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Lambert, Wilfred G.; Millard, Alan R. (1969). Atra Ḫasīs The Babylonian Story Of The Flood. Oxford University Press.

Little Caesar Little Caesar''

"[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes."

- Asimov, 1969

"No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified."

- Asimov, 1980

Asimov became a science fiction fan in 1929, when he began reading the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store.

At first his father forbade reading pulps as he considered them to be trash, until Asimov persuaded him that because the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, they must be educational.

Two days later he received a rejection letter explaining why in detail.

---This was the first of what became almost weekly meetings with the editor while Asimov lived in New York, until moving to Boston in 1949;

Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and became a personal friend.

for continuing

 * psychohistory

Isaac Asimov 5 views 5.3 social issues

At the end of the year 1983 Asimov was asked (by Toronto Star for an Orwell series ) about his views of the year 2019 (35 years later ). He wrote: "...Let us, therefore, assume there will be no nuclear war — not necessarily a safe assumption — and carry on from there.

Computerization will undoubtedly continue onward inevitably...

The immediate effect of intensifying computerization will be, of course, to change utterly our work habits. This has happened before.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of humanity was engaged in agriculture and indirectly allied professions. After industrialization, the shift from the farm to the factory was rapid and painful. With computerization the new shift from the factory to something new will be still more rapid and in consequence, still more painful.

It is not that computerization is going to mean fewer jobs as a whole, for technological advance has always, in the past, created more jobs than it has destroyed, and there is no reason to think that won’t be true now, too.

However, the jobs created are not identical with the jobs that have been destroyed, and in similar cases in the past the change has never been so radical...

This means that a vast change in the nature of education must take place, and entire populations must be made “computer-literate” and must be taught to deal with a “high-tech” world."

In Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection (which was published after his death) he writes about the origins of psychohistory : ""Psychohistory" is one of the three words (that I know of) that I get early-use credit for in The Oxford English Dictionary. The other two, for the record, are "positronic" and "robotics".

... In the case of "psychohistory", however, I suspected that the word was not in common use, and might even never have been used before. (Actually, the O.E.D. cites one example of its use as early as 1934.) I first used it in my story, "Foundation", which appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fictiion.

... So I suggested we add the fact that a mathematical treatment existed whereby the future could be predicted in a statistical fashion, and I called it "psychohistory". Actually, it was a poor word and did not represent what I truly meant. I should have called it "psychosociology" (a word which the O.E.D. lists as having first been used in 1928). However, I was so intent on history, thanks to Gibbon, that I could think of nothing but psychohistory.

I modeled my concept of psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases... The molecules making up gases moved in an absolutely random fashion in any direction in three dimensions and in a wide range of speeds. Nevertheless, one could fairly describe what those motions would be on the average and work out the gas laws from those average motions with an enormous degree of precision.

In other words, although one couldn't possibly predict what a single molecule would do, one could accurately predict what umptillions of them would do.

So I applied that notion to human beings. Each individual human being might have "free will", but a huge mob of them should behave with some sort of predictability, and the analysis of "mob behavior" was my psychohistory.

There were two conditions that I had to set up in order to make it work, and they were not chosen carelessly. I picked them in order to make psychohistory more like kinetic theory. First, I had to deal with a large number of human beings, as kinetic theory worked with a large number of molecules. Neither would work for small numbers. It is for that reason that I had the Galactic Empire consist of twenty-five million worlds, each with an average population of four billion. That meant a total human population of one hundred quadrillion.

... Second, I had to retain the "randomness" factor. I couldn't expect human beings to behave as randomly as molecules, but they might approach such behavior if they had no idea as to what was expected of them.

... Much later in the game, I thought of a third condition that I didn't think of earlier simply because I had taken it so completely for granted. The kinetic theory assumes that gases are made up of nothing but molecules, and psychohistory will only work if the hosts of intelligence are made up of nothing but human beings. In other words, the presence of aliens with non-human intelligence might well bollix the works. This situation may actually develop in future books of the Foundation series, but so far I have stayed clear of non-human intelligences in my Galactic Empire ..."

In Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection (which was published after his death) he writes about the origins of psychohistory :

In Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection (which was published after his death) he writes about the origins of psychohistory :

""Psychohistory" is one of the three words (that I know of) that I get early-use credit for in The Oxford English Dictionary. The other two, for the record, are "positronic" and "robotics"."

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