April 6 marks a special anniversary for me. On April 6, 1996, I began to keep the diary which I still maintain today. Four years earlier, on April 6, 1992, Isaac Asimov died. The two events are most definitely related, as we shall see. Sometime in the early spring of 1994, while wandering through a…
One of the things I love about baseball is that it is possible to have a “perfect game.” A perfect game is one in which a pitcher faces 27 batters, and not one of them gets on base. There are no hits, no walks, no one hit by a pitch, no one ever making it…
Today, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation makes its television debut on Apple TV+. I haven’t watched it yet, but I plan to watch the first two episodes, which were released last night, before the end of the day. It has been a long journey from original concept to the silver screen. H.B.O. attempted to do it and…
On March 29, 1997, I finished reading Forward the Foundation, the final entry in Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series that he wrote himself, not long before he died in 1992. It was, I believe, the third time I’d read the complete series. The series is composed of 7 books, the first three of which were published…
I have been reading a lot about information theory these last two months. In the course of this reading, the same people keep showing up again and again. Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, J. C. R. Lichlider, Marvin Minsky, Norbert Wiener, and John McCarthy to name just a few. It is the last few…
Since I am (obviously) on a Stephen King kick again, I thought it apropos to share snippets from a few letters between Isaac Asimov and Stephen King that I recalled reading in Stanley Asimov’s book, Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters. According to Stan Asimov: Stephen King wrote this letter to Isaac on the occasion of…
Because Fred Kiesche, Paul Weimer and I were discussing them on Twitter yesterday, here is a photo for Fred and Paul designed to turn them green with envy: Technically, Asimov’s Guide to Shakepeare and Asimov’s Guide to the Bible are not annotations in the sense that the entire work is included and commented on. But Asimov wrote that…
Isaac Asimov was known as a bit of an egoist1 but this was something that he openly acknowledged. He called these “charming Asimovian immodesties” and later referred to his attitude as “cheerful self-appreciation.” However, once in a while, he could come across as brilliantly modest. For instance, this quote from him which I read a…
Last year, I skipped my annual Isaac Asimov autobiography reading. I was busy with writing, blogging, and my Vacation in the Golden Age reading and it was all too much for me. But I didn’t want to skip it two years in a row, as I so enjoy sitting down with In Memory Yet Green and…
Taking a break from fiction-writing was a particularly difficult decision for me. But I was getting burned out. Life was intruding and something had to give. Once I made the decision, I felt pretty good about it, but in the back of my mind, it still bugged me a little. “I should be writing,” I’d…
I started reading Isaac Asimov’s retrospective memoir, I. Asimov last night. I’ve written here often enough about my ritual, each April, where I read Isaac Asimov’s 3 autobiography volumes. I always read I. Asimov first, even though that was written last, because that one is a retrospective of his whole life. In the epilogue, Janet Asimov writes…
Today would have been Isaac Asimov’s 92nd birthday. Come April, he’ll have been dead for 20 years. It is hard to believe. It is still one of my biggest regrets that I never got to meet him. I really started to broaden my science fiction reading right around the time he passed away. At the…