Isaac Asimov would have turned 94 today. Sort of.
Via asimovonline.com
I used have a ritual, every time I entered a bookstore. Between of the ages of (say) 12 and 16, I might glance at the magazine rack or the new book section, but after a few minutes I'd head for science fiction and fantasy, where I'd immediately look for the A's. For Isaac Asimov.
Not that I expected to find any new titles. By the time I discovered his work, Asimov had been dead for a couple of years, and his publishers had mostly finished collecting his odds and ends into a few final books.
So why did I keep gravitating to that part of the shelves? I couldn't have explained it then. Looking back, I think I wanted to reassure myself that he was still there. Still waiting for someone else to discover him.
***
There's nothing unusual, I think, about looking back and searching for personal origin stories, but it may be particularly tempting if you happen to have a certain geeky mind-set. And if you do, well, there's a good chance that those origins will be geeky.
For me, there are two beginnings. There's the 6-year-old Anthony, crying loudly after watching the astoundingly bloody opening of Jaws: The Revenge; to finally shut me up, my dad bought me my very first comic book. And there's me four or five years later, wandering the Borders bookstore near my home and stumbling across a paperback called Foundation.
I still remember staring at the cover by Michael Whelan, with an old man in a wheelchair, surrounded by a futuristic city. I remember reading the introduction and hearing, in my head, a friendly voice that told me about the distant world of the 1940s, when Asimov wrote the stories I was about to read. And I remember how that introduction eased me into the far future of Foundation, with its vast Galactic Empire.
Via i.imgur.com
Most of all, I remember finishing the book and thinking: More. Now. I tore through the rest of the original trilogy, then the sequels and prequels that he wrote decades later. At the end of his career, Asimov tied the Foundation and Robot series together, so it was natural for me to make the leap from Forward the Foundation to The Caves of Steel, then to The Naked Sun, then to the rest of his science fiction.
Eventually I finished the futuristic stuff, so I turned to everything else. Asimov famously boasted about writing a book in every major class of the Dewey Decimal system, and I followed him to the mystery section, to science, to Shakespeare, and to history — I even managed to finish his 700-page doorstopper, Asimov's Chronology of the World, on a long family road trip. (Sadly, I never made it to his volumes of dirty limericks.)
And as I followed him, I was learning. As a teenager, you're ready to embrace your favorite authors' big ideas, but even as an adult, Asimov's core tenets stay with me. (For one thing, valuing rationality above superstition. For another, actually caring about what the world will be like in a hundred or a thousand years.)
That's not all I was learning. See, one way he managed to attach his name to such a staggering number of books (nearly 500, though the exact total depends on how you count) was by editing a long list of anthologies, many of them collecting classic science fiction. Until then, I'd only read a few scattered books in the genre: Dune (because of the computer game), 2001 (because of the movie).
By the time I was done with the anthologies, I wasn't just an Isaac Asimov fan, but a science fiction fan too.
***
It's easy to see his shortcomings. Asimov's books feature large casts of characters, but those characters are rarely memorable. Many of his most famous stories consist of scene after scene in which people stand around and argue about abstract ideas. And although it may be unfair, I think a contemporary reader can't help but notice that Asimov's worlds, for all their super-intelligent robots and galaxy-spanning starships, are obviously rooted in the '40s and '50s — if you read the Foundation trilogy, you'll find a curious absence of personal computers, and you'll realize that virtually every scientist and politician is a man.
In spite of all that, I keep coming back for the Asimovian voice, the one he used no matter what he was writing. Fact or fiction, the Good Doctor always convinced you that ideas matter and the universe can be explained. There are times, I admit, when the voice can feel a little smug, a little insufficient, but it's still an important voice, a comforting one. When I'm looking for pure reading pleasure, it's the voice I return to.
