In five minutes: who was Isaac Asimov?
Isaac Asimov was an American science fiction writer and a trained biochemist. If you want one sentence: he turned two big questions into stories, "How would we live with thinking machines?" and "Could history ever be predicted?" The first question gave us the robot stories and the Three Laws of Robotics. The second gave us the Foundation series, about a fading galactic empire and a mathematician who tries to shorten the dark age that follows.
He also wrote more than 500 books in total, from crime stories to guides to the Bible and Shakespeare, and a huge number of popular science books. Together with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein, he is counted among the Big Three of twentieth-century English-language science fiction. For the wider story of the genre, see our hub, History of Science Fiction.
Life and career
Asimov was born in 1920 in Petrovichi, a village in Russia. His family emigrated to the United States in 1923, when he was three, and he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. His parents ran candy stores, and the shelves held cheap pulp magazines, including science fiction. Young Isaac read them eagerly and began writing his own stories as a teenager.
His first story was published in 1939, the same year he finished his chemistry degree at Columbia University. He went on to earn a PhD in biochemistry there in 1948, and during the Second World War he worked as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. After the war he taught at Boston University School of Medicine. In 1958 he stopped teaching to write full time, although he kept his university title.
The most important person in his early career was John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding magazine. Campbell pushed young writers to build stories on believable science and sharp ideas, and Asimov later credited him with helping shape the Three Laws. In 1941 Asimov's short story "Nightfall", about a world whose people almost never see darkness, made his name. He died on 6 April 1992, aged 72.
The robot stories and the Three Laws
Before Asimov, robots in fiction were often menaces, in the tradition of Frankenstein. Asimov grew tired of this and called it the Frankenstein complex. In his stories, robots are machines built by engineers, with safety rules built in, just like any other tool.
Those rules are the Three Laws of Robotics. In plain words: a robot may not harm a human being or, by doing nothing, let a human come to harm; a robot must obey human orders unless they conflict with the first law; and a robot must protect itself unless that conflicts with the first two. The laws are stated clearly in the story "Runaround" (1942).
The clever part is that the laws rarely work as planned. Most Asimov robot plots are puzzles: why did this robot freeze, lie or behave strangely when all three laws seem to be obeyed? A detective-style investigator, often the robopsychologist Susan Calvin, works out which rules are pulling against each other. The best-known collection is I, Robot (1950), which links nine earlier stories. Later Asimov added a "zeroth" law, protecting humanity as a whole, in Robots and Empire (1985). He is also credited with the first use of the word robotics, in the story "Liar!" (1941). For a closer look at the rules themselves, read Three Laws of Robotics.
The Foundation series and psychohistory
Asimov began the Foundation stories in 1942, and the first book, Foundation, appeared in 1951, followed by Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953). The idea came partly from his reading of the fall of the Roman Empire. In the story, a huge galactic empire is slowly collapsing. A scientist named Hari Seldon uses a made-up science called psychohistory, which uses mathematics to predict the behaviour of enormous populations, to see that the fall cannot be stopped. What he can do is shorten the dark age that follows from thirty thousand years to one thousand, by setting up two groups, the Foundations, at the edges of the galaxy.
The books are not about heroes with big guns. They are about people who solve crises with trade, religion, politics and clever thinking. Psychohistory works only for large groups, never for one person, and the series tests that idea when a single unexpected figure, a mutant called the Mule, appears and disrupts Seldon's plan. Asimov returned to the series in the 1980s with Foundation's Edge (1982), which won the Hugo Award, and later wrote prequels. In 1966 the original trilogy received a special Hugo for Best All-Time Series.
Other works worth knowing
- "Nightfall" (1941): a short story about a planet with several suns and a once-in-thousands-of-years darkness. It is often chosen as one of the best science fiction short stories.
- The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957): murder mysteries set in the future, in which a human detective works with a robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw.
- The End of Eternity (1955): a time-travel novel about people who try to improve history from outside it.
- "The Last Question" (1956): a short story that follows one question about the universe through billions of years. Asimov named it among his own favourites.
- The Gods Themselves (1972): a novel about contact with a parallel universe, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Outside fiction, Asimov wrote clear popular science, from chemistry to astronomy, and also books on history, the Bible and Shakespeare. Many readers first met him through these explanations, written in the same plain, friendly voice as his stories. A science magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, was started in 1977 and carries his name.
Where to start reading
- You like short stories: begin with I, Robot or with "Nightfall".
- You like detective stories: read The Caves of Steel.
- You like big ideas and politics: read Foundation. It is a set of linked stories, so each chapter jumps forward in time.
- You are new to science fiction: his plain style makes him an easy author to try first.
Asimov's style is simple on purpose. Characters talk a lot, and there is little description or action. If you prefer vivid worlds and heavy atmosphere, you may find his books dry; if you like ideas and puzzles, that plainness is the point.
Common misconceptions
- "The Three Laws are real rules for AI." They are a storytelling device. Real robots and AI systems are not built on three sentences, and Asimov's own stories are about how such rules fail. Compare them with Clarke's three laws, which are about technology and perception, not machines' behaviour.
- "Psychohistory can predict anyone's future." In the books it works only on huge populations, in the way gas laws describe many molecules but not one. It is fiction, not an actual science.
- "The 2004 film I, Robot is the book." The film borrows the title and the Three Laws, but its plot is mostly new. The book is a set of separate puzzle stories.
- "Asimov only wrote science fiction." He wrote across science, history and literature, and his nonfiction was as important to his fame as his novels.
Read next
- Three Laws of Robotics: what each law says and why the stories keep breaking them.
- Clarke's three laws: the other famous set of three rules from the Big Three, about the future of technology.
- History of Science Fiction: where Asimov fits in the long story of the genre.
