{"id":952,"date":"2014-01-02T20:50:18","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T02:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/?p=952"},"modified":"2014-01-02T20:50:18","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T02:50:18","slug":"happy-birthday-isaac-asimov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/happy-birthday-isaac-asimov\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Isaac Asimov"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Isaac_Asimov.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-953 alignleft\" alt=\"Isaac_Asimov\" src=\"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Isaac_Asimov.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"299\" \/><\/a>If he were alive, Isaac Asimov would have celebrated his 94th birthday today.\u00a0 I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Asimov, but I grew up reading his works.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve not read everything he wrote, but I&#8217;ve read quite a bit.\u00a0 I&#8217;m speaking of his science fiction here, not his total output.\u00a0 <a title=\"Isaac Asimov\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Isaac_Asimov\" target=\"_blank\">Wikipedia says<\/a> he wrote over 500 books.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also <a title=\"National Science Fiction Day\" href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/future_tense\/2013\/01\/02\/national_science_fiction_day_on_isaac_asimov_s_birthday_learn_to_live_in.html\" target=\"_blank\">National Science Fiction Day<\/a>, which I think is quite appropriate.<\/p>\n<p>Asimov was one of the first science fiction authors I read when I graduated to adult science fiction.\u00a0 This would have been in junior high.\u00a0 (I&#8217;ve always been ahead of my time.)\u00a0 I think I came across one of his robot stories in an anthology edited by Robert Silverberg that was in the school library.\u00a0 It wasn&#8217;t long before I was hunting down his short fiction (in addition to his robot stories), the Foundation series, and some of his other novels.\u00a0 His later Foundation novels were among the first science fiction I purchased new in hardcover that wasn&#8217;t a book club edition.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/The-Winds-of-Change.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-954 alignright\" alt=\"The Winds of Change\" src=\"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/The-Winds-of-Change.jpg\" width=\"167\" height=\"280\" \/><\/a>It&#8217;s been quite a while since I read any of Asimov&#8217;s work.\u00a0 As I stated in my <a title=\"Reading Goals for 2014\" href=\"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/reading-plans-for-2014\/\" target=\"_blank\">reading goals post<\/a>, I want to get back to basics\u00a0 this year and reread some of the works and authors that first attracted me to science fiction.\u00a0 I picked up a paperback copy of <em>The Winds of Change<\/em> a few months ago in a second hand shop.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a later collection, and I haven&#8217;t read it.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve loved the colors on the cover for years and finally gave in to temptation and bought it.\u00a0 I think I&#8217;ll spend some time this evening reading it and raising a glass to the legacy of Isaac Asimov.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If he were alive, Isaac Asimov would have celebrated his 94th birthday today.\u00a0 I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Asimov, but I grew up reading his works.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve not read everything he wrote, but I&#8217;ve read quite a bit.\u00a0 I&#8217;m speaking of his science fiction here, not his total output.\u00a0 Wikipedia says he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[762,692],"class_list":["post-952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isaac-asimov","tag-isaac-asimov","tag-national-science-fiction-day"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-fm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=952"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":956,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions\/956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}