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Get this from a library! Asimov: a memoir. Isaac Asimov - An autobiography of the science fiction master. Filled with his opinions and insights on topics ranging from his own genius and his fear of flying to politics, love, mortality, Hollywood,.

I, Asimov: A memoir is a non-fiction book by Isaac Asimov. List of Books by Isaac Asimov. Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992, I. Asimov: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 1994. MLA Citation (style guide) Asimov, Isaac. Asimov: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2010. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a. As unique and irrepressible as the man himself, I. Asimov is the candid memoir of an incomparable talent who entertained readers for nearly half a century and whose work will surely endure into the future he so vividly envisioned.

Other Titles

Translations
Year Language Title Spanish Memorias French Moi, Asimov

Awards

Place	Year and Award	Category
1	1995 Hugo	Best Non-Fiction Book
1	1995 Locus	Best Non-Fiction
4(as Memorias)	1995 Premio Ignotus	Mejor libro de ensayo - Best Nonfiction Book
Nomination(as Moi, Asimov)	1997 Imaginaire	Essai

Publications

Displaying all variants and translations • Do not display translations • Do not display variants or translations

Title	Date	Publisher/Pub. Series	ISBN/Catalog ID	Price	Pages	Format	Type	Cover Artist	Verif
I. Asimov: A Memoir	1994-04-00	Isaac Asimov	Doubleday	0-385-41701-2	$25.00	xii+ 562	non-fic	Jill Krementz, Al Nagy
I. Asimov: A Memoir	1994-06-00	Isaac Asimov	Doubleday / SFBC	03247	$11.98	562	non-fic
Memorias	1994-11-00	Isaac Asimov	Ediciones B (Primer Plano)	84-406-5031-0	496	non-fic
I. Asimov: A Memoir	1995-00-00	Isaac Asimov	Bantam Spectra	0-553-56997-X	$7.99	592	non-fic
I. Asimov: A Memoir	1995-00-00	Isaac Asimov	Bantam Books	0-553-56997-X	$7.99	xii+ 578	non-fic	Jill Krementz, Al Nagy
I. Asimov: A Memoir	1995-02-00	Isaac Asimov	Bantam Books	0-553-56997-X	$6.99	xii+ 578	non-fic	Jill Krementz, Al Nagy
Moi, Asimov	1996-04-00	Isaac Asimov	Denoël (Présences)	2-207-24301-X	F195.00	610	non-fic	Marc Taraskoff
Moi, Asimov	2000-03-00	Isaac Asimov	Denoël (Présence du Futur #630)	2-207-25107-1	604	non-fic	Fred Sorrentino
I. Asimov: A Memoir	2020-12-15	Isaac Asimov	Random House Audio	978-0-593-34634-1	$42.00	non-fic
I. Asimov: A Memoir	date unknown	Isaac Asimov	Bantam Books	0-553-56997-X	$7.99	578	non-fic	Jill Krementz, Al Nagy
I. Asimov: A Memoir	date unknown	Isaac Asimov	Bantam Books	0-553-56997-X	$7.99	x+ 578	non-fic	Jill Krementz, Al Nagy

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Reviews

• Review by Gary K. Wolfe (1994) in Locus, #400 May 1994
• Review by Jean-Marc Lofficier (1994) in Starlog, July 1994
• Review by Moshe Feder (1994) in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1994
• Review by Tom Easton (1994) in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Mid-December 1994, (1994)
• Review [French] by (1996) in Ozone #3, Août/Octobre 96
• Review [French] by Claude Ecken (1996) in Yellow Submarine, #121
• Review [French] by Daniel Conrad (2000) in Galaxies, #17
• Review [French] by Éric Vial (2004) in Galaxies, #32
• Review [French] by Hervé Le Roux (2012) in Bifrost, #66

Isaac Asimov (c. 1920–1992) wrote three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980)^[1][2] were a two-volume work, covering his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994),^[3] published after his death, was not a sequel but a new work which covered his whole life. This third book won a Hugo Award.^[4]

Before writing these books, Asimov also published three anthologies of science fiction stories which contained autobiographical accounts of his life in the introductions to the stories: The Early Asimov (1972), Before the Golden Age (1974), and Buy Jupiter and Other Stories (1975).

Books[edit]

The Early Asimov, or, Eleven Years of Trying (Doubleday, 1972) is a collection of almost all of the published short stories Asimov wrote during the first eleven years of his career, 1938 to 1949, other than his robots and Foundation series of stories (and his first story, 'Marooned off Vesta'), which had already been collected in other books. Each story is prefaced by an introduction about how the story came to be written and published. The book also refers to eleven unpublished stories which, at the time the book was written, Asimov thought had since been lost, as he no longer had the manuscripts. Collectively, this material describes the beginning of Asimov's career and his long association with John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, who published many of the stories in the book and to whom the book is dedicated. The book covers the first 60 stories Asimov wrote, and ends with the publication of his first novel in 1950.

Isaac Asimov Reading Order

Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s (Doubleday, 1974) is a collection of science fiction short stories by a variety of authors, which were all originally published in pulp magazines in the 1930s. It also includes one of Asimov's eleven lost stories, 'Big Game' (written in 1941), which a fan had discovered in a collection of Asimov's papers in Boston University library after reading about it in The Early Asimov. Edited by Asimov, this book contains autobiographical material describing his childhood as a science fiction fan who grew up reading 1930s magazines. It ends at the point when Asimov sold his first published story in 1938, where The Early Asimov began, and thus is a prequel to that book.

Buy Jupiter and Other Stories (Doubleday, 1975) collects 24 of Asimov's stories, first published between 1950 and 1973. The autobiographical material between the stories covers the same period, carrying on from where The Early Asimov left off and ending at his marriage to his second wife, Janet Jeppson Asimov. In the introduction Asimov explains that he hopes that by including autobiographical information in his story collections, it will be easier to resist editorial pressure to write a proper autobiography.

In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954 (Doubleday, 1979) is the first volume of Asimov's two-volume autobiography. It ends shortly before the point when he became a full-time writer. Up until then, his main career had been lecturing in biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine, although by then he already earned more from his writing than he did from his academic post.^[5] It is Asimov's joint-200th book; it was published on the same day as Opus 200. It includes another of Asimov's lost stories, 'The Weapon' (written in 1938), which he had forgotten had been published under a pseudonym.

In an interview shortly after publication, Asimov said: 'I've done nothing in my life. You would be surprised how shrewdly I had to write it to obscure that fact.'^[6] He later wrote:

A reader once told me, enthusiastically, after the autobiography was published, that he had read the book with immense interest and that he had been unable to keep from turning the pages and reading on and on and on, laughing all the way.

I said to him, curiously, 'Didn't you notice that nothing was happening?'

'I noticed that,' he said, 'but I didn't care.'^[7]

The publishers disliked Asimov's original title, As I Remember, so they asked him to provide another, suggesting he find a good quote from an obscure poem.^[8] Asimov suggested the following poem:

In memory yet green, in joy still felt,
The scenes of life rise sharply into view.
We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt,
And while all else is old, the world is new.

Isaac Asimov Quotes

Doubleday agreed to Asimov's new title, but could not find the source of the verse he had given them. When Doubleday inquired, Asimov confessed: 'I wrote it myself'.^[8] The poem was included at the front of the book, attributed to 'Anon.'

In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978 (1980) is the second part of Asimov's autobiography. The title is also taken from the poem. The two volumes are 640,000 words long in total.^[7]In Joy Still Felt won the 1981 Locus Award for best science fiction-related nonfiction book.^[9]

Asimov had intended to write the third volume in 2000, starting where the second had left off,^[10] and to call it The Scenes of Life.^[8] But after falling ill in 1990 he decided to write it early, on his wife Janet's advice, in case he did not live that long.^[10] Janet's opinion was that the original two-volume autobiography was too chronological (although it was highly detailed, owing to Asimov's eidetic memory and the copious notes he kept about his life in his daily diary), lending it an emotionless and reserved quality. As such, she encouraged him to write a third volume which would instead convey more of his feelings about the contents.^[8] Published posthumously under the title I. Asimov: A Memoir (Doubleday, 1994; 235,000 words^[11]), it covered his whole life, so that people who had not read the first two volumes could still enjoy it.^[12] Janet Asimov wrote an epilogue.

All three books were nominated for a Hugo Award, in the category of best non-fiction book. I. Asimov: A Memoir won in 1995.^[4]

Janet Asimov later edited It's Been a Good Life (Prometheus Books, 2002), an abridged compilation of all three books.

References[edit]

1. ^Asimov, Isaac (1980) [Originally published 1979; New York: Doubleday]. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954 (Paperback, 1st Avon Printing ed.). New York: Avon Books. ISBN0-380-75432-0. LCCN78055838. OCLC6375488.
2. ^Asimov, Isaac (1980). In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ISBN0-385-15544-1. LCCN79003685. OCLC5846307.
3. ^Asimov, Isaac (1994). I. Asimov: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday. ISBN0-385-41701-2. LCCN93008644. OCLC831955104.
4. ^ ^abList of 1995 Hugo Awards at the official website. Archived 2011-05-07 at WebCite (Retrieved 25 March 2016.)
5. ^I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), pp. 196, 200
6. ^'An Interview with Isaac Asimov' by Phil Konstantin at americanindian.net (retrieved 20 April 2019).
7. ^ ^abI. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), p. 437
8. ^ ^abcdI. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), p. 438
9. ^sfadb.com
10. ^ ^abI. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), p. xi
11. ^I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), p. 560
12. ^I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994) p. xii

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