Word: asimov
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...Asimov is all too frequently barraged by those who confuse Shirley MacLaine's utterances with thought. The interrogations have to do with UFOs, alien visitors, astrological predictions and the healing power of crystals. "Cab drivers mostly," he says, "and passersby. I guess these are what causes them to recognize me." The term these refers to a pair of voluminous sideburns, and they make it impossible to mistake the wearer for anyone else, except possibly Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the U.S. New Age inquisitors remain one of the few puzzles Asimov is unable to crack: "I have never...
...same light hand is evident in the thousands of books that fill his apartment near Central Park. From his 33rd-floor aerie, he and his second wife Janet, a retired psychiatrist, overlook the city they seldom leave. The proof of Asimov's immobility lies in the terrace situated some 40 ft. from his study. Janet tends the little garden. Incredibly, he has never set foot on the terrace, for the man whose Foundation Trilogy centers on a Galactic Empire and ( interplanetary voyages is terrified of heights. He has flown only once: "It was in the Army, and to refuse meant...
...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...