I read a lot of Asimov, both science-fiction and his popularization of science. The latter includes The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, and a single-topic book, The Neutrino.
I looked forward to hearing him speak at the University I attended. I was greatly disappointed as he was a conceited person. I stopped reading him.
I suspect that if I were to re-read his Foundation books, I would seem them in a new light. “Guiding” humanity along sounds socialistic to me now.
Yeah, he was pretty full of himself.
I think he was influenced by other scientific egomaniacs of his time, John von Neumann being one, but there were many others. Asimov considered himself a member of that club, at least as I understand him.
He was a leftist I'm quite sure. He definitely believed socialism was the future. In that, he was not alone; the obviousness of socialism's superiority was "obvious" to the intellectuals of that time, educated in the 1920s and 1930s, when socialism was new, bright, relatively untarnished by any encounter with reality.
Of course, if they had taken time to study history, they might have figured out that socialist experiments of the past had come to bitter ends. But they thought that science and technology had finally reached a point where socialism could be made to work. Wrong again, for the Nth time.
Other very conceited scientists of the time included Brian Josephson (winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Francis Crick (winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with James Watson). Both were almost insufferable, at least to me. They were brilliant though, really astonishingly so. So I guess one must make allowances.
Personally, I don't think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.
I would be very much surprised if any of the people I named were other than left-wing in their views. Particularly after the advent of atomic weapons, the enlightened ones all believed that a form of international socialism and one-world government was the only way the human race could survive the knowledge they had generated.
“I suspect that if I were to re-read his Foundation books, I would seem them in a new light. “Guiding” humanity along sounds socialistic to me now.”
Yep. I discovered Asimov when I was a teenager and enamored of centralized world government and social engineering ideas. I read the last of his foundation books when I was in my 20s and had taken a much more libertarian way of thinking and was a lot less enthralled by his vision of the future.
I have read all Azimov’s Foundation books, not just the original Trilogy, there were prequels and sequels, and not written in chronological order.
I have also read all of Herbert’s Dune series, the originals and the prequels and sequels written by the son and Kevin Anderson.
They are quite similar in their eventual outcomes.
Azimov’s robots were very avuncular, except for the ones on Solaria, but Herbert’s robots were very dangerous and would kill you for no good reason.
But both were guiding humanity along for tens of thousands of years.
Azimov’s robots were developing Galaxia, a galaxy-wide Gaia-like entity where everything, living or inert was connected to each other and could be used as a ‘force’ (is this where Star Wars got its idea?).
Herbert’s robots were trying to eliminate humanity and become the only ‘intelligent’ beings in the universe. Except for one robot, Erasmus, who had his own plans, of creating a universe where humans and robots were co-dependent.................