Word: asimov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...those are the ones Isaac Asimov is currently studying, seated at his TRS 80, beginning the long trek to Opus 500. Working in his customary routine from 7 a.m. to evening, he will pursue a science fiction novel, provisionally titled Nemesis; a "rather large history of science"; a collection of columns for Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine; and a collaboration with wife Janet on a children's book about Norby, the friendly robot. Every so often, he and Janet will saunter downtown for a look at some Fifth Avenue shopwindows. Royalties and lecture fees bring in a high-six-figure income...
...first of those works was a futuristic novel called Pebble in the Sky, in 1950. "I presented a copy to my father," Asimov remembers. "I think it was then that he finally forgave me my failure to get into medical school ten years before." Actually, he was in medical school -- Boston University School of Medicine -- but as an instructor in biochemistry. The meager salary, plus payments for occasional sci-fi short stories, supported Asimov, his first wife and their son and daughter for ten years. It was then that he decided to break for New York City and a free...
...argues, and "saying that the Japanese have a pollution problem is ! like saying there's a bad leak in your end of the boat." Of course, hundreds of futurists share that insight. Some of them, when pressed hard enough, may even present a solution or two. That is the Asimov difference: without prompting, he offers remedies by the ream. The man who predicted assembly-line robotics in 1939, coined the term psychohistory -- "the prediction of future trends in history through mathematical analysis" -- in 1941, and foresaw the computer revolution in 1950 not only faces tomorrow, he also embraces...
Ebullience does not mean blindness. Asimov is alarmed by overpopulation, with its insatiable demand for natural resources. He is not sanguine about the medical establishment's inability to find a cure for AIDS: "It may just burn itself out the way the bubonic plague did in the London of 1665. But this tragic disease moves much more slowly. It might take a century to disappear." And wars and weapons continually remind him about the fragility of Spaceship Earth. But in the Asimovian view, that fragility is an echo of his personal history. He was felled by a heart attack...
Autobiographies and mysteries, collections of limericks, books on physics and the Bible, Shakespeare and sci- fi -- all bear the byline of the protean author Isaac Asimov...