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Well his personal issues with women definitely are apparent in his work. His female characters are often shrieking ninnies.

Also I don't think anyone but an academic will be reading his work in a few hundred years. As much as I enjoy his ideas and his easy style he is actually mediocre.

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> Also I don't think anyone but an academic will be reading his work in a few hundred years. As much as I enjoy his ideas and his easy style he is actually mediocre.

I don't like to point out and say people's opinions are wrong but The Embire series are cornerstone of science fiction writing and will surely be read in the future. I can't imagine someone studying the history of scifi literature and skipping Asimov at any point in time.

You said it: studying. That's why I say an Academic might be reading it. Some work becomes the preserve of specialists and other work continues to be read by people who love reading. We still read Dickens. Some of that work is almost 200 years old.

He said it, but meant reading.

Regular fans will continue to read Asimov, as they do today, 70+ years after some books where published.

In fact, there is (was?) a TV series coming up on Foundation as well...

Realistically, very few books keep being read for hundreds years and those who do typically strongly influenced politics or art or because they have contemporary ideological message (teaching kids values and political attitudes we want them to get).

Dickens is not read just because it was fun.

Asimov is more in the "for fun" category. They are creative, but you must avoid thinking deeper about those societies and people in them - it breaks those books.

So while it definitely plays role in sci-fi history, it is replaceable by next fun thing (Harry Potter or whatever).

>Realistically, very few books keep being read for hundreds years

Considering his first stories came around 1930 iirc, his books are already close to the "hundred years" mark, and still read, so we're past wondering about that...

People might not read Tom Wolf ('The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' anyone?) but they'll sure keep reading Asimov and Clarke and Dick and co for a good while...

I have no idea why you would propose Tom Wolfe as an avatar for quality. No-one really knows whose work will continue to connect with generations to come. Tom Wolfe is, in my view, mediocre and a writer whose middle-brow popularity is largely to do with his capturing something about the times he lived in.

Asimov, re-reading him as an adult, is also quite mediocre. He writes space melodramas garnished with some neat ideas. He knew how to popularize scientifically novel ideas. He was genuinely imaginative. But you can't take his sentimental and cliched scenarios seriously.

Philip K Dick on the other hand I think might well be read in 500 years. His work, with its own many defects, often has something profound in it.

As ever these are just views.

>I have no idea why you would propose Tom Wolfe as an avatar for quality.

I have no idea why you think I've proposed him "as an avatar of quality". I gave him as an example of someone who was once widely celebrated, but not that read anymore (much less in a "100 years").

In fact, talk about literary quality didn't enter my comments in this subthread at all. It's about whether people will still read Asimov, or whether they would care about the facts in TFA so that his legacy as a sci-fi leader is in danger, etc.

>Asimov, re-reading him as an adult, is also quite mediocre. He writes space melodramas garnished with some neat ideas. He knew how to popularize scientifically novel ideas. He was genuinely imaginative. But you can't take his sentimental and cliched scenarios seriously.

Well, a lot of well known sci-fi is mediocre, if "garnished with some neat ideas". That doesn't change the fact that it's good and popular for what it is (genre fiction, not high literature with subtle writing and profound truths). Or whether it will be read in 100 or 500 years. And I think Asimov will (well, if people are still around, that is).

Ehhhh. I agree in general but there are so many exceptions to that. Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, et al are all regularly dissected but frankly just read for pleasure.

Note that most of the fairy tales get changed to accommodate whatever message is currently popular. For example, remember the atrocity that Disney did to the original "The little mermaid" fairy tale. The main characters remain for hundred of years, but the story not.

One interesting bit for me was that German censorship during WWI make censored deaths in kids books. No deaths for you children, despite dads dying.

> someone studying the history of scifi literature

would be an academic.

No, could just as well be a sci-fi fan/reader.

I certainly did dug back for most genres I follow to earlier history of the genre.

I enjoy reading older SF too. A lot of SF is responding to older works, expanding or critiquing on their ideas.

Without the Foundation series, I doubt there'd be the Culture novels - or at least not in that form.

You can study things and not be called an academic. For instance if you enter a genre by force, you usually read some sort of chronology of best hits by the decades -- because there are many more books published to discover beyond this year.

> Well his personal issues with women definitely are apparent in his work. His female characters are often shrieking ninnies.

Het also used the word "gay" as simply meaning happy in the Foundation series. Because it's written in the 50's. Remember all of those face slaps to calm down hysterical women you saw up til the 80's in movies? When I see it now I think "waaaaaaaaat" but it was a normal stereotype back then.

IIRC he also used "queer" to describe things as strange. I listened to some audiobooks of his works and it always threw me off.

Queer has always first and foremost meant “strange” or “odd” - “How queer!” was a common refrain in all the literature I’ve read dating back more than a couple of decades.

I hadn't noticed this before about his female characters.. and now i can't unotice it that you have mentioned it

You know it was quite common in those days for Pulp Sci Fi...but for example the character of Jezebel Baley in The Caves of Steel is so bad that it almost suggests actual hatred on the part of the author.... certainly contempt.

If you choose to name your character Jezebel[1] you might have an ulterior motive...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezebel#Cultural_symbol

EDIT on the other hand, from the same page -

> In his two-volume Guide to the Bible (1967 and 1969), Isaac Asimov describes Jezebel's last act: dressing in all her finery, make-up, and jewelry, as deliberately symbolic, indicating her dignity, royal status, and determination to go out of this life as a queen.

The characters in the book discuss the symbolism of her name. She goes by "Jessie" because she does not want to identify with Jezebel.

Apparently some commenters here would have us believe that if there's a highly emotional woman, it's because the author hates women. Jezebel's/Jessie's husband and main character of Caves of Steel, Elijah, is himself kind of an anxious headstrong type who's wrong more often than he's right. Of course, this indicates with high certainty that Asimov also hates men.

Edit: Also worth noting that Bliss/Gaia in Foundation is pretty much the most powerful character in the Foundation universe. Mayor Branno, woman mayor of the First Foundation, is also revered as an incredibly capable and bold leader by all accounts.

Edit 2: And not to mention the young girl taken from Solaria, who is the only character to potentially rival Bliss. What a laughable claim that all the women in Asimov’s stories are weak or hysterical.

Yes they discuss her name. But if you recall Jessie liked her name and enjoyed the secret thrill of its salacious implication exactly because she is quite a square in real life. However Elijah one day reads the Bible and gives her the more correct interpretation of Jezebel's behaviour as that of a woman protecting her interests and not at all a harlot. This greatly upsets Jessie because it robs her of that secret thrill. She then never uses the full name again. Elijah often regrets this.

Despite its intricacies I found this particular part of their marital back story to be totally unconvincing and ineffective. Sorry Isaac.

Thanks for the expansion. I read The Caves of Steel a loooong time ago, and in translation.

Elijah and Jezebel - a match made in heaven...

>His female characters are often shrieking ninnies.

I don't recall his works. But review the US family TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s and see the 'fond, goofy' portrayal of women -- it was everywhere. Similarly, many cartoons of that era ... shown across the nation in theatres ... cannot be seen anymore. The level of thick-headed, cloddish insensitivity was pervasive. We've changed as a culture in the US, and I'm grateful.

>Also I don't think anyone but an academic will be reading his work in a few hundred years. As much as I enjoy his ideas and his easy style he is actually mediocre.

While I don't agree 100%, that never hurt any artist's commercial success or fan following...

In any case, for the sci-fi field he's one of the classics. Most others in the genre weren't exactly subtle deep literature either, it's the ideas and sci-fi exploration of them that count.

Susan Calvin????????

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