Isaac Asimov Wrote Much More Than Science Fiction

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov is remembered as an idea man. While his prose left much to be desired, the author was a wealth of prescient ideas that have endured in the scientific community to this day. For example, as The Conversation notes, his Three Laws of Robotics, which he introduced in the 1942 short story "Runaround," later published in his wildly popular collection titled I, Robot, are still used as a guiding template for how we think of ethics in the field of robotics to this day. Scholars, scientists, engineers, and others in the field are discussing how the laws can be updated to better suit the changing landscape of robot development in the 21st century. According to the School of Computer Science at Stanford University, Asimov is even credited with coining the term "robotics."

Asimov's other most important work was the Hugo Award-winning novel Foundation. Published in 1951, it chronicled the decline of a Galactic Empire and how its fall was predicted by the "psychohistorian" Hari Seldon, who invented a statistical method by which he became pretty good at predicting the future. The novel began a trilogy that ended up being a seven-book series that stretched well into the '80s. But these were just the tip of the iceberg of what this extremely prolific author produced.