Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Carl Sagan.

Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in various books and short stories to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other.

Fearing that his stories would be adapted into the " uniformly awful " programming he saw flooding the television channels Asimov decided to publish the Lucky Starr books under the pseudonym " Paul French ".

A condition stating that the Zeroth Law must not be broken was added to the original Three Laws, although Asimov recognized the difficulty such a law would pose in practice.

Asimov reasoned that it must belong to another universe with other physical laws ; specifically, different nuclear forces would be necessary to allow a Pu-186 nucleus to hold itself together.

According to the foreword in Robot Visions, Asimov was approached to write a story titled " Bicentennial Man " for a science fiction collection, along with a number of other authors who would do the same, in honor of the bicentennial of the United States.

( In the Asimov universe, this would otherwise be unthinkable, given the Three Laws.

The company U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., is approached by its biggest competitor that has plans for a working hyperspace engine that allows humans to survive the jump ( a theme which would be further developed in future Asimov stories ).

Asimov was initially gleeful, imagining that a grand, Citizen Kane-style motion picture would soon be in the works.

: Asimov: " Well, I can't help but think it would be good, except that in my stories, I always have opposing views.

Author and humor theorist Isaac Asimov, when telling ethnic jokes that were based entirely on ethnic slurs, would transplant them to Ruritania, e. g.

It was later revealed that, even with the programming removed, Bester had left in place an ' Asimov ' - adapted from the first of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics ( Bester stated that it had been adapted from the first two of Asimov's laws, but his explanation only covered the first law )-knowing that Garibaldi would likely murder him on sight if not prevented from doing so.

In " Nightfall and Other Stories ," Asimov claimed that any " parlor psychologist " would claim that this story is highly indicative of underlying sexual tensions, but he dismissed this notion as ludicrous.

Isaac Asimov pointed out that this was a serious logical flaw in the plot, since the submarine ( even if reduced to bits of debris ) would also revert to normal size, killing Benes in the process.

However, Asimov knew that the miniaturized crew members would not be able to breathe unminiaturized oxygen molecules.

To his credit, aside from the initial " impossibility " of the shrinking machine, Asimov went to great lengths to accurately portray what it would actually be like to be shrunk to that scale, such as the lights on the sub being highly penetrating to normal matter, time distortion, and other side effects that are completely ignored in the movie.

As noted above, Asimov was bothered by the way the Proteus was left in Benes, and in a subsequent meeting with Jaffe he insisted that he would have to change the ending so that the submarine was brought out.

Asimov did not want any of his books, even a film novelization, to appear only in paperback, so in August he persuaded Austin Olney of Houghton Mifflin to publish a hardcover edition, assuring him that the book would sell at least eight thousand copies, which it did.

However, since the rights to the story were held by Otto Klement, who had co-written the original story treatment, Asimov would not be entitled to any royalties.

In 1984, Isaac Asimov was approached to write Fantastic Voyage II, out of which a movie would be made.

Campbell wanted to create a category of short-short science fiction tall tales called " Probability Zero " that would serve as a market for beginning writers, and he asked Asimov to write one for him.

* Asimov, Isaac, The Shaping of France, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1972, p. 122 also mentions that the 1306 work advocated a European league of nations led by France, in which disputes would be settled by arbitration rather than war, universal education, and church property to be " secularized ," which can be taken to mean seized.

Pohl and Bradbury wanted Asimov to write a juvenile science fiction novel that would serve as the basis for a television series.

Later, Asimov would introduce the mind-reading robot R. Giskard Reventlov in the 1983 novel The Robots of Dawn, and the telepathic world-entity Erythro in the 1989 novel Nemesis.

According to Asimov, the premise was based on ideas set forth in Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and was invented spontaneously on his way to meet with editor John W. Campbell, with whom he developed the concept.

The narrator decides to contact Asimov and have him write up the story, soliciting the readers of Astounding for ideas.

For example, the Opening Parade Event for the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and a series of Special Weekends for the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY that included many original ideas including a Murder Mystery Weekend with Edward Gorey and Isaac Asimov ; a Chamber Music Weekend ; Explore the Tiny ( Small is Beautiful ); Star Parties with Carl Sagan ; a Chocolate Lover ’ s event and many more that continue to be featured events at the Mountain House to this day.

During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the U. S. Navy, also recruiting Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania.

Isaac Asimov believed that Heinlein made a swing to the right politically at the same time he married Ginny.

Related to the first, some stories are set in the very remote future and only deal with the author's contemporary history in a sketchy fashion, if at all ( e. g. the original Foundation Trilogy by Asimov ).

During World War II, de Camp served as a researcher at the Philadelphia Naval Yard along with his fellow writers Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein.

Asimov used the Roman Empire as the creative basis for the Foundation series, so Trantor is in some sense based on Rome at the height of the Roman Empire.

In 1982, Asimov gave in after a thirty-year hiatus, and wrote what was at the time a fourth volume: Foundation's Edge.

Then, at some unknown date ( prior to writing Foundation's Edge ) Asimov decided to merge the Foundation / Empire series with his Robot series.

In the spring of 1955, Asimov published an early timeline in the pages of Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine based upon his thought processes concerning the Foundation universe's history at that point in his life, which vastly differs from its modern-era counterpart.

Asimov read this story at the age of 11, and acknowledged it as a source of inspiration in Before the Golden Age ( 1975 ), an anthology of 1930s science fiction in which Asimov told the story of the science fiction he read during his formative years.

After the publication of The Currents of Space in 1952, all three novels ( the only Asimov novels published at that time ) were collected into an omnibus titled Triangle.

* In The Last Question by Isaac Asimov, humanity progresses from a Type I to Type IV civilization, at first harnessing the power of a single star, eventually extracting energy on a cosmic scale.

In December 1953, Asimov was thumbing through a copy of the March 28, 1932 issue of Time when he noticed what looked at first glance like a drawing of the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

Asimov decided to turn the story into a novel, and on March 17 he left it with Walter I. Bradbury, the science fiction editor at Doubleday, to get his opinion.

( In Asimov's saga, the Galactic Era begins when the Galactic Empire is founded at an unknown date roughly 11, 000 years in the future: the timeline can be deduced from some hints Asimov dropped in his other science fiction works, including the Robot and Empire series.

It might be an accidental use of the same technology — Asimov hints at a connection in Foundation's Edge, but never definitely settled the point.

Cowell stated at a popular BBS convention they named the company as an homage to Asimov and because in his science fiction works US Robotics eventually became " the biggest company in the universe ".

Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, imagined slidewalks as the potential method of transportation of practically the entire urban population on Earth, with expressways moving at up to equipped with seating accommodations for long distance travel, and with slower subsidiary tracks branching off from the main lines.

Isaac Asimov wrote a science column for the magazine that ran for 399 monthly issues without a break, from November 1958 to February 1992, ending two months before his death, at which time he was in such poor health that he dictated the final essay to his wife Janet Asimov.

In contemporary terms, however, Asimov wrote the Empire series in the early years of the Cold War, when a nuclear World War 3 seemed a realistic future ; one whose widespread and enduring radioactive contamination might be remembered, at least in folklore, for thousands of years.

Asimov felt that Gold's judgment was at fault by attributing too much power to the Constitution as a document.

Asimov later considered the premise highly improbable, and became annoyed at Gold for having persuaded him to insert the subplot into the novel.

Isaac Asimov, a student at Columbia at this time, remembers Urey lamenting, perhaps too vehemently, how pained he was that he could do nothing to help the war effort.