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Happy birthday, Isaac!
As the OED points out, today is Isaac Asimov's 100th birthday.
Isaac Asimov was a formative influence on me. He was a decent science fiction writer (with occasional flashes of brilliance -- The Gods Themselves springs to mind), a good mystery writer, and an AWESOME non-fiction writer. For umpty-ump years he had a monthly column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which he could discuss pretty much whatever topic he wished, and he used that freedom to the fullest, covering topics from biochemistry (his Ph.D. subject) to astrophysics to geography to etymology to history to myth to... pretty much anything. Periodically these columns were collected and published in book form, and throughout my pre-teen and teenage years a good fraction of my bookshelf was these books of collected free-form articles, which I read and re-read voraciously. Another good chunk of my leisure reading was his book-length non-fiction, e.g. The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire.
And of course, he was mind-bogglingly prolific. It took me several years to write a textbook; he wrote at least two books each year from 1950 to 1993, and frequently half a dozen or more in a year, a mix of textbooks, popular non-fiction, and fiction.
Back to the science fiction, for which he's probably best known. He was never a master of character or dialogue, which was fine with me because I wasn't either; his science fiction was, in the classic John Campbell mold, "here's a cool scientific idea; how would people react to it and use it?" The aforementioned The Gods Themselves, the Foundation trilogy (and prequels and sequels), The End of Eternity, the short story "Nightfall", and no doubt dozens more that I'm not thinking of right now, are all splendid examples of this.
Anyway, thank you, Isaac.
Isaac Asimov was a formative influence on me. He was a decent science fiction writer (with occasional flashes of brilliance -- The Gods Themselves springs to mind), a good mystery writer, and an AWESOME non-fiction writer. For umpty-ump years he had a monthly column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which he could discuss pretty much whatever topic he wished, and he used that freedom to the fullest, covering topics from biochemistry (his Ph.D. subject) to astrophysics to geography to etymology to history to myth to... pretty much anything. Periodically these columns were collected and published in book form, and throughout my pre-teen and teenage years a good fraction of my bookshelf was these books of collected free-form articles, which I read and re-read voraciously. Another good chunk of my leisure reading was his book-length non-fiction, e.g. The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire.
And of course, he was mind-bogglingly prolific. It took me several years to write a textbook; he wrote at least two books each year from 1950 to 1993, and frequently half a dozen or more in a year, a mix of textbooks, popular non-fiction, and fiction.
Back to the science fiction, for which he's probably best known. He was never a master of character or dialogue, which was fine with me because I wasn't either; his science fiction was, in the classic John Campbell mold, "here's a cool scientific idea; how would people react to it and use it?" The aforementioned The Gods Themselves, the Foundation trilogy (and prequels and sequels), The End of Eternity, the short story "Nightfall", and no doubt dozens more that I'm not thinking of right now, are all splendid examples of this.
Anyway, thank you, Isaac.