Isaac Asimov - The Man and the Legend

 A tribute to Isaac Asimov, who died on April 6, 1992.  

 
(The review was written close to his death, and was published only among students at the Technion, and on the Hedaan website immediately upon its opening in 1997 of course).
In April 1992 he passed away, prolific and famous among science fiction writers whose mention of his name for three generations brought visions from the future - intergalactic journeys, a superman and the world as it will look 20,000 years from now. This is, of course, the king of the Midwest - Izik Asimov. He was interested in the future, but was a realist and his images of the future reflect the present and the past.

Asimov didn't just write science fiction. He wrote about physics, mathematics, chemistry, in literary journals, and even about the Bible, and you can even find a book of jokes he collected. Asimov demonstrated extensive knowledge in dozens of fields until he was suspected of being a genius, versed in so many different subjects. Asimov himself said in an interview with CNN: "People got the impression that I know everything, but I don't!!! know it all. But I don't want to admit it because I make a living from people thinking I know everything." His brother Stanley, says he had a photographic memory. He would remember everything he read, and years later could give exact quotes. This is a natural talent.

Asimov's parents wanted him to be a doctor. But after failing in his attempt to get accepted to medical school, he went to study chemistry. After that he even taught at Boston University, where he obtained a doctorate in chemistry, but very quickly, at the age of 28 in 1948, he switched to full-time work - writing, which he had started even earlier, when he published his science fiction story in 1938, when he was only 18 years old , but it would not be correct to say that with the termination of his membership in the academic staff of Boston University he stopped studying. the opposite. He studied science all his life. Prof. Bud Foote, a lecturer in English literature and a science fiction expert, who gives a seminar on Asimov at Georgia Tech, says that a good science fiction writer should be a student all his life.

Science fiction is what made him famous. His first story, the one published in Astounding in 38, was "Witness to the Stars", in a story in which Asimov predicts that the fears of war will hold back the technology necessary for space travel even when it is within reach. We are often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?" And one of the examples is given in his book "There is no one here, except...": "I imagine that the person asking the question is convinced that there is some kind of mysterious inspiration that only comes to the world through strange and forbidden means, or that the author is conducting a religious ceremony, horrifying which may include calling the devil. But the answer is in the basket of everything: you can derive an idea from anything if you are prepared to think hard enough and long enough."
Asimov did not recognize the limits set by the scientists - one for chemistry, and the other - for physics. For Asimov, all human thought, all sciences and all human history were his territory. When he was awarded the title of vice president of the international "Menza" organization (the organization of people with a high IQ), he wrote "I suppose I am intelligent, but I have come to the conclusion that I do not know what intelligence is". It's hard to give this thing a label.

Asimov was born in Russia to a shopkeeper father, he was born Jewish, and even though he was an atheist and a rationalist, he never denied his origin, and even bothered to emphasize it from time to time, once he appeared on a TV program filmed on Yom Kippur. The next day a man called him and asked him why, as a Jew, he does not respect the holy day. Asimov replied that he did not know when Yom Kippur was and even if he had known, he would not have changed his plan. When the man insisted on telling him that as a Jew he represents the Jewish people, Asimov said: "You have an advantage over me, you know my name, I don't know your name, Jackson Davenport," the man replied. "Well, then who is hiding his Judaism?" Asimov asked. The man hung up.

He was the best explainer of science, and his eye was sensitive. For example, one of the editors of the "New Scientist", a British weekly dedicated to scientific articles, actually tried to defend Emanuel Volikovsky, when he wrote "During its 200-year flight this year, science gave birth to some successful tricks such as canned food and long-playing records, but in truth , What real value has science contributed to man's seventy years? "Hish Mahar responded in a letter in which I wrote, among other things:"...One of the things that have 'real value' are those seventy years of a person's life... For most of history, the lifespan was closer to thirty. Are we not entitled to expect from you anything but gratitude for that additional forty years of life that you had the opportunity to enjoy?"
To all those who argued that it might be worthwhile to give up the reasons for science and return to the peace of the Middle Ages, he said that before the machines were invented, everything was done by slaves, and if we were to return to the Middle Ages, maybe we would be the slaves?"

Asimov was aware of the advantages but also the disadvantages of science, but he was optimistic: it is a fact that most of the damage and pollution comes to us as a result of the development of science. But despite this, science is not the only creator of problems on earth, but only it has the means to solve them.

According to his critics, Asimov was a gentleman. He abhorred the violence that was a line in many science fiction books. According to Pott he was always ahead of his time. While in all the normal books the Russians were always the bad guys he will locate American-Russian cooperation in various operations. He understood that the Cold War was a temporary thing, and of course - it took place.

The thing that Asimov worried about most of all - the population explosion. In his article "The End" (Fantasia 2000 Issue 13) Asimov calculates the end - if the doubling of the number of humans on Earth continues every 35 years - the total mass of humans - in kilograms - will reach the mass of all matter in the universe within 4856 years! Obviously, there should be a stop to this growth, but how? Whether by way of wars and famine or by way of voluntary birth control. "It is clear to everyone that worldwide birth control will not be easily achieved. There are stumbling blocks. There are important religious bodies that strongly oppose this. There are entrenched social traditions that involve having children with strong national security, with help at home and in the field, with security for old age. There are age-old psychological factors that tie multiple children to a demonstration of male power and female duty. There are new nationalist elements that cause minority groups to see birth control as a means to limit their numbers and see unlimited births as a means to take over the establishment."

Asimov was the inventor of the science of robotics. He published his first story "A Strange Playmate" already in 1940, in which the foundations of the three laws of robotics were laid. The laws were supposed to limit the robots' ability to harm humans, but they actually served as an extensive platform for speculation as to the conflict between them:

The rules are:

A. A robot will never harm a person, either by act or omission.
B. The robot will always obey the instructions of a person, provided that these instructions do not contradict the first law.
third. The robot will maintain its existence, provided that the actions necessary for this do not contradict the first or second law.
In many days about 40 years after the first publication of the Laws of Robotics, Asimov added the law that goes beyond these laws - the Zero Law which states: "Never let a robot cause harm to humanity, either by act or omission." This law is intended to allow robots to save the world and humanity from certain humans, who may wreak havoc on them.

In a profile article of Asimov (Fantasia, issue no. 17), Yohanan Nagel writes that in Asimov, the robot is but one side of man whose main unhappiness is that he lacks the other side. This is what allowed Asimov to build a new type of MDB robot, and make it so rich, simply by introducing into it all the problematics that have troubled the human race in literature since Balzac. But this very thing prevented his imagination from going further. To the strange areas that are beyond human, the areas that, in my opinion, should be aimed at from a good source."

By the way, the only time when Asimov was humble, was when he attributed the formulation of the laws of robotics to Campbell, but Campbell claimed that they were folded into Asimov's stories. Campbell also gave him the idea for what many consider his most successful story - Sunset. He quoted to Asimov Emerson's hypothesis: "If the stars appear once in a thousand years - how great will be the wonder of human beings, how great will be their adoration that will preserve many generations, for the city of God."

His next success was the Mossad series in which he tries to recreate a futuristic world that is nothing but a projection of the past (the Roman Empire). The foundation for this was already laid in the book "The End of Time" which, both in Nagel's opinion and in my opinion, is one of Asimov's best long books.

Asimov sold his first story, as mentioned, in 1938 to the editor of "Amazing Stories" Hugo Gernsback. And since then he hasn't stopped writing for 53 years. He didn't stop writing on vacations, while traveling. The only thing that made him happy was to sit at the typewriter and write. When asked if writing is easy? He said: "Yes, it is very easy. It's my hobby like playing golf for people who like golf. The only problem is that I get paid for it, so many people call it "work".

Was Asimov a good writer? Does quantity equal quality? Asimov hoped yes, that out of quantity would also emerge quality stories. Prof. Bad Foot says "There was a kind of poetry in the universe, and he had the ability to communicate with it." Yohanan Nagel writes about Asimov that he is (so far) bad as a writer, but good as a science fiction writer, and one of the most systematic minds in the history of science fiction. In one of the interviews, Asimov was asked what he would do if he knew he only had six months to live. His answer was: "prints faster".

What will be left on the shelves of Asimov's work a hundred years from now? Maybe four or five books, but Pott is sure they won't be novels. When Asimov was asked what he thought of the approaching 21st century, he replied: "Nothing special will happen, because history does not work in leaps and bounds, but if we do, we will at least know that we passed the terrible twentieth century in peace, and we will have to find solutions to many of the problems that arose in it. I personally will be happy if I get to live on January 2000, XNUMX because the next day will be my eightieth birthday.

Isaac Asimov, 1920-1992

Asimov on:

* Evolution: "I suspect that if it were possible not to generalize man in this matter, there would never have been any problem in accepting the theory of biological evolution."

* On faith in God: "Faith does not change and nothing. All the hundreds of millions of people who believed in their time that the earth was flat, were unable to straighten out its sphericity even by a centimeter. What is needed is some logical line of reasoning, preferably one that begins with observable facts..." "...If I ask if I believe in God, I suppose my answer must be that the moment I am presented with indisputable evidence of his existence - I will accept it.

* Astrology: "Towards the end of the 17th century, with the establishment of a faithful image of the heliocentric solar system, astrology eventually became a pseudo-science. No one can imagine that the entire vast universe known to us today is organized only to serve as a key to the fate of our insignificant speck of dust. That so many men and women believe it, nevertheless, is a remarkable expression of the manner in which human folly can celebrate its triumph."

* On life after death: none of the ideas I heard, neither about the underworld nor about the garden of heaven, seemed to me to assume the opinion of a rational and cultured mind, and I prefer nothing.

* On O'Neill's space colony plan: "NASA estimates that the first colony will cost about one hundred billion dollars spread over fifty years. That is two billion dollars a year. Americans spend a lot more on cigarettes and liquor, and that's without even counting the financial damage to the people hit by drunk drivers? What about the monetary values ​​of the buildings that caught fire and the people killed in fires caused by shutters? What about lung cancer and heart attacks caused by smoking?

* On the new discoveries in the solar system: in the thirty (this was written in the eighties) years that have passed since the founding of the magazine for science fiction and fantasy, we have lost the dark side and the light side of Mercury, the existence of life on the surface of a planet other than Earth, we have gained the faster rotation of Mercury and in the slower rotation of Venus, in the liquid nature of Jupiter, in the rings of Jupiter and Uranus (and now also Neptune), in craters on the surface of Mercury, Mars, Phobos, Damos, Ganymede and Callisto, in tectonic plates on the surface of the Earth and possibly also the moon Europa, in volcanic activity on Penny Io, with additional moons for Jupiter and Saturn (as well as Uranus and Neptune) and a new satellite for the shrunken Pluto. Only thirty years, what will the next thirty years reveal to us?"

* About the size of the solar system: When the time comes and we can establish astronomical space stations at the edge of the solar system, we may discover several past plutonic planets, and the solar system will reach the large dimensions it surely has.

* On science fiction: "Science fiction, of course, is not science, at most it has a spice of science, which is only a secondary part of all perfection, since the interest in every story must be centered on the people in it, their actions and reactions. Furthermore, the science included or discussed in science fiction stories may be simplified, corrected or even distorted, according to the needs of the plot. Therefore, the science in the story (alas for human frivolity!) may be completely wrong, due to the ignorance of the writer - who is rarely a scientist himself. However, science, as it is revealed in the stories of the Madev, whether it is wrong or whether it is true, appeals to our curiosity to know where the accelerated pace of transformations is leading us, a pace that scientific development has made possible and inevitable.

* More on science fiction: I am not sure that I would have been able to break into the world of science fiction in 1979 using only the same talent that helped me break into the field in 1939, but this fact should not discourage new writers - they study in better schools in 1979 than I studied in ..1939

* About UFOs: "One day I received in the mail something called 'Symposium on the topic of UFOs - 1973' and in it an article by Ahad T.S. Friedman and a section of it was entitled "Science Fiction vs. Etymology". beginning with the words
The following: 'Many people are surprised when I point out that two of the greatest science fiction writers - Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov, are both very strong in their views against UFOs. The fact that Friedman meets people who are surprised by this indicates, one assumes, the level of the circles in which he circulates. Finally, why does the fact that we are science fiction writers make people assume that we have lost our reason and that we must believe in any mystical belief, which has some elements close to the subjects of science fiction? The testimonies of individual eyewitnesses in the dark about UFOs remind me of the joke about the man who barely remembers what he barely saw.

* On the benefit of discovering extraterrestrial intelligence: "I believe there will be benefit from this. One example of a possible benefit. The very fact that such a civilization exists, and especially if we discover that it is much more advanced than ours, will prove to us that it is possible to develop an advanced civilization without committing suicide.

* On Asimov's Addendum to Parkinson's Law: For a while it seemed to me that without all the academic duties in fact, and with my free time in my hands, I could finally write everything I had to write and still have a lot of time left for games and amusements. It didn't work that way. One of Parkinson's laws is: "work expands to fill the free time". This was the case in my case. In a very short time I discovered that my work productivity was no greater with full-time work than it was with part-time work, and I very quickly formulated Asimov's addition to Parkinson's Law: "In ten hours a day you have the leisure to fall twice as far behind on your obligations as in five hours a day."

* On his doubt in writing: in his book "Opus" 200 written in 79 (in the meantime he had managed to write over two hundred other books): "According to the Guinness Book of Records, an Englishman named Charles Hamilton and an American named Charles Andrews published, each separately , about one hundred million words, while my output so far reaches only fifteen million words... Both the British writer John Kreiser and the Belgian writer George Simenon published, each separately, in their lifetime, five hundred books, and it is not at all probable that even A long life and constant writing will bring me beyond the .400 limit. Despite all this, I do not work with a feeling of failure. Those that have passed me in terms of quantity are (as far as I know) limited horizons. Their specialty is fiction, and usually only one or two kinds of it, so they achieve their speed by traveling on well-oiled tracks. On the other hand, I write not only fiction but also non-fiction books. I write diverse types of non-fiction intended for a wide range of readers."

* On the snobbery of the scientists: it is not surprising that scientists see themselves as belonging to the intellectual aristocracy. To reach a high level of professionalism in science, one needs intelligence, curiosity, dedication and patient training, which are not common qualities, and since they are not common, some consider them superior.

Sources

All of Asimov's articles published in "Fantasy" 2000 and "Cosmos - Asimov's Selection".

An article on Asimov by Yohanan Nagel - Fantasia 2000 Issue 17

"Opus" 200 by Isaac Asimov. Hyperion Publishing. 1981

"There is no one here except" by Isaac Asimov. - Hoch Mesda. 1980