In the end Asimov went for quantity. I have not seen any final figures but it looks likely that nearly five hundred titles will have been published under his name at the time of his death on April 6th. Unfortunately for the bibliophile many of that last hundred will be new collections of old material (or even worse in case of material said to be editted by him, actually ghost-editted), as if Asimov wanted the credit without the effort, though all his previous efforts demand recogntion.

Brian Aldiss has compared Asimov to H.G Wells - both prolific SF novelists who were also scientifically trained and major producers of popular science books; and like Wells Asimov has contributed to the atmosphere which has allowed other popularisers of science to become well known - so Wells had peers like Haldane, Julian Huxley and James Jeans, and Asimov has had Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking and Douglas Hofstadter among others. Yet I doubt if the people who leave A Brief History Of Time on their coffee tables had previously bought The New Intelligent Man's Guide To Science or any other of Asimov's science guides. Asimov was a pathfinder - none of his books made a loss, but I get the impression others have made the big bucks.

Asimov was born in 1920, and trained as a scientist (interupted by war service) going through the educational mill - received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University in New York City in 1948 and then went to teach biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. In 1957 he gave up teaching, though he kept the honorary title of Professor, and wrote full time. He had published twenty-four books when he turned professional, but only six of them were not fiction.

Of course, that is not an accurate account of Asimov's early career - he may have published only twenty-four books but he had written the material for many more, and if his name was not on everybody's lips as it was at the time of his death, he was famous internationally. He had been writing and publishing since he was eighteen.

Asimov apparently wrote easily, though in his early days he lacked ideas for stories. He began reading science fiction early - his father (who had emigrated from Russia to avoid the anti-Jewish pogroms) ran a drug store, and would not allow Isaac to read rubbish, but allowed him to read SF pulps because his English was not good enough to realise that a science fiction magazine is not an educational science magazine. At the age of eighteen Asimov wrote three short stories and submitted them to Astounding. The second and third were accepted. John W. Campbell, the editor, took Asimov under his wing as he did with many other of his contributors, feeding him with ideas and creative criticism. Asimov, while still going through college, became a writer for the pulps, making one cent a word. You can understand why he did not immediately give up his day job.

Without Campbell Asimov would not have been the writer he was. Campbell gave him the themes for stories - "Nightfall", for instance, while in other cases such as the Three Laws of Robotics, these arose out of the long discussion Campbell liked to have with his authors (as both were in New York they could meet relatively easily). Campbell also identified the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and its subject nations as a paradigm for all future history.

On the other hand Asimov must always have felt the new-ish world of SF to be of value - no matter how well you think he succeeded in handling the subjects, he took two and made them important - the implicatins of automation in his robot stories, and the philosophy of history in the Foundation stories. He handled other themes as well, of course, and some things he never really touched - space journeys, alien cultures, bug eyed monsters, supermen, yet no other author of the period managed to identify some major elements so well.

As Eisenhower replaced Truman the economics of publishing changed - the pulps disappeared. Astounding became Analog. In 1950 Asimov published his first novel - his first book - Pebble In The Sky, and the collection I, Robot. He published The Stars, Like Dust in 1951, and Foundation, the first of the trilogy. In 1952 he started his series of juvenile novels about Lucky Starr, the Space Ranger, as well as putting out his first text book. From then on he never published less than two books a year, and two book years were exceptional.

Asimov's decision to abandon academia in 1957 co-incided with another major event - on October 2nd the first articial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched. Asimov decided that all his efforts must be spent on educational writing - he did not write another novel until The Gods Themselves in 1972.

About the economic level of his success I am not sure - Asimov wrote that everything he produced was published, although he sometimes had problems with publisher's editors (he took the title to the editor with whom he had first discussed the idea, even if the editor had changed companies or had had periods of unemployment). On the other hand in 1966 he engaged in the hackwork of producing a novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage, which might suggest that he needed the money.

In the 1970s he returned to writing some fiction, and some of his short stories tied up with themes from the forties - the 1977 story "The Bicentennial Man" is a robot story, for instance. Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine began to appear, as well, though Asimov had little to do with the running of the magazine.

Then in the early 80's Asimov began on another path - science fiction novels of best-seller-blockbuster size, and they did hit the bestseller lists. The first was Foundation's Edge in 1982. The new mammoths followed his two themes - the Foundation story, and his cop-robot novels - and even attempted to merge the two, even though for forty years they appeared to be separate worlds. He also managed to pick up something from a new fashion in science - zeroth as an ordinal number, and gave us a zeroth law of robotics.

If we ever get sentient robots or computers capable of manipulation it would be sensible to try and build the three laws into them, though I am not clear how it would be done. Yet Asimov never saw that it was computers that would become important long before robot-like machinery. Equally, he never saw the significance of the decline of the British Empire, which began in his teens, or of the Soviet Empire which lived and died in his lifetime. If science fiction is such a valubale thought tool should not one of its leading practitioners have been able to use it in some of the areas in which he practiced it?

Sometime ago I reviewed Robot Dreams, a collection of old stories with new rather inappropriate illustrations. I reached a similar position (a question rather than a conclusion) there that I have reached here. I wrote

"A lot of Asimov's alternate presents and most of his futures are, when you think of it, pretty unpleasant. His worlds tend to be overcrowded, run by inhumane bureaucrats, controlled by large but crude computers; his frontiers are harsh and restricting, and even after the frontiers have been opened the life on the new worlds is no better than on the old. How many people will stop and think about the implications of his work after reading this book, or noticing the clash between the illustrations and the text, I don't know. But I would hope that some would. Perhaps someone could decide if Asimov is a futuromane or a futurophobe."

At the entrance to the future there can be one of two signs - either "Danger - Do Not Enter" or "Welcome - Please Enter". After reading Asimov I am not sure which it should be. Actually, I am not too sure about the present he lived in either.