Science fiction in English - Isaac Asimov

Science fiction in English

We speak of science fiction as if it were a something of completely extraneous, a thing that will never involve us, in practice pure and simple absorbed imagination in anecdotes that you/they can sometimes seem banal; but are we sure that it is correct? Not by chance science fiction is ambientata in the future, certain, at times in a future some too far, but the time goes by and technology more quickly advances always. There is an author that already from the first years of the '900, that I repute one among the greatest writers of science fiction, that it has 'spoken' of histories in a very distant future, around 50.000 years in before: this writer is Asimov.

Thanks to his scientific studies and the abilities that the Nature has given him, a lot of things of which he/she writes are of the exact hypotheses and, as then himself will tell more ahead its life, it will pronounce him satisfied to see you realize some things that he had hypothesized before only in its books a few decades.

Generations have dreamt among the es of its grandiose speculations on the future history, they have assimilated important scientific notions divulged in comprehensible way but never banal, from scientist before from writer.

Isaac Asimov

It is born to Petrovichi (Russia) in 1920, to the 3 year-old age it follows his/her parents that emigrate in the United States. Of Jewish family grows to New York in the district of Brooklyn where his/her father has managed for many years an emporium. It graduates in Chemistry and Biology, and it develops activity of teaching near the prestigious School of Medicines of the university in Boston. Contemporarily from 1939 it develops activity of writer that will bring him/it to retire from the teaching in 1950 to devote to the writing at full time.

He was a modest personality, and of character nearly employs the totality of its time to the typewriter, test of this its the immense production that in the arc of 53 years complains approximately 450 banns. Habitual and dedicated to its job it does not love to travel above all in aire and very rarely one goes away from its New York. Curious is to notice like a man who has imagined human travel through the space immense time of millenia in the future on distances of light years did not love to travel and is feared from the aire. In reality, on its mind, it has spaced very beyond the physical limits and mental of the common man and in this completely he was satisfied, once he has said to thanks the nature for give him a mind polishes and flood of ideas, and the skill to clearly render them on the paper. Witty and ironic it loved to talk bad of its job in public, perhaps with false modestia, declaring much interested to the proceeds of its works that to the contents, in reality he had a simple life, nearly monastic, of absolute dedication to the job.

Just went proud to have coined the new word 'Robotics', beyond having some previewed the applications, destined to having a sensational impact on our times. Also being a lot interested to the religion from a philosophical and literary point of view, always declared not believer and 'humanist'.

Its conviction was that the destiny of the man is in the own hands; also respecting every sideboard it has opposed whichever superstitions, bigotry or para-science, elevating himself often to champion of the thought rationalistic and scientific.

Father of two sons, subsequently has married in second wedding the psychologist Janet Jeppson, that attended to one and supported him, contributing to make of he in the second part of its life the Asimov that we know and we love.

Isaac Asimov dies in  Manhattan the 6^th April 1992.

It is found to live it 'Golden Age', the age of the gold of the Science fiction years 40, but immediately it far with his unmistakable personal style, in which, the technical details are neglected for giving space to the history, to the characters and the interlacement of the stories. Its stories are great of breath, they are mosaics whose pieces are recomposed later only in the end or many books, and this has made him immortal: no green dwarves, but only human beings that are found to cross the vortex of the stories of the future history.

For this none of his stories he has found a cinema transposition, him same he has always refused to write screen-plays of his novels. He would not have been in his style and he would have destroyed the magic atmosphere of the to unwind some story through episodes of impassioning complexity. Not at all among his masterpieces they are also to enumerate different novellas of the yellow kind. Not less main point has been the activity of Asimov as scientific popularizer. Hundreds they are his publications concerning the Physics, the Chemistry the Mathematics the Biology until to reach the History, to the literature and even to the Bible. Not less notes are some harvests of his of satirical (limericks) poetries. But we come to the science fiction; Asimov has written his principal works in cycles whose books have not been written in chronological order, but always adding a new wedge to the complex story of the future history of the humanity and unfortunately he there is missed when still it was well away from to complete this sketch. The history that tells Asimov has been departing about for our days thin to reach around to a period that is to 50.000 years in the future. In it the stories of the humanity are told beginning from the period of the robots and computer progress of the society (until around to the 2300 A.D.) and the contribution that this will give to the following footstep: the colonization of the solar system before, the flight toward the stars then, the slow and difficult expansion of the human life in the space up to the foundation of a Galactic Empire. The stories of this, his collapse and the following rebirth to work of the Foundations, always under the guide of the gods (numi) of the humanity, the I.A. (artificial intelligence, the Robots).

Its works of science fiction are commonly gathered in 'cycles', each of which he/she understands a certain period 'historical.' Same Asimov didn't hold to an absolute precision, sometimes privileging the quality of the episode to loss of the coherence 'historical.'

However it is to underline him the fact that the greatest part of the novels of the various cycles of science fiction has been written by the author after a thirty year-old break, and that therefore also its more style 'slow' it hears again of a certain evolution of the tastes of the author.

Its works have impressed and encouraged the generation that has been protagonist of the run to the space as the whole following science fiction, we are enough to think about the cinema trilogy of Stellar Wars, it could find a temporal position among the first two books of the Foundation.

Isaac Asimov pronounced him happy to have lived enough to see to become reality a lot of the things from him you imagine decades before.

For this its Science fiction is so important, never too much fanciful and based almost always on concrete bases or scientific speculations, he has given us the sense of the reality to which we must extend, without illusions but with the awareness that the destiny is in our hands, it is only to us to turn it into a reality from dream, or in the worse one of the nightmares.

I, robot

One of the first novels that you/he/she has written are 'I, robot.'

This book is important because in it it treats all the consequential problem list from the creations of androids and also for the first time it enunciates the famous ones 'Three laws of the robotics':

1. A robot cannot go damage to a human being, neither he can allow that, because of its missed intervention, a human being receives damage.

2. A robot must obey to the orders imparted by the human beings, provided that such orders don't contravene to the First Law.

3. A robot must protect his/her own existence, provided that this self-defence doesn't oppose with the Before and the Second Law.

Published for the first time in 1950, he/she sees formulated and you apply these very famous laws, those norms that regulate the actions of the 'Thinking things' and that since then in then they are at the base of the whole literature of the kind. It's very important in the history of the science fiction literature, 'I, robot' it is also a harvest of stupendous histories, ironic, to hold, touching and amusing; you tell that while they are speaking of androids they disclose us the most secret sides of the eccentric human nature.

The cycle of the Foundation

In my opinion it is the best cycle he have wrote, from the beginning talks about the juvenile stories of Hari Seldon, and as the idea of the science of the future, the "Psicohistory" (Psicostoria), is a science able to prevent future events thanks to the known of the past.

It is a group of seven novels of science fiction written by Isaac Asimov beginning from 1951. After the initial trilogy, note as Trilogy of the Foundation, Asimov, under the push of the impassioned ones.

The three novels of the original (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) trilogy have been written three decades before the other successions and prologues, and they are stylistically very different from them.

Foundation

Hari Seldon, first and greater psicostoriografist of the Galactic empire, using complex mathematical equations from him you invent and harvests in a defined science 'psicostoriografy' (or 'psicostoria' according to the translation), it reaches the conclusion that the Galactic empire is decaying and that before the reconstitution of a new galactic arrangement that can assure peace and calm, you/they must pass 30.000 years of anarchy and barbarity.

In the attempt to reduce this period of chaos to as soon as thousand years, Seldon, that had purchased power and popularity in the capital of the empire in the meantime, using the "psicostoriografia" pushes the events to send on Terminus, et in the outskirts of the galaxy, a community of scientists, that you/they officially will have the charge of create a Galactic Encyclopedia, monumental work that must maintain intact the to know technological and scientific for the generations to come; in reality this foundation of scientists, that will be found to have to overcome a series of Crisis Seldon or moments of crisis anticipated years or straight centuries before from Hari Seldon thanks to the "psicostoriografia", he is destined according to the 'plain Seldon' to become the nucleus of the new Galactic Empire that should rise within the thousand following years.

Already a to depart from this first episode Isaac Asimov shows us a different science fiction from that an accustomed of today of we are of which: alien than without science fiction of one, intergalactic of battles of epic than without, strengths' overnatural of mysterious than without.

Each of the numerous adventures that you/they will see protagonist the Foundation will also touch absolutely known problems to our daily reality: religion, market, politics they are of diplomacy that of themes of the it uses him of Asimov to paint the future of the history of the humanity.

Foundation and Empire

Defeated all the adversaries and you overcome all the Crises Seldon of the first 150 years of life, the Foundation, inevitably it is found to have to face the Galactic empire.

The technical level reached by the Foundation, in fact, is such for which the introduced novelties seem magic in ison to the known technology in the decadent Empire. With the merchants, however, the legends of the Second Empire. After in the equations of Hari Seldon there was an unexpected element, an individual that the name of Mule (Mules).

These it is a mutant endowed with enormous psychic powers, through which it is able to convert his harshest enemies in allied believers.

Second Foundation

The Mule is looking for the Second Foundation created by Seldon and he sends Han Pritcher, one of the conditioned ones to his/her service, together to a youth, not conditioned, in the hope that the freest mind of this last can discover the location of it. What he doesn't know, and that it will discover only at the end, it is that it is fallen in a trap of this foundation, composed by people that they have developed senses in everything and for everything similar to his innate psychic powers.

The principal objective of this trap is that to condition the Mule and to prevent to continue him the search, up to its death.

After the death of the Mule the Foundation recovers the control of the lost ets, but a group of people plots in the shade thinking that, in reality, the Second Foundation, that exists so that the project Seldon goes to good end.

The secret of the apparent final victory of this manipulate of conspirators it seems to reside in the great deductive abilities of the small Arcadia Darell that, only in the whole Galaxy, she had succeeded in arresting the advance of the Mule.