In his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, which his wife Janet prepared for publication ten years after his death, it is explained to his readers that he died due to the HIV virus he contracted from the blood used during heart surgery.
Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, whose real name is Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, was born on January 2, 1920, to a Jewish family in Russia, the child of Judah Ozimov and Anna Rachel Asimov (Berman). The family immigrated to the United States when Isaac was just 3 years old. They settled in Brooklyn, New York. Isaac Asimov, as his new name here, cannot learn Russian, as Yiddish (the language used by Ashkenazi Jews) and English are constantly spoken at home. However, he learns to read and write in English even before he goes to school. Thus begins a passion for reading that will never end throughout his life. However, his father is quite conservative, he wants Isaac to read religious books and become a rabbi.
Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.
When Isaac is six years old, his father, Judah Asimov, buys a candy store. The shop has magazines he can read, but for Isaac, who spends his spare time at his father's candy store, these magazines are forbidden. Because, according to father Judah Asimov, these magazines fill the minds of children with a lot of nonsense. According to father Asimov, the works in the public library are suitable for reading and do not pose any danger to his son. Therefore, he presents him with a library card. From that day on, Isaac regularly goes to the library with his mother. He reads everything he can find, from Greek Mythology to Shakespeare, from Charles Dickens to popular science books.
He graduated from Brooklyn Boys High School at the age of 15. He enters Columbia University at the age of 16. He chooses Zoology first, but because he is allergic to cats, he quits mid-year and chooses Chemistry. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. After graduation, he concentrates on medicine for his doctorate at the same university but fails. In 1941, he started his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the same university. When World War II broke out, he worked as a civilian officer at the Naval Research Center for three years between 1942-1945. He transferred to the US Army in October 1945 at the age of 26 and served for nine months.
After completing his military service, he completed his unfinished doctorate at Boston Medical School. Asimov, who accepted the offer of the university administration to be a faculty member, remained a teacher at the school until 1958. Asimov, who had been interested in science fiction and wrote stories since his 20s, was also able to earn money by writing for many magazines and newspapers. Asimov makes a radical decision and leaves the university and chooses to write.
Isaac Asimov publishes his first book, The Foundation, in 1942. Originally written in the form of short stories and later made into a trilogy, the work is a galactic epic inspired by Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The series tells the events that develop around the ingenious plan of a mathematician named Hari Seldon, who is also the inventor of psychohistory, spanning thousands of years. In 1966, he won the one-off Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Trilogy Award by Hugo, the most prestigious award in the science fiction world, surpassing The Lord of the Rings.
The Foundation trilogy, besides the factors such as robots, interplanetary travel, telekinetic powers, and hologram, which is expected from a classic science fiction work, also has a philosophical depth in terms of its subject. Asimov, who added four more books to the trilogy upon insistence, draws a universe in which humans have settled a galaxy of 25 million planets in the very distant future and these planets are ruled by the Galactic Empire.
The robots in Asimov's stories are not beings who devise insidious plans to destroy humanity. It is very different from the monster robot theme commonly used in the science fiction literature of the period. His robots are builders, they serve their masters, and most importantly, they are subject to the famous Three Robot Laws. Asimov's Three Laws of Robots, inspired by John W Campbell, Editor of Astounding Magazine:
- A robot may not injure or allow a human being to be harmed.
- A robot must obey a human's orders as long as they do not conflict with the first rule.
- A robot is obliged to protect its own existence as long as it does not conflict with the first and second rules.
One of the important books of Asimov, who wrote more than 500 books, I Robot was published in 1950. The book includes 21st-century predictions with interviews with robo-psychologist Dr Susan Calvin and consists of nine short stories. The Robot Series is created by adding 4 more novels to this compilation of stories.
Caves of Steel was published in 1954, where science fiction and detective were intertwined. In a dark underground universe covered with metal domes, people living in steel caves do not come to light. In fact, seeing the light of day and going out in the open air is very scary for most people. The vast majority of them hate robots, they see robots as a threat to take away people's jobs. Colonists, on the other hand, believe that the overpopulated and dwindling supply can only be saved by robots. On such a planet, the best name in the field of robotics is killed and events develop.
In 1959, at the suggestion of his friend Arthur Obermayer, scientist and director of the American Missile Program, Asimov received an offer from DARPA (the U.S. Department of Defense Agency responsible for producing new technologies to be used by the Army) to join the American National Missile Program. But Asimov rejected this offer, thinking that the ton of confidential information that would come from being included in such an institution would prevent him from writing freely. But he writes articles for DARPA under the name of Creative Thoughts and presents his thoughts.
The Gods Themselves of 1972, which won the Nebula Award for the fourth time, is his favorite work, according to a letter written by Asimov in 1982. The main subject of the work is the inter-universe energy exchange and the problems it creates. Aliens in a parallel universe decide to use our universe to supply energy to their extinct universe. But it also poses a serious danger to our universe.
His work, Naked Sun, which was published in 1975 and is also the second book of the Robot Series, is a mix of science fiction and detective fiction. Successfully fulfilling their mission on Earth, Elijah Baley and R Daneel Olivaw set out to illuminate a murder on the planet Solaria this time. But due to the different social structures of the planet, unexpected setbacks will happen to them.
His masterpiece Robots of Dawn, which would become the genius of the science fiction world, was published in 1983. The novel centers around the death of a robot on the planet Aurora. Like the first two books in the Robot series, this third book features Elijah Baley and his partner, R Daneel Olivaw. Asimov dedicates this book to Marvin Lee Minsky and Joseph Frederick Engelberger, who made major contributions to robotics.
1985's Robots and Empire is the last novel in the Robot Series. Unlike the first three books, Elijah Baley is not included in the book. Instead, we encounter one of his distant descendants, a trader named Daneel Giskard Baley (DG Baley for short). More than 160 years have passed since Elijah Baley's death. It is a work that connects the Robot Series to the Imperial Series. It is especially important in terms of explaining the emergence and first use of the Zeroth Law.
Isaac Asimov, a pacifist against war and military power, was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 1984. After that year, he was the honorary chairman of this association until his death. In the last period of his life, he also wrote popular science books on everything from astrophysics to Newtonian physics, to the world of biochemistry, from Einstein's theory of relativity to Heisenberg's uncertainty theory. We can list such books as follows:
- Chemicals of Life (1954)
- Inside the Atom (1956)
- The World of Nitrogen (1958)
- Life and Energy (1962)
- The Human Brain (1964)
- The Neutrino (1966)
- Science, Numbers, and I (1968)
- Our World in Space (1974)
Asimov dies of kidney failure on April 6, 1992. In his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, which his wife Janet prepared for publication ten years after his death, it is explained to his readers that he died due to the HIV virus he contracted from the blood used during heart surgery. Honda company names its robot produced in its laboratories Asimo. A crater on Mars is also called Asimo.