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was recognized as an important writer of our time, a recognized master of the science popularization, a polymath profligate with books in many fields and pursued by opinion-seekers of all kinds on a variety of subjects, a witty, expensive, much-sought-after speaker, a commercial spokesman upon occasion, and only last a science-fiction writer, insofar as his general reputation went. The occasions of his one hundredth, two hundredth, three hundredth, and four hundredth book publications brought him considerable attention from the book world and perhaps even from the book-reading world. He was reviewed and interviewed and profiled in and on a variety of national media. He was an institution. The delightful part of the man was that, in spite of his fame and wealth and general reputation, he never forgot his roots. He still considered himself a science-fiction writer. He was shaped by science fiction and by John Campbell, just as he was shaped by an upbringing in Brooklyn and his servitude in the series of candy stores from which he was liberated only late in his teens, by his precociousness, and by his father's stern ethical principles. Out of all these influences came the Asimov stories in the Golden Age of the magazines and the books published when science fiction first was breaking into the book market. As a consequence, the stories influenced the genre because they led the way in critical times. They retain that importance, but it may exceed their basic value as literature. |
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At the end of the first volume of his autobiography, Asimov wrote that in science fiction "I had gone as far as I could. I might do things that were better than `Nightfall,' The Foundation Trilogy, I, Robot, or The Caves of Steel, but surely not much better." That judgment was sound: he may have done better but not much better. What he did in his chosen field, however, was no small thing. Those works, and other Asimov stories and books, helped to shape science fiction just as Asimov himself was shaped by it. Asimov's presence in the field of science fiction had importance as a reminder not only of the past but of the way in which the past is a foundation for the present, and of the way in which the past can renew itself. Rationality still could be relevant. |
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