Isaac Asimov — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters — a biochemistry professor who turned pulp science fiction into architecture, building whole civilizations across time and then connecting them into one vast future history.

Biography

About

Asimov was born around January 2, 1920, and became a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, but it was his fiction that made him one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers alongside Heinlein and Clarke. His Foundation series, about a fallen space empire, won the one-time Hugo for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. He built parallel worlds — the Robot series in the mid-1950s with novels like The Caves of Steel, the earlier-set Galactic Empire series — and then in 1986 with Foundation and Earth he linked them all, along with more than 380 short stories including "Nightfall", voted the…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

saidMar 1965

Ten years on the moon could tell us more about the universe than a thousand years on the earth might be able to.

— What Can We Expect of the Moon?" in The American Legion Magazine, March 1965

Isaac Asimov

saidJan 1965

Predicting the future is a hopeless, thankless task, with ridicule to begin with and, all too often, scorn to end with.

— "The World of 1990" in The Diners' Club Magazine, January 1965

Isaac Asimov

said1965

The fact that the general incidence of leukemia has doubled in the last two decades may be due, partly, to the increasing use of x-rays for numerous purposes.

— Statement of 1965, as quoted without citation of a specific work in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), edited by

Isaac Asimov

said1965