This tribute is different from the others I’ve written. I never met Isaac Asimov. I know almost nothing about him as a man. What I know is his work, and his work shaped a huge part of who I became. For a kid growing up obsessed with outer space and robots and the idea of someday being an astronaut, Asimov’s books and stories were the door into a whole universe, and I walked through it early and never really came back out. He was my role model in one specific and important sense. Not as a person, because I never followed his life, but as an author. As a writer, he set the bar, and he set it high enough that I’ve spent a lifetime measuring other writers against it.
How I found him
I got introduced to Asimov’s work when I was young, somewhere around eight years old. I started with I, Robot and the related short stories and books, and I was instantly hooked. There was something about the way he thought through the logic of his robots, the way the Three Laws collided with one another and created puzzles that had to be reasoned out, that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I had never read anything like it. For a kid who already spent his time looking up at the sky and wondering what was out there, this was the perfect thing to find.
From there I went looking for more, and finding more meant the magazines. In those days I subscribed to every science fiction and fantasy magazine I could get my hands on, titles like Analog and Astounding Science Fiction, and I waited for each new issue anxiously every single month. The wait was its own kind of pleasure. I’d count the days until the next one was due, and when it finally showed up I’d read it cover to cover, sometimes in a single sitting.
At first I bought them off the newsstand, one issue at a time, whatever I could afford. Then I discovered I could subscribe by the year, which felt like a small miracle at the time. No more hoping the newsstand had the issue I wanted. They just arrived. By the time I finally stopped collecting magazines years later, I had two entire bookshelves filled with them. Those magazines were my real education in the genre, and Asimov’s name was all over them, first as a writer and later as a presence who loomed over the whole field. He was the thread that ran through everything I was reading.
What made him great
Asimov’s writing was plot-driven and scientific. You could never call his work character-driven, and that was fine, because the plots were tight and full of interesting politics and ideas. He wasn’t writing action adventure, and he wasn’t trying to. He was writing about consequences, about systems, about the slow working out of problems across centuries and civilizations, and he did it with a clarity that almost nobody could match. For a young reader who wanted to think about how the future might actually function rather than just watch things blow up, it was exactly right.
His ideas were the engine. The Foundation stories, with their notion of psychohistory and the long mathematical arc of a galactic civilization rising and falling, gave me a way of thinking about history and society that I still carry. The robot stories taught me to look for the hidden flaw in a system of rules, the place where logic turns against itself. None of it depended on the characters being deep. The ideas were deep, and that was more than enough.
What still amazes me is the range. The man didn’t just write science fiction. He wrote science, he wrote history, he wrote about almost everything under the sun. He produced something close to five hundred books across his life, which is a number so large it stops sounding real when you say it out loud. I used to hang out at Arts Used Bookstore in San Bernardino and hunt for everything he wrote, and there was always more to find. Just when I thought I’d tracked down everything, another title I’d never heard of would turn up on a shelf. He explained complicated things in plain language better than just about anyone alive, and he did it across an absurd number of subjects, from astronomy to chemistry to the Bible to Shakespeare. The breadth of it is still hard to believe.
The editor and the doorway
Beyond his own books, Asimov edited a great many more. He put together compilations that gathered other authors, and there must have been hundreds of those. I hunted those down too, because he always picked the best subjects and the best authors. If Asimov’s name was on the cover as editor, I knew the contents were worth my time, and I was almost never wrong. Those anthologies introduced me to writer after writer I’d never have found on my own, names I went on to chase down and read everything by. He didn’t just give me his own work. He gave me a map to the whole genre, and I followed it for years.
These were the golden age days of science fiction, back when the field felt genuinely expansive and authors were writing things that were actually worth writing about. The ideas were big, the ambition was real, and the whole genre seemed to be reaching for something. Asimov got his start as one of John Campbell’s people, published in that legendary stable of writers who built modern science fiction at Astounding under Campbell’s editorship. That was the crucible the whole field came out of, and Asimov was right at the center of it.
He won a long list of Hugo and Nebula awards. He was a giant in the field, and I knew that even as a kid. But I followed his works, not his life. That’s how I am with most authors. I don’t tend to follow people’s lives. I follow their works. The books are what I’m there for, and the books were always enough.
What Hollywood did to him
The adaptations are another story, and not a happy one. The Foundation series on Amazon is, to put it bluntly, a bastardization of what Asimov actually wrote. They took the name and a handful of words from the books and built something almost entirely their own. To be fair, it has some decent concepts on its own terms, and I can see the work that went into it. But it goes on too long, it’s too convoluted, and it corrupts the source material badly. The quiet, idea-driven story Asimov told about psychohistory and the long fall of empire got buried under spectacle and invented plotlines. The Foundation on screen is not the Foundation Asimov wrote. I think he’d be turning over in his grave if he saw it.
It wasn’t the first time Hollywood let me down, either. Long before the Amazon series, a film version of Nightfall came out, the famous short story about a world with several suns that never experiences darkness, until once every few thousand years night falls and the civilization destroys itself. The story is a masterpiece, one of the most celebrated short stories the genre ever produced, and I’d loved it for years. I waited anxiously for the movie. The movie was a crushing disappointment. No budget, weak acting, and it completely failed to capture what made the story great. I sat through the whole thing as the only person in the theater. Just me, alone in the dark, watching one of my favorite stories get flattened into nothing. Asimov himself disowned that film, and after seeing it, I couldn’t blame him one bit.
His legacy, and mine
Isaac Asimov died on April 6, 1992, at the age of 72. By then he’d published something near five hundred books and influenced generations of readers, writers, and scientists. He coined the word robotics. He gave us the Three Laws. He made the future feel like something you could reason about rather than just dream about, and he made science itself feel accessible to anyone willing to read carefully. Working scientists have said they went into their fields because of him. Countless writers learned the craft from him. That’s a legacy almost no author can claim.
I can’t write the kind of personal tribute for him that I’ve written for friends, because I never knew the man and never tried to. But I can say this honestly: very few people have shaped how I think and what I love as much as Isaac Asimov did, and he did it entirely through the page. He turned a kid in San Bernardino into a lifelong reader, sent me hunting through bookstores and magazine racks for decades, and handed me a whole genre’s worth of other writers along the way. That’s its own kind of immortality, and it’s the kind he’d probably have appreciated most. Rest in peace, Doctor Asimov. Thank you for the robots, the Foundation, the magazines I waited for every month, and the hundreds of other writers you put into my hands.
Frequently Asked Questions About Isaac Asimov