Talk:Isaac Asimov

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Because of their length, the previous discussions on this page have been archived. If further archiving is needed, see Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page.

Previous discussions:

Archive 1 (October 2002 to April 2005): Foundation series, Martian Way, Nightfall, Quotes, Science fiction and science fact, Grammar gripe, Quantity of output, Mensa, Book count, Turning pages carefully, Asimov was a biochemist, Public speaking, Beliefs and politics, FARC, Image, Readings and references?, Categories, Historiographical Analysis
Archive 2 (May 2005 to December 2005): Quotations, Template, Asimov's Name, The Greatest, Chronological order of books, Writings on calculus, Etymology of robot, Sacrosanct only in his own mind, Excellent Article, Herbert, Suggested updates, Javascript errors, What links here, Image of Asimov, ASIMO, Vacation from my vacation, Asimov's death, Missing work?

Merging Robot Dreams and Robot Visions

Merging Robot Visions into this article, as the tag posted atop the page suggests, would be a bad idea. As this article stands, it's overstuffed with information; adding the contents of a relatively insignificant story collection would make the seams burst. The only collection whose Table of Contents I could think of including here would be I, Robot, and even that would only be permissable if we didn't have a few dozen kilobytes of good content. Leave the content where it is, and add to it if the page looks too short.

Be seeing you. Anville 10:51, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removed "Asimov's History of the Future"

I removed the following text from the article:

Asimov foresaw these trends in the future:

The flight to space of Earth's elites. The fittest (physically and intellectually) people on Earth abandon the planet to live in Space Habitats. These people, known as "Spacers" look down with arrogance on the wretched masses left behind on Earth.

The downfall of robots, as people shun robotic technology due to the fear of the ever increasing dominance of robots and the loss of personal freedom.

First of all, it's a distortion: the Spacers aren't the fittest people on Earth, physically or intellectually. They're just the first who decided to leave. They look down upon the Terran City-dwellers, and they go to extreme lengths to deny their Terran ancestry. You're playing into Spacer propaganda. (-;

Second, saying that Asimov "foresaw" these happenings is a bit of a stretch. He worked them out as fiction, sure, but not even consistently: the Spacers in "Mother Earth" (The Early Asimov) aren't exactly the same as those in The Caves of Steel, and neither are consistent with the hint he drops at the end of Nemesis. (I note in passing that the Spacers of the Foundation series do not generally live in "space habitats", but rather on the surfaces of extrasolar planets. Nemesis is his only novel to feature orbiting space habitats on a large scale, and in that novel, "Spacers" are hinted to descend both from Earthers and from the habitat dwellers.) Even in his non-fiction, Asimov never stuck to one party line about the future. Sometimes he was optimistic, and sometimes he sank to Vonnegutian levels of pessimism. The letters in Yours, Isaac Asimov sample these opinions.

Cheerio. Anville 09:25, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm changing Озимов to Азимов; Озимов is extremely rare in Russian; Азимов isn't (Do a google search for the two. If we are going to assume that it was transcribed back into Russian as Азимов, ит мэйкс сенс thат ит ваз Азимов ту бигин виth. :))))

some people just don't read carefully enough...

under criicisms, it is stated that asimov contradicts himself in stories where robots violate the laws. This is entirely untrue. Asimov explains in numerous stories how the first law is more important to a robot than the second, the second more so than the third, and the third just a sort of failsafe. It is also explained how certain degrees of harm done to a human may cause a robot to choose to lie to avoid physical harm, or something similar. an excellant example of this is "Liar!" the very story used to make the logic of asimov's stories seem broken. It's also important to point out that some contradictions that the robots must make to the laws leave them unusable, or were due to a malfunction in the first place.

I agree. It is a plot device to portray "what everyone assumes to be true" about a topic and then have the hero of the story be the first person to look past the assumption to the truth that everyone had ignored. It is not a contradiction to show everyone assuming that a robot cannot lie and then reveal an unusual situation in which a robot can lie. --JWSchmidt 15:14, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is it any better now? Supporting information can be found in the article Pebble in the Sky and at this discussion, though I don't think this article should go into deep detail. Save that for The Foundation Series, when we get around to making it a modern-day FA-worthy page. Anville 09:44, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Has "retcon" escaped from the jargon cage? The second Google hit for it is some kind of dictionary of jargon. --JWSchmidt 16:12, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By "some kind of dictionary", you of course mean the Jargon File, that palimpsest of eccentric technological anthropology slowly being poisoned by Eric S. Raymond's peculiar political proclivities. "Retcon" is the best word I could think of to indicate what was going on. Other articles on Asimov topics use the word, e.g., Spacer and Three Laws of Robotics, and so do various people talking about Asimov in the outside Web (see here, here, here or over here). Since this term wikilinks to the retcon article, the sentence stays within the letter of the jargon style guide, though if anyone's got a better way to stay within its spirit, I'd love to know. Anville 16:51, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Foundation Series no longer a Featured Article

The Foundation Series, which became a Featured Article back in the olden days, is Featured no more. This is really a good thing, since standards have advanced faster than the poor article did. In due time, we should be able to build it back.

Best wishes to all, Anville 10:38, 8 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Article could really use a colour photograph

Aren't there any good colour photo's of him in the public domain? Would be good if someone could upload it. :)

Ethnicity

I removed "jewish" from the first sentence (added on June 27). Asimov called himself an atheist or humanist as the article says later on. Thus I don't think the fact that his parents were jewish belongs in the very first sentence of the article. --Frol 17:13, 3 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I had the same reaction when the edit appeared, but looking into it, I found that Asimov also called himself a Jew.

[Asimov] said he tried to make up for this "by making sure that everyone
knows I'm a Jew, so while I'm deprived of the benefits of being part of
the group, I am sure that I don't lose any of the disadvantages, because
no one should think I am denying my Judaism in order to gain certain
advantages." -- Sheli Teitelbaum, "Isaac Asimov's Galactic Talent",
The Jerusalem Report, April 23, 1992, p. 31.

so I'd let it stand. -- JHunterJ 12:58, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In his writings, as I recall, Asimov said he considered himself ethnically and culturally to be Jewish, though he did not practice the faith. --Isaac Lin 16:43, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Words pronounced differently with capitals

To Asimov's Polish/polish can I add Stone of Scone/scone (hopefully edible)

Jackiespeel 15:45, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't see any mention of Asimov's Polish/polish to add that to. -- JHunterJ 16:16, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alien sex

From the article: "Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens, sex, and alien sex." Is this really not a joke? Found it funny, at least :) --Heida Maria 17:29, 14 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's true. Anville 20:08, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removed text

I removed the following blurb from the Quotations section. Apparently, the famous Salvor Hardin line about violence being the last refuge of the incompetent was

Derived from "I do not believe in violence; it is the last resource of fools." Lady Anne Bellamy, a character in Dawn by H. Rider Haggard.

I've never read a statement by Asimov to this effect. Anville 20:10, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is a lot in this entry that isn't supported by a statement by Asimov. “Original research” (your condemning term in the article history) plainly doesn't mean statements not by the subject of the entry. (Indeed, on human subjects of entries could give statements in the first place.) So I conclude that you are grasping for reasons to exclude a datum to the effect that Asimov's most famous quotation wasn't particularly original. —71.154.208.74 23:59, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The provided citation does not say anything about the quote being dervived from Dawn. Rangek 02:22, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That set is meant to be read as a sequence of derivation. Indeed, would you be so absurd as to claim that we'd have to prove that the third quotation thereupon is derived from the second? —71.154.208.74 03:44, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" - Samuel Johnson, 1775 ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 02:53, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please read the No Original Research policy. This article can only state things which other sources, reliable and verifiable sources, have said first. In this case, in order to assert that any particular Asimov quotation is a reference to an earlier aphorism, we need either (a) a statement by Asimov himself to this effect or (b) the word of a literary critic making the suggestion as a plausible theory. In the first case, we'd say, "Asimov said that. . ." while in the second case, we'd write, "Literary theorist John Smith observed that. . ." Neither case applies without an actual source, clearly specified so that other people can look it up and check for themselves. Anville 03:00, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One of the most frequent pathologies on Wikipedia are “Please read…” directions to policies that in fact do not support the pleader. You can abusively demand a citation for anything and everthing, including a citation for a citation. Wikipedia is not about creating fan pages with ad hoc defenses for inflating the object of worship. Not only is the Johnson allusion obvious and deliberate, it is arguably too obvious to bother including. The Haggard influence is less familiar and more interesting. —71.154.208.74 03:44, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Johnson is obviously an influence. That doesn't change the fact that Haggard was also an influence. —71.154.208.74 03:44, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Third parties, please indicate whether my referral to policy counts as an "abusive" demand. Anville 03:51, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Asking a fannish mobocracy to come to your defense is apparently your last refuge. —71.154.208.74 03:56, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's a common method of aborting stupid flamewars before they start. I don't have a fan club, nor have I ever relied upon mob psychology to get my way on the Wiki. Anville 04:02, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The notion, of course, isn't that you have fans, but that you are knowingly calling upon fans of Asimov to mobocratically protect his reputation. Fans of Asimov will naturally be a disproportionate share of readers of this discussion. And calling on a mob is indeed a common device for imposing a desired rule (and it is now-a-days the common way of establishing what prevails in Wikipedia), but it's commonality doesn't legitimize it. —71.154.208.74 00:04, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is completely and utterly inane. 71.154.208.74, you insist of including as reference a random list of factoids collected by one Susan Stepney, who has absolutley no literary credentials. What's more, the cited list of violence-related quotes has absolutely no commentary to suggest that either one is derived from the other. They are merely grouped by theme and intended message. By the same logic anyone can cite any number of pacifist quotations tracing back to any period in history. Anyway, Asimov's phrasing owes more to Samuel Johnson -- but I am not going to include that in the article text because it is original research. ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 00:56, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, neither is original research, because each lacks novelty. You truly flatter yourself if you think that your claim about Johnson is novel; therein lies inanity. —12.72.69.73 21:17, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia provides a tag “{{fact}}”, which renders as “^{[citation needed]}” for requesting/demanding a citation. This tag exists because assertions are not supposed to be deleted immediately just because a given reader doesn't know of support for them. —71.154.208.74 00:12, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know about the citation-needed tag. I used it myself, about one month and five hundred edits ago, tidying up Earth in fiction. I've used other templates, like {{unreferenced}}, as well. With all due respect, the important point here is not about adding tags; it's about respecting that little notice we see every time we make an edit: "Content must not violate any copyright and must be verifiable."

Also, edit summaries which state that other Wikipedia contributors act "loutishly" are not considered civil. It says so specifically, right there under the Examples section of the Civility policy: "Judgmental tone in edit summaries" counts as petty discourtesy. Me, I personally don't care. I'm like the Operative in Serenity: "You can't make me angry." However, such remarks are sure to make somebody take offense, sooner rather than later.

I mention this only so that the 'pedia can continue to be a beneficial editing environment for us all. Peace. Anville 03:26, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You obviously don't know what civility actual is. It is not merely general pleasentness, and it is certainly not pleasentness in the face of an inexcusably grotesque misrepresentation of what one has written. In fact, civility began to crumble around here when you engaged in immediate deletion, instead of using the “{{fact}}” tag.

In fact, you aren't positioned to know whether Asimov once indeed remarked that he'd derived the line in part from Haggard, so you're not even positioned to know whether your (excessive) verifiability criterion could be met. Your deletion was plainly motivated by something other than a good faith adherence to Wikipedia policy. —71.154.208.74 03:54, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is totally true that we have no evidence "Asimov once indeed remarked that he'd derived the line in part from Haggard". We also have no evidence he didn't. Therefore we must be contemplating this from the "[a] literary critic making the suggestion as a plausible theory" angle. (Because if we aren't then I could say anyone said anything, as long and people would have to prove it thatthey didn't. Chaos.) According to your edit summary, "The editor of the cited list of quotations, and the source who drew her attention to the Haggard quote," the editor of the website you cited, and/or her source are the "literary critic".

No one has argued that the note should stand because Asimov might have made the admission. The point was that even if Anville's standard of demanding such admission was the only sufficient support, he should have inserted a “^{[citation needed]}” instead of immediately deleting. It is simply wrong of you to take a point presented in refutation of one claim, and attack for failure to refute some completely different claim or claims. (—12.72.69.73 21:14, 23 July 2006 (UTC))[reply]

I think you are misunderstanding me. Of course, "no one has argued that the note should stand because Asimov might have made the admission." Therefore we must analyze this from the "[a] literary critic making the suggestion as a plausible theory" angle. As such, we must look at the cited source and ascertain whether it constitues "[a] literary critic making the suggestion as a plausible theory". The consensus seem to be that, no, Prof. Stepney is not a literary critic, at least not one credible enough to cite in an encyclopedia, and additionally, the web page does not make any suggestions, plausible or otherwise. Rangek 22:46, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't misunderstand you; nor, on the other hand, did I allow a cheap rhetorical ploy to be used without mention. —12.72.69.73

Now I am lost. All I was trying to do was establish a consensus view as to what the criteria were for judging statements like the one in question. Anville suggested that there are two ways to validate such a statement: 1) with a source in which Asimov states his intent, or 2) with a source in which a literary critic makes the suggestion as a plausible theory. All I did above was to systematically evaluate each of these possibilities and show how neither applies in this case. How is that "a cheap rhetorical ploy"? Rangek 01:30, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So, is this a credible source? Well, the editor of webpage is a Computer Science professor, and she does have quite a bit of stuff written up about sci-fi, but I don't think she rises to the level of a source for wikipedia. At least not for her literary criticisms. I mean, heck, I am a professor. If I put up a bunch of sci-fi reviews on my web site and claim that Asimov wasn't influenced by Haggard, then what?

That would be something of a case for amending the note and also citing your hypothetical page. (—12.72.69.73 21:14, 23 July 2006 (UTC))[reply]

Huh? So every professor with a web page and five minutes can have any hare-brained idea the might have enshired in Wikipedia? I don't think that is a wise course for Wikipedia to take. Indeed, it seems that the Wikipedia community is aware of this folly. Rangek 22:51, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, not every professor with a web-page; that's why I emphasized the “something”. The problem, here, is that you're using the Socratic method in a lazy fashion. You don't actually make the case, you just ask questions structured to make your opponent generate a reply to every case that you might try to make. Well, you got a lazy answer to your lazy question. —12.72.69.73 23:28, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so what makes the webpage in question qualify as a source of literary criticism? Rangek 01:31, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Futhermore, there is nothing on that website that says Asimov's quote is derivative of Haggard. The page linked is just a (short) list of simlar quotes about violence. That's all. I don't think Prof. Stepney is trying to make some kind of grandiose literary arguement about anything there. It is just a bunch of quotes. Rangek 01:04, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The argument simply isn't grandiose. The influences of Haggard (and of course of Johnson) are fairly transparent. (I suppose that you could ascertain whether Stepney is making the non-grandiose claim, found in the natural reading, by simply asking her.) —12.72.69.73 21:14, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just a thought: if "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" were a quotation from Thomas Pynchon, we would rhapsodize over how he masterfully alluded both to Rider Haggard and to Samuel Johnson in one fell swoop. Far from calling him unoriginal, we'd proclaim him a genius. We'd write a thesis about it, gooshing in admiration about how Pynchon deconstructed the boundary between high and low culture. Waxing Borgesian, I'd love to imagine a Pierre Menard scenario: "Thomas Pynchon, author of Foundation." One could do the same exercise to slighly different effect with Vladimir Nabokov, too.

…whereas the fans of Asimov grasp in self-contradictory manner for reasons to erase a note that neither attack nor praised Asimov for the derivation. (—12.72.69.73 21:14, 23 July 2006 (UTC))[reply]

Rangek, you say you're a professor? If I write up a literary essay explaining how Vladimir Nabokov was the real author of the Foundation trilogy, could you publish it under the aegis of your faculty website? (-; Anville 15:07, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]