I is for Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite authors. (He is also, incidentally, one of my favorite people.)

I remember in elementary school hearing that he had died. It was 1992. Garfield, earlier that year, had celebrated Isaac Asimov's birthday. It didn't mean much to me.

A few years later, I came across a short story collection of his that Mom kept around the house, "Nine Tomorrows." I read some of the stories, but remember little about them. What I do remember was reading a snippet of one of the longer short stories in PASS (a gifted class that took the place of Reading) in sixth grade. I was impressed.

The story is of a young boy in a society a billion years in the future. Education (and subsequent careers) are highly structured, and everyone learns by having a computer automatically feed people all the information they'd ever need directly. First, at a young age, they learn how to read. Then, at 18, the computer judges what career they'd be best for and, accordingly, they receive appropriate information. He learns to read and, on a whim, decides to obtain books on a field he's interested in (I think it's quantum mechanics). He thinks it'll give him an edge, but no one else understands. When he gets there on the 18th birthday, they can't take him in. It turns out he has a brain different from the others. One of only thousands in an entire empire, he becomes an innovator, one who invents. Perfectly normal snippet, and interesting for the time. But the story went on from there.

The boy (called that now out of convenience) learns for a few years, but learns enough to grow rather dissatisfied with the societal order. He decides to go to an intellectual Olympics, a place where prospective employers choose employees. While there, he sees his old friend struggling with a chemistry presentation. He loses. When they talk later, it turns out that the methods he was imprinted with have proven obsolete. He can't be imprinted again. He can't get a job. The hero decides to try and teach him, but soon authorities learn about this.

I won't ruin the end because I can't remember it, but it had many things I love about Asimov: science, discordian social orders, advanced technologies, human heroes, rather cerebral discussions, and a setting eerie in its familiarity. I was hooked, and in the proceeding years I would buy nearly all of his novels, several short story collections, a small bit of his nonfiction, and (most recently) a rare short story compendium with a female cyborg on the back cover.

"Rather cerebral" might have caught your eye as sounding rather boring. For me at least, Asimov manages to make his dialogues sound rather natural and plainspoken. Because the stories use speculative science fiction and often involve government agents, pilots, and scientists, it can also end up being technical, political, sociological, or academic. I'm cool with that. Then, one way to describe the arc of his stories is a repeating series: description, dialogue, action. Some stories err on the side of dialogue. For me, Asimov's style is one that's refreshingly unadorned.

As a science fiction writer, his ideas have always been fresh and ingenius. He made robots into human-like entities when the usual trend was to make them monsters. He's explored several different implications of time-travel, from its use as a universal monitoring device to their ability to change time (or, paradoxically, to enable time to be as it is). I could go on and on.

He's also an ingenius person. I'd recommend his autobiographical letters, "I, Asimov." For more, there's always "It's Been a Good Life." In them is a man with a sharp memory, witty intellect, several quirks, and a generalist interest in everything. He has a PhD in chemistry, but left a university position because (first) his interests were in teaching instead of the original research that was so encouraged and (second) because he was getting paid more to write. He's written and edited tons of nonfiction books, subjects ranging between limericks, the Bible, science, history, and miscellaneous trivia. Now, he's not a flawless man. It's obvious that he's proud and boisterous and sometimes makes poor decisions despite the veneer he puts on them. Nonetheless, he's a true renaissance man, and I admire him.

Perhaps I should admire a famous medievalist (and I do: Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, amongst others). Perhaps I should admire a prominent literary theorist instead (I like several). Asimov and I have roots. I liked Asimov when I wanted to be a scientist. He's been with me for a long while now. Now that I have chosen to study literature instead, I only like him more. His ideas inspire me. His stories are interesting, and occasionally (as in The Ugly Little Boy) fill my soul. He helped form my ethical compass, my appreciation of science, my love of computers, my environmental awareness, and my positivism. I owe all this to a man I first met through a Garfield comic.