Isaac Asimov

In 1921, double pneumonia went through Petrovichi, a village in Smolensk Oblast, and killed 16 children. The survivor was a boy whose exact birth date nobody had recorded and who later picked January 2, 1920, for himself. The family sailed from Liverpool on the Baltic and landed in New York on February 3, 1923. His parents ran a succession of Brooklyn candy stores where everyone worked and where the racks held newspapers, magazines and pulps. His father forbade the pulps until the boy pointed out that a magazine with the word Science in its title had to be educational. He finished Boys High at 15. Columbia's unwritten quota on Jewish applicants sent him to its Brooklyn branch instead of its college.

Chemistry carried him a long way before writing took over: a bachelor's in 1939, a master's in 1941, war work as a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, a doctorate in 1948, and a biochemistry post at Boston University in 1949 at 5,000 dollars. By 1952 the writing paid better. The university stopped his teaching in December 1957 for producing no research, let him keep the title, and made him a full professor anyway in 1979. Meanwhile: Nightfall in 1941, the Three Laws of Robotics worked out with the editor John W. Campbell, the Foundation stories from 1942 and the trilogy from 1951, a 1966 Hugo for the best series ever written, The Gods Themselves in 1972. The OED credits him with the word robotics. He published more than 500 books, spanning nine of the ten Dewey categories.

He groped women. Wikipedia puts it plainly, and so did the people who were there: he fondled, kissed and pinched women at conventions and elsewhere without asking, and defended himself by insisting they had cooperated. In 1971 he published a book called The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline Dr. A, in which he wrote that the question was not whether a girl should be touched but merely where, when and how. His biographer Alec Nevala-Lee, drawing on Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison and Frederik Pohl among others, concluded that many of the encounters were plainly non-consensual and that the conduct of the field's most visible man helped set the terms women worked under in it. The man who gave machines three laws about not harming people had no rule for himself.

A heart attack in 1977 led to triple bypass surgery in December 1983, and a transfusion during that operation gave him HIV. The family kept it quiet, afraid the stigma would attach to his wife and children, and when he died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, the cause was given as heart and kidney failure. Ten years later Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed to say what had actually happened, and Janet put it in her edition of his memoir. The books stayed: Foundation reached television in 2021, an asteroid and a Martian crater carry his name, Honda called a robot ASIMO, his papers sit at Boston University. The other record is now in the file with them.

Isaac Asimov's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Nightfall article
  Voted the best science fiction short story ever written by the SFWA in 1968 1941
• I, Robot book
  The positronic robot stories and the Three Laws he built with John W. Campbell 1950
• Foundation book
  First of the trilogy that took the 1966 Hugo for best all-time series 1951
• Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare book
  He said no book he wrote gave him more day-to-day pleasure 1970
• The Gods Themselves book
  Written partly to answer critics who said he could not write sex or aliens. Nebula, Hugo and Locus. 1972
• Foundation's Edge book
  The comeback novel, and a Hugo in 1983 1982

• 1921 aged ~1 Survives the double pneumonia that kills 16 other children in Petrovichi
• February 3, 1923 aged 3 Arrives in New York on the Baltic, aged three His parents spoke Yiddish and English to him and used Russian as a private language.
• 1929 aged ~9 Talks his father into letting him read the pulps in the family candy store The argument was that magazines with Science in the title must be educational.
• September 1941 aged 21 Publishes Nightfall at 21
• July 26, 1942 aged 22 Marries Gertrude Blugerman, five months after a blind date on Valentine's Day They divorced in 1973. He married Janet Jeppson that November.
• December 1957 aged 37 Boston University stops his teaching for producing no research He kept the title, gave the opening lecture each year, and was made a full professor in 1979.
• 1971 aged ~51 Publishes The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline Dr. A The book made a joke of behavior his colleagues had been on the receiving end of.
• December 1983 aged 63 Contracts HIV from a transfusion during triple bypass surgery The family concealed it for fear the stigma would reach his children.
• April 6, 1992 aged 72 Dies in Manhattan at 72 The published cause was heart and kidney failure. The truth came out a decade later.

• Ray Bradbury 1920–2012
  Science fiction writer whose Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles became American classics. fellow Golden Age writer
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. shared the popular science audience with
• Ursula K. Le Guin 1929–2018
  Writer who used speculative fiction to examine gender, power, culture, and alternative social arrangements. contemporary in the field
• Robert H. Goddard 1882–1945
  Built and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket and patented foundational rocket propulsion methods. wrote the rockets he wrote about
• Kurt Vonnegut 1922–2007
  Satirical novelist whose Slaughterhouse-Five became an anti-war classic of 20th-century literature. satirist of the same era