according to the author himself, some readers consider better than the stories themselves). In one of his early stories, Homo Sol , human civilization comes into contact with the Federation , made up of humanoid beings, who are not human. Humans, although more technologically backward, have great potential for expansion and learning. This seemed to please John W. Campbell (Asimov's editor and pre-golden age writer) quite well. However, for Campbell "human" meant, by default, Western North European. This approach was not to the liking of Asimov (of Russian-Jewish origin) and to avoid this type of conflict, he decided to create only human galaxies, in which no reference to races is made.

Others criticized the lack of strong female characters in his early works. Asimov excused himself, citing his initial lack of experience as a practically juvenile writer. However, as he progresses in his work, female characters gain importance, such as Susan Calvin in I, Robot, Noys Lambert in Eternity's End, Arkady in Second Foundation, Bliss in Foundation and Earth, Gladia Solaria in The Robots of Dawn or Dors Venabili as well as Bayta Darell (Foundation and Empire) in the sequels to the original Foundation trilogy.

During the 1980s, engaged by editorial pressures in successive sequels to the Foundation series and at the height of the Cyberpunk movement, Asimov's positive vision of science and technology was reviled by this literary current, more critical of its deviations and abuses.

Accommodations

• The embryonic robot (1966), short film directed by Antonio de Lara, based on the story "Embustero!"
• Halhatatlanság halála (1977), telefilme directed by András Rajnai, based on the novel The End of Eternity
• The Ugly Little Boy (1977), short film directed by Barry Morse and Donald W. Thompson, based on the short novel "The Fool Boy"
• All the Troubles of the World (1978), short film directed by Dianne Haak-Edson, based on the story "All the evils of the world"
• The End of Eternity (1987), film directed by Andrei Yermash, based on the novel The End of Eternity
• Nightfall (1988), film directed by Paul Mayersberg, based on the short novel "Anochecer"
• Robots (1988), film directed by Doug Smith and Kim Takal, based on Robot series
• Feeling 109 (1988), short film directed by Richard Kletter, based on a story by Asimov
• Teach 109 (1989), telefilm directed by Richard Kletter, based on a story by Asimov (the same one by The Android Affair)
• The Android Affair (1995), telefilm led by Richard Kletter, based on a story by Asimov (the same as Teach 109)
• The bicentennial man (1999), film directed by Chris Columbus, based on the short novel "The Bicentennial Man" and the novel Human robot
• Nightfall (2000), film directed by Gwyneth Gibby, based on the short novel "Anochecer"
• Me, robot. (2004), film directed by Alex Proyas, based on ideas of the stories of the Robot series
• Formula of Death (2012), telefilme directed by Behdad Avand Amini, based on the novel The death negotiator
• Spell My Name with an S (2014), short film directed by Samuel Ali, based on the story "Write my name with an S"
• Foundation (2021), series created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, based on Foundation Series
• More science than fiction (2013), series of Jesús Pedro Zamora Bonilla, on TVE-2. Asimov is the protagonist of the first chapter of the documentary series.

Novelizations

• Novel Awesome journey, novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage (1966)

Honors and Awards

In honor of Asimov, the asteroid, (5020) Asimov, and the Asimov crater, on the planet Mars, were named.

Throughout his long literary career he received numerous awards and honors, among which are:

• 1963, Hugo special prize for his articles in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
• 1966, Hugo Award for the best series of science fiction of all time by the Trilogy of the Foundation.
• 1972, James T. Grady Award for Best Scientific Outreach for Introduction to science.
• 1973, Hugo Prize and Nébula Award for Best News The gods themselves.
• 1977, Hugo Prize and Nébula Award for Best Short novel by The bicentennial man.
• 1983, Hugo Award for the best novel by The limits of the Foundation.
• 1992, Hugo Award for the best short novel by Gold.
• 1995, Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Work I. Asimov, A memoir.

In 1965, Asimov had fourteen honorary doctorates from different universities.