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an afterword to the collection of essays about his work edited by Martin Greenberg and Joseph Olander titled Asimov, "without very much in the way of conscious thinking I manage to learn from what I read and what I hear."
As the young Asimov became the older Asimov (still in his late youth, as he would say), what he had been became what he was, either conditioned by his early experience or in reaction to it. Asimov recognized both processes. In one sense he was a rational man in an irrational world, puzzled at humanity's responses to change, unable to understand humanity's inability to see the clear necessity, if it is to survive, to control population and pollution and eliminate war, still assuming "the smart man's burden" to educate the bewilderingly uneducable, even taken aback at times when the people he dealt with behaved irrationally.
Joseph Patrouch, in his The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1974), commented that Asimov had not written in his fiction on the subjects about which he was most concerned, the subjects he wrote on in his non-fiction and spoke about in his public talks: pollution, overpopulation, and so forth. I asked Asimov about this, saying that in his talks and articles and books he seemed to exhibit a kind of alarm about our world situation that was not in his fiction a kind of public despair that contrasted with his fictional optimism. In his science writing he tried to persuade by showing the terrible consequences of what would happen if people do not act, and in his science fiction he tried to persuade by showing how the problems could be solved. Asimov agreed.
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In my public statements I have to deal with the world as it is which is the world in which irrationality is predominant; whereas in my fiction I create a world and in my world, my created worlds, things are rational. Even the villains, the supposed villains, are villainous for rational reasons. . . .
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You can see for yourself in my autobiography that I had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the world when I was young. To a large extent the world was an enemy world. . . . Science fiction in its very nature is intended to appeal a) to people who value reason and b) to people who form a small minority in a world that doesn't value reason. . . . I am trying to lead a life of reason in an emotional world.
Asimov, no doubt, still was trying to please his stern father with industry and productivity. Asimov would have been the first to admit it. He also would have said that it didn't matter how the past had shaped him. He was satisfied to be what he was: a claustrophile, an acrophobe, a compulsive writer. When he was a teenager, people

 
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