Focus on Isaac Asimov
October 30th, 2006 by Alan Chudnow
Isaac Asimov is one of the great masters of the Science Fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, is referred to as one of the “Big Three” of SF writers. A highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer, Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters or postcards. He is, to my knowledge, the only author to have published works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System with the exception of Philosophy.
Asimov’s early career, dominated by Science Fiction short stories, began in 1939. Eleven years later saw the publication of his first SF novel Pebble In The Sky (Doubleday 1950). Arguably Asimov’s most famous works are the Foundation Series, the Galactic Empire Series and the Robot Series. Much later in his career he ended up tying both the Empire and Robot series into the Foundation Series. In addition to his numerous works in the Science Fiction field he wrote a number of wonderful fantasies and a prodigious amount of lay science and non-fiction work.
Two and a half years after publishing his first short story, “Marooned Off Vesta”, in the March 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, he published the short story “Nightfall” in the September 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It has been described as one of the most famous science-fiction stories of all time. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted “Nightfall” the best science fiction short story ever written. It is an archetypical example of social science fiction, a term coined by Asimov to describe a new trend, led by authors such as himself and Robert Heinlein, away from hardware and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.
The Foundation Series is among Asimov’s most famous fiction work and some scholars consider the collected works to be the most influential science fiction series in the genre. The stories recount the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in a universe of the far future. The series features Asimov’s fictional science of Psychohistory in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted by a series of complex metrics.
The first of the stories, “Foundation” appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (May 1942). The stories were later collected in the Foundation Trilogy books – Foundation (Gnome Press 1951), Foundation and Empire (Gnome Press 1952), and Second Foundation (Gnome Press 1953).
Many years later, he continued the series with Foundation’s Edge (Doubleday 1982) and Foundation and Earth (Doubleday 1986) and even later wrote two novels preceding the original trilogy, Prelude to Foundation (Doubleday 1988) and Forward the Foundation (Doubleday 1993).
His Robot Series stories began with the publication of “Strange Playfellow” in the September 1940 issue of Super Science Stories. The story was originally titled “Robbie” by Asimov and subsequent republishing now uses this title. Many of the Robot stories were later collected in I, Robot (Gnome Press 1950).
The Robot stories are perhaps most famous for the set of rules of ethics for robots and intelligent machines known as the Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov’s Three Laws influenced almost all subsequent writers and thinkers in their treatment of robots, androids and artificial intelligence to such an extent that even today such stories are examined with them in mind.
The Galactic Empire Series consist of three novels and one short story, Pebble In The Sky (Doubleday 1950), The Stars, Like Dust (Doubleday 1951), The Currents of Space (Doubleday 1952) and “Blind Alley” (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1945). They are a set of loosely connected stories set in the same universe as the Foundation tales. Asimov created an additional connection between all three series of stories in Robots and Empire (Doubleday 1985).
On Collecting Asimov
The sheer volume of Isaac Asimov’s work makes any attempt to own a complete collection of his work practically impossible by an individual collector. A good alternative to attempting a complete collection is to limit your acquisitions to a particular subset of the author’s work. Restricting yourself to those works of Asimov’s that won Hugo or Nebula Awards is one option and would provide an excellent cross-section of his works as well as providing a roadmap of hard science stories in the genre during his career.
Limiting a collection to a single publisher of first editions is another possibility. A collection restricted to Doubleday first editions of Asimov’s science fiction and fantasy works, for example, would consist of about forty books, a very manageable number that would still include some rare and harder to find volumes.
Fortunately finding many of his books in good condition is relatively easy but early editions and first editions can be expensive. Even so, searching on abebooks.com for first editions with dust jackets, under $100.00 and limited to the keywords “science and fiction” yielded over 2000 entries! A similar search limited to under $25.00 returned about 1600 entries. Most collectors will be able to find a number of interesting volumes within their budget.
great post.
it’s a shame that more sci fi readers skip the classics. they should read them first, then they would know who of the new writers are actually orginal voices.