![]() His scientific credentials were recognised when he had an asteroid (5020) named after him - as is Honda's humanoid prototype robot ASIMO. ![]() ![]() As well as his fiction, he wrote many popular guides to science. Trained as a chemist, Asimov, who was born in 1920, held a teaching post at Boston University for many years. In the Foundation series, science and maths were used to predict and plan the development of societies, a device that Mark Brake, professor of science communication at the University of Glamorgan, thinks may be a touch heavy-handed: "We can't even predict a flood in Boscastle, let alone how a society behaves a thousand years in the future." Last month, Will Smith got jiggy in I, Robot, a film version so distant from the source that the credits say only "suggested by Isaac Asimov's book". ![]() Two works mark him out as the master of the genre: I, Robot, and the Foundation trilogy. "Asimov was not a stylish writer in the way that say, Philip K Dick was, but he was very rigorous scientifically, and thoughtful about how he projects scientific ideas into the future," says Philip Ball, a writer of popular science books. Despite an astonishingly prolific career, he has never been regarded highly for his prose. ![]() As predictable as the human race eventually being enslaved by robots, Asimov, the founding father of modern science fiction, tops the poll. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |