Asimov’s Foundation trilogy won a unique 1966 Hugo
Isaac Asimov (c. 1920–1992), Boston University biochemistry professor, ranked among the century’s top science-fiction writers. Foundation’s first three books took the one-time Hugo for Best All-Time Series in 1966. He also poured out robot stories and historically staged popular-science explainers.
He was born in Petrovichi in Soviet Russia sometime between October 1919 and 2 January 1920, and chose the latter as his birthday. In 1921 he and sixteen other village children caught double pneumonia, and he alone lived. The family sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Baltic and reached America on 3 February 1923. The surname came from a Russian word for winter rye bread; his father, thinking an S sounded like Z, spelled it Asimov, which later inspired the story Spell My Name with an S.
His parents ran a series of candy stores where everyone worked, and the racks of newspapers and pulp magazines fed a boy who started on science fiction at nine. He finished Boys High School in Brooklyn at fifteen, took a scholarship at Seth Low Junior College, a Columbia branch set up for Jewish and Italian-American students squeezed out by quotas, and switched from zoology to chemistry. Rejected twice by medical schools, he entered Columbia’s chemistry graduate programme on probation in 1939, earning a master’s in 1941 and a doctorate in 1948.
During the war he was a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, alongside Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp, and married Gertrude Blugerman in July 1942 after a Valentine’s Day blind date. Letters from William Boyd, who admired his story Nightfall, led to a biochemistry post at Boston University’s medical school. In 1959 he turned down DARPA work to avoid classified material, sending a paper on creativity instead.
A fear of flying meant he flew only twice, and it shaped the Elijah Baley robot novels; from 1972, when he watched Apollo 17 lift off from a cruise ship, he lectured on voyages at sea. Besides fiction, he wrote Guide to Science and the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Honda’s robot ASIMO carries his name.
Source: Isaac Asimov
