Science fiction author Isaac Asimov is one of the best-known and most successful authors to emerge from the Golden Age of science fiction. The author of nearly 500 books (albeit many of them anthologies or collaborative efforts), he managed to publish an astonishingly broad array of works: mystery, poetry, science, humor, horror, literary criticism, mythology - even guides to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Background
Ethnicity:
His parents, Anna Rachel and Judah Asimov, were Jews.
Isaac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia (near Smolensk) in 1920, around 2 January. He was the son of Judah Asimov and Anna Asimov who immigrated to the United States in Brooklyn, New York when Isaac was three where they owned a series of candy stores. Although his parents, Anna Rachel and Judah Asimov, were Jews, they did not raise the young Isaac to be religious. As a youngster, growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Asimov soon showed himself to be remarkably bright, with an extraordinary memory. By the time he was five he had taught himself to read. And despite the family's frequent moves (selling one candy store in order to buy another in a new location), he was always at the head of his class, and frequently being promoted. He skipped half of kindergarten, half a year of first grade, and half a year of third grade. Being quick to perceive the lesson before the teacher had gotten more than part way through it, he often became bored in class.
At the same time he was socially and physically awkward. He never learned how to ride a bike or swim, and if he spent even ten minutes out in the sun his skin would burn fiercely. He was also a claustrophiliac, having a peculiar liking for small, enclosed spaces. At age nine he began working in the family store where he discovered science fiction novels, by eleven he had begun his first novel.
Education
Asimov’s childhood was spent reading passionately. He explored all the libraries within his reach and was a perfect description of the term bookworm. Asimov graduated from Columbia University in 1939 with a degree in chemistry and then also obtained a PhD from the same university in 1948. He later accepted the offer of lectureship at Boston University where he was made an associate professor of biochemistry in 1955.
Career
Asimov’s literary career started when his contributions to science fiction magazines started publishing in 1939. Night Fall, a short story Asimov wrote in 1941 proved to be his ladder to literary success. The story is based on a planet where night appears only once in every 2049 years. Till now it is considered by some to be the best science fiction short story ever to surface. His first book, Pebble in the Sky was published in 1950. His most famous set of novels is a trilogy namely Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation (1951-1953). This space based trilogy narrates the tale of a futuristic galactic empire. I Robot (1950) which was also filmed in 2004 is another brilliant piece of work by Asimov which focuses on developing rules and ethics for artificially intelligent machines. Some other noted fictional works by Isaac Asimov include The Stars, like Dust (1951), The Currents of Space (1952), The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), Earth Is Room Enough (1957), Foundation’s Edge (1982), and The Robots of Dawn (1983).
Religion
Isaac Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, and a rationalist. He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he railed against pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. During his childhood, his father and mother observed Orthodox Jewish traditions, though not as stringently as they had in Petrovichi; they did not, however, force their beliefs upon young Isaac. Thus, he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the Torah represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the Iliad recorded Greek mythology. As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.
