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<><><><><><><><> T h e V O G O N N e w s S e r v i c e <><><><><><><><>
Edition : 2551 Tuesday 7-Apr-1992 Circulation : 8157
By RAYNER PIKE Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - Isaac Asimov, the prolific writer of science fact and
fiction who laid down the literary laws of how robots must behave, died
today, his brother said. He was 72. Stanley Asimov, a vice president of
Newsday, said his brother died at 2:20 a.m. at New York University
Hospital of heart and kidney failure.
Earlier this year, Asimov announced that a prostate operation had slowed
him down and he was cutting back on his writing. He also suspended his
monthly column in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, to which he had
contributed some 400 columns and articles over 33 years. Publishing 10
or more titles in a year was no big deal for Asimov, and his production
had continued after a heart attack in 1977 and triple bypass surgery in
1983.
Among the nearly 500 books Asimov wrote, three early novels known as the
``Foundation'' trilogy were honored in 1966 with a special Hugo Award as
the best science-fiction series ever. Asimov promulgated the three
``Laws of Robotics'' in his second book, ``I, Robot,'' a 1950 collection
of connected stories about the introduction of sentient machines into
human society. He required that each robot brain be programmed with
these immutable commandments: Robots may not injure a human or, by
inaction, allow a human to be harmed; robots must obey humans' orders
unless that conflicts with the first law; robots must protect their own
existence unless that conflicts with the first two laws. Robots as
conscienceless marauders and implacable killing machines were a cliche
of pre-Asimov pulp sci-fi. But the logic of Asimov's laws have been
largely acknowledged by other writers and, ``Terminator'' movies
notwithstanding, they changed the image of fictional robots from the
malign to the solicitous. The Foundation books, set in a future galactic
empire, featured another engine of the imagination that Asimov called
``psychohistory,'' a wedding of mathematics, history, psychology and
sociology that almost unerringly reveals what the future holds. Robot
and galactic empire themes eventually expanded and intertwined in 14
novels. Taken together, they formed a picture of humanity in millennia
to come - spread through the stars, with earth itself all but forgotten,
but the people still in the thrall of human nature.
Asimov was a biochemist by training and a hallmark of his fiction was
that the science, sometimes mindboggling - like faster-than-light travel
- was nonetheless convincing. One book in which Asimov conceded his
science was not so hot was the popular ``Fantastic Voyage'' in 1966,
about a medical team being miniaturized and injected into the
bloodstream of a dying man. The microscopic-sized characters were so
small that a molecule of oxygen would be too big to breathe, Asimov
said.
In hundreds of books of science fact, Asimov was a master explainer of
the abstruse and complicated, a plain-English guide for the young or the
scientifically semiliterate. He could put an intelligent but ignorant
reader at ease with everything from the mysteries of mathematics to the
keys to the genetic code. His work also ranged through history, the arts
and humor, as indicated in such titles as ``The Sensuous Dirty Old Man''
in 1971 and ``The Shaping of France'' and ``Asimov's Annotated Don
Juan'' in 1972.
His most recent entry in ``Who's Who'' said he was the author of 467
books and actually lists 249 titles. A not untypical year for Asimov,
1977, included such books as ``Familiar Poems Annotated,'' ``The
Collapsing Universe,'' ``Asimov on Numbers,'' ``How Did We Find Out
About Outer Space?'' ``Still More Lecherous Limericks,'' ``The Hugo
Winners, Vol. II,'' ``The Beginning and the End,'' ``Mars, the Red
Planet,'' ``The Golden Door,'' ``The Key Word and Other Mysteries'' and
``Asimov's Sherlockian Limericks.''
Asimov once told an interviewer about a time he was saddened at the
prospect of dying and having his brain decay. But then he cheered
himself with the thought, ``I don't have to worry about that, because
there isn't an idea I've ever had that I haven't put down on paper.''
Contemplating his output and popularity, Asimov called himself ``the
beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes.''
He was born in Petrovichi in the Soviet Union Jan. 2, 1920, and brought
to the United States when he was 3. His parents ran a candy store in
Brooklyn and at age 9 Asimov, helping out in the store, began reading
the stock of science-fiction pulps. He majored in chemistry at Columbia
University, but also put his hand to storytelling. His first short
story, ``Marooned Off Vesta,'' after a dozen rejections, ran in the
October 1938 issue of Amazing Stories. One of the rejecting editors,
John Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction, said years later that the
18-year-old Asimov was ``lean and hungry and very enthusiastic. He
couldn't write, but he could tell a story. You can teach a guy how to
write, but not how to tell a story.''
Asimov said a watershed of his writing career came at age 21, when
Campbell paid him $150 for his 12,000-word story ``Nightfall.'' That was
a cent-and-a-quarter per word rather than the then-standard one cent a
word and Asimov exulted over the bonus, saying later, ``I had never,
till then, received so huge a payment for any story.'' Asimov earned
advanced degrees in chemistry at Columbia, sandwiched around Army
service in World War II. He became a biochemistry teacher at Boston
University Medical School in 1949 and there co-wrote a textbook on human
metabolism. That set him off to writing science books for laymen and led
to his quitting his academic post in 1958 to be a writer full time.
``All I did was abandon the retail field for wholesale teaching,'' he
quipped. What was involved, he said, was ``to read what other scientists
write and translate it into English.''
During his decade of teaching, his first novel, ``Pebble in the Sky,''
came out in 1950, followed by the first robot and Foundation books. Also
notable among the novels were ``The Caves of Steel'' in 1954 and ``The
Naked Sun'' in 1957, in which a human cop is teamed with a robot
detective. The two characters reappear in later books. Asimov said
writing was a pleasure for him, not the tortured exercise many authors
describe. He said he rarely could ``stop writing for as much as three or
four days at a time without feeling either guilty or restless.'' ``I
actually love the mechanics of sitting at the typewriter or the word
processor and doing it,'' he told USA Today in 1987. He said he was too
self-assured to have doubts about his outpourings, ``so I'm not forever
patching and repatching and worrying and losing sleep.''
Interviewer Barbara Walters once asked what he'd do if a doctor said he
had six months to live. ``I'd type faster,'' Asimov responded. His
keyboard speed was a fast-enough 90 words per minute and a typical
workday might yield 2,000 to 4,000 words.
He worked from a 33rd floor apartment on Central Park West, where he
lived with his second wife, Janet Jeppson, a retired psychiatrist. His
first marriage, to Gertrude Blugerman in 1942, produced two children,
David and Robyn. He also is survived by a sister, Marcia Rapanes.
Stanley Asimov said a memorial service for his brother will be held at a
date to be announced.
AP-NY-04-06-92 0830EDT
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