Even the first time he met Jeppson in , Asimov later admitted, he cracked a blue joke. As Jeppson proffered a book for Asimov to sign, he asked about her field. Asimov enjoyed substantive, mutually rewarding relationships with peers like Jeppson, Judy-Lynn del Rey, and Jennifer Brehl, a Doubleday staffer in the s when she impressed Asimov with her insights.
The answer is tied up in personal and social history. As a self-conscious, sexually inexperienced young man, Asimov learned that his lightning wit was a social lubricant.
From early on, he sprinkled titillating quips into his banter, using his physical ungainliness to frame his lascivious persona as a colossal joke. This was never a safe prospect, though. He experienced mutual interest often enough to reinforce his behavior, but he failed to respect the line between reciprocal flirtation and harassment. By the following year, Asimov had moved out, divorce negotiations were underway, and he was back on Cavett wearing a bra on his face to promote The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.
He was proud of his fictional robopsychologist Susan Calvin—but the cost that character paid for her extraordinary abilities was to have her physical unattractiveness constantly remarked upon. Nor is that attention always on characters like Artemisia, a stereotypically gorgeous young woman ready to be painted for the cover of a pulp. He laughed loudly at her flush. Do you want a drink, Bay? After focusing largely on nonfiction throughout the s and 70s, Asimov returned prolifically to fiction in the 80s, a more open era.
He became more frank, but seemed incapable of writing about sexuality in a warm, human manner. A rare Asimov novel from the 70s, The Gods Themselves , centered on the somewhat abstract sexual practices of a non-humanoid alien race. A typical late-career passage comes in Foundation and Earth when a starship lands on a secluded world and Trevize appraises the topless woman who appears to greet the visitors. He liked individuality and stayed in groups where he enjoyed giving speeches. As a free thinker, Asimov saw sci-fi literature serving as a pool where ideas and hypotheses are expressed with unrestricted intellectual freedom.
Young Asimov was fascinated with science fiction magazines which were sold at his parent's general store. Around the age of 11 he wrote eight chapters of a fiction about adventures of young boys in a small town. Asimov had known Janet Opal Jeppson since She was a psychoanalyst and also a writer of science fiction for children.
Correspondence with her convinced Asimov that she was the right kind of person for him. In Asimov became a full-time writer and gave up his teaching duties because his income from his literary works was much greater than his professor's salary. In he began his teaching career at the Medical School of Boston University, becoming assistant professor in , and associate professor in Army and was transfered to the island of Oahu and was destined to participate in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in July After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.
Asimov met Gertrude Blugherman on a blind date on Valentine's Day in February of , they got married in July of the same year. Asimov shot to fame in with 'Nightfall', a story of a planet where night comes once every years. Asimov wrote over five hundred literary works. He is credited for introducing the words "positronic", "psychohistory", and "robotics" into the English language. He penned such classics as "I, Robot" and the "Foundation" series, which are considered to be the most impressive of his writings.
Asimov was afraid of needles and the sight of blood. Although he had the highest score on the intelligence test he had the lowest score on the physical-conditioning test. He never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle. The author who described spaceflights suffered from fear of flying. In his entire life he had to fly only twice during his military service. Acrophobia was revealed when he took his date and first love on a roller coaster in , and was terrified. This phobia complicated the logistics and limited the range over which he traveled; it also found reflection in some of his literary works.
He avoided traveling long distances. Instead he enjoyed cruise ships like the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, where he occasionally entertained passengers with his science-themed talks. He impressed public with his highly entertaining speeches as well as with his sharp sense of timing; he never looked at the clock, but he spoke for precisely the time allocated. Asimov's sense of time prevented him from ever being late to a meeting. His brother Stan was a journalist and rose to a vice-presidency at the Long Island newspaper "Newsday".
He was the oldest of three children. His exact date of birth within that range is unknown, but Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. The family name derives from a word for winter crops, in which his great-grandfather dealt.
Since his parents always spoke Yiddish and English with him, he never learned Russian,[19] but he remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English.
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five, and his mother got him into first grade a year early by claiming he was born on September 7, The candy stores sold newspapers and magazines, a fact that Asimov credited as a major influence in his lifelong love of the written word, as it allowed him an unending supply of new reading material as a child that he could not have otherwise afforded.
He became a naturalized U. Around the age of 11, he began to write his own stories, and by age 19, after he discovered science fiction fandom, he was selling stories to the science fiction magazines.
John W. Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, had a strong formative influence on Asimov and eventually became a personal friend. Originally a zoology major, Asimov changed his subject to chemistry after his first semester as he disapproved of dissecting an alley cat. When he failed to secure admission to medical school, he applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia, initially rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis, Asimov completed his MA in chemistry in and earned a PhD in biochemistry in Army, if he had not had his birth date corrected, he would have been officially 26 years old and ineligible.
In the course of his brief military career, he rose to the rank of corporal on the basis of his typing skills, and narrowly avoided participating in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, when a bureaucratic mixup that caused his allotment to be stopped led to his being removed from the task force only days before it was due to sail to Bikini. Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp with Asimov right , Philadelphia Navy Yard, After completing his doctorate, Asimov joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine, with which he remained associated thereafter.
Being tenured, he retained the title of associate professor, and in , the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimovs personal papers from onward are archived at the universitys Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gotlieb. Asimov declined, on the grounds that his ability to write freely would be impaired should he receive classified information.
However, he did submit a paper to DARPA titled On Creativity[35] containing ideas on how government-based science projects could encourage team members to think more creatively. After the wedding the couple lived in an apartment in West Philadelphia, as Asimov was then employed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard where two of his co-workers were L.
Sprague de Camp and Robert A.
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