I’ve seen a few things like this lately which seem to indicate that Asimov is not all that not well regarded as a master writer, but rather more as “visionary” stylistic hack.
I always enjoyed his books, especially the Robot stories and the Foundation series, but then I was a much younger man at the time. What’s the scoop re his writing skills?
I’m a big Asimov fan, and even I will tell you that he couldn’t do characterization or style if his life depended on it. Asimov was far from being a “hack,” but his greatest strength was in his ideas, not his writing. People remember Asimov’s story for what he said, not necessarily how he said it.
It should also be noted that his primary output wasn’t science fiction, though that’s what he’s best known for. Asimov wrote mysteries and fantasy as well as sf. And his non-fiction output probably dwarfs his fiction. He’s written guides to Shakespeare and the Bible, science popularizations, annotations on classic literature (his Annotated Gulliver is excellent), and tons of short non-fiction as well (columns for various magazines). Here is a listing of books he either wrote or contributed to. There are 506 separate entries. I’ve heard estimates that he actually wrote, contributed to, or edited over 800 books.
Oh, Asimov was a consummate hack. Prolific, indiscriminate in intellectual and writing interests, verbose in dialogue, crippling in characterization, pen-thin plots that veer on peculiaralities and technical detail… non-elitist, fan-friendly mentor and professional schmooze. Couldn’t write intimacy, physical conflict or describe sex for squat – Didn’t write contemporary slang or patois.
Of course, the level of ingenuity and foresight what he would “hack out” is what many of his contemporaries still can’t even aspire to.
Why limit it to just his contemporaries? 
I think Asimov really exemplifies the hard SF writer, where the idea is the most compelling character in the story. I think he a few characters who do stand out. There’s one story of his, a short story about a passenger liner captured by chlorine breathing aliens. The main character is a man, if you’ll pardon the term, a complete nebbish, who acts a cold blooded commando to regain control of the ship. The thing is his usual normal cool character interactions until you get to the end of the story when the man’s partner asks him why he helped take the ship, and the nebbish answer: I have to go home. I’m homesick. In that instance it makes the character one of Asimov’s best.I wish I could remember the title of the story.
Asimov was a hack. In the 70’s he wrote intro’s to some of his books explaining he basically thought of a beginning, an end, and then sat down and wrote it. He railed against editors who were prejudiced because he would write a story in a morning and send it out for publishing, eg he rarely edited or rewrote his own work and sent out what most authors would consider a first draft.
IIRC an interview where he said in later years he hated writing. His wife would lock him away for several hours a day, and he’d be in a room with 5-6 typewriters, and various projects on each one.
But I sure enjoyed his writing for many years
The C-Chute.
Are you sure you remember correctly? Everything I’ve read of his that’s in any way autobiographical mentioned how he’ll be writing till the day he dies and that they’ll pry the typewriter from his cold, dead hands (or word to that effect).
He could very well have been joking as well. He was very funny. My favourite title of his (not book, it was a thin joke stretched far) was The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.
For the thread itself, The Ugly Little Boy is a story that gets me choked up every time and other than the time travel gimmick of bringing a Neanderthal boy forwards in time is all about the characters. Note I’m not talking about the awful Robert Silverberg “novelisation”.
Well, having read more Asimov stories than I can count, I would say that he focused on (a) the central sci-fi idea of the story and (b) mystery-style plotting. In reality, he was a mystery writer. All of his mysteries just had to do with hard science.
Both?
Honestly I feel his writing style is rather bland, but not in such a way as to make his books boring. They just somehow lack an artistic quality. Like he’s telling a news story - a very exciting one. My husband says he writes “very much as a white guy”.
His ideas are robust, and I feel he is masterful in how he unfolds a story. The Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw series are engaging mysteries in their own right, scifi aside. And conceiving in such detail of a human galactic empire 10,000 years in the future blows my mind.
Hacks aren’t noting for coming up with new ideas, much less new ideas that are so brilliant that other SF writers borrow from them for decades. Asimov was a hack SF writer the way Jimi Hendrix was a hack blues guitarist.
If I recall correctly, C. S. Lewis once described George MacDonald as a mythmaker rather than a writer. That is to say, his writing technique is not all that good. But his stories are memorable, and often create images far greater than the writing itself.
I think Asimov might well fit in that category, rather than between the polarities “hack” and “great writer.” I find many of his stories less re-readable than I would have hoped. And, toward the last, I think some of his “future history” novels undermined the earlier ones. But when all that’s said, the images and themes which he created are excellent. Great writer? Probably not. Great mythmaker? I think so.
Asimov was a good hack. He could produce competent work at a steady pace. But he generally favored simple plots, his characterization was almost non-existent, and he was never an innovator.
Asimov’s other big gift was that he was a master of selling himself. He understood marketing and worked the system.
“Hack” implies that he wrote just for the money, and didn’t put his heart into it. But Asimov, from everything I’ve read of/about him, wrote so much because writing was pretty much his favorite thing to do. (i.e. I concur with Silent Goldfish)
Judging by quantity, he probably churned out more science nonfiction than anything else, but he’s best known by far for his science fiction, the best of which is, I believe, still considered among the best and most influential in the genre, and the worst of which (particularly the later stuff) is considered by many to be talky and dull.
Because he’s strong at some things and weak at (or just didn’t attempt) others, people’s opinions of him vary wildly depending on what they look for in “good writing.” (SF author Orson Scott Card called him “the writer that I firmly believe is the finest writer of American prose in our time, bar none.”) His writing, fiction and non-, appeals much more to the intellect than to the emotions.
It may be unfair to say that he “couldn’t do style.” He certainly wasn’t a poet or a quirky stylist. His style was transparent, unobtrusive; it didn’t get in the way of what he was trying to say. Thus, he’s criticized by some for his lack of style while being praised by others for his clarity.
Asimov wrote almost nothing but science fiction for his entire early career, say from 1939 to 1958 or so. His strength was not in ideas per se but in the working out of the implications of ideas. This always worked better for him at shorter lengths. Most of his early “novels” are actually collections of novelettes. His first true novel is the almost forgotten The Currents of Space.
His weaknesses were in the ordinary literary virtues: plot, dialog, characterization, depth. He couldn’t write human-sounding dialog ever: his characters simply lectured the plot mechanics at one another. Even worse, he had a bizarre weakness. He was incapable of writing a conversation with more than two people speaking. Even when he depicts a group of people in a meeting, first he has two people talk at one another, then two more people talk at one another, then two more, never a true conversation.
The less said about his female characters the better. Obviously, there is no sex in his works either.
He wrote that when Sputnik happened he had almost an epiphany. He lost interest in writing fiction and began writing about the sciences, basic knowledge that seemingly the entire country badly needed.
Suddenly all his idiosyncrasies became strengths. Simple clear explanatory prose at short length poured out of his typewriters. Even his books, when analyzed, prove to be individual topic chapters put together rather than a developing argument. He was probably the best ever at explaining the basics of science.
His books on other topics are not up to the same standard. You can present history as a straightforward timeline, but you can’t say anything interesting about history without analysis and this he could not manage.
You can do this with mysteries, though, and he wrote hundreds, almost all pure puzzle shorts with minimal characterization.
After he became famous in several fields, his publisher dangled huge checks in front of him to start writing novels again. He pumped out big fat bestsellers of no merit whatsoever, bloated, static, talky books in which all of his flaws were magnified. Bestsellers are a genre unto themselves and seldom have anything to do with literary merit, as the many discussions of Dan Brown here have shown.
I can’t imagine where that comment about his wife having to lock him into his office came from. Every word out of his mouth while he was alive was just the opposite. His idea of a vacation was to be left alone to write more. By the end of his life he didn’t have to write anything for any reason. He just did.
It’s quite true that he wrote incredible numbers of books, but they do need to be put in some perspective.
Literally dozens of those books are reprints of reprints, repackagings of works previously published in book form. Over one hundred are very short works in instructional series for children. Asimov had no real part in any of the 180 or so anthologies that Marty Greenberg packaged under his name. Asimov would take the already collected stories and write an introduction.
Writing 200 real books should be enough of an accomplishment for any one career. Falsely inflating the numbers to over 500 was simply a manifestation of his ever-increasing ego as he grew older.
I respect Asimov’s career greatly. I can’t believe it will ever be matched. He was a magnificent self-promoter and a champion of literacy. But his science fiction has been superseded in quality and impact by later writers, and the progress of science makes his non-fiction less useful with every year. He was not a hack, merely a representative of his time who could not grow out of his roots.
Not entirely true. There was a small, not too explicit sex scene in Robots of Dawn
Tchiakovsky: Was he the tortured soul who poured out his immortal longings into dignified passages of stately music, or was he just an old pouf who wrote tunes?
I agree with pretty much everything that has been said here except
Sorry, we can’t let this stand. Asimov originated the revolutionary notion (now a commonplace in SF) that robots would not be allowed by their designers to become Frankenstein’s monsters. Before him, fictional robots inevitably went amuck and destroyed their creators. As a logical scientist, Asimov considered it absurd that engineers wouldn’t build in safeguards to prevent such disasters.
Another example of innovation: In the Foundation series he conceived of epic stories on a time scale that, to my knowledge, had only previously been attempted by one writer, Olaf Stapledon. (Does anyone happen to know if there’s any indication that Asimov had read Stapledon’s Last and First Men?)
Another of Asimov’s “innovations” was his social role as a popularizer of science. AFAIK, in this he was essentially the first, excluding kids’ shows like Mr Science. Carl Sagan, thanks to TV, became more widely known, and others, like Stephen Jay Gould, followed, although Gould’s range was pretty much limited to biology. I know that my own interest in science generally, and a significant percentage of the principles of science I know today, come from my voracious reading of his science explanation books in my teens and twenties.
Asimov may not have been as creative as subsequent SF writers, but to say he “never” innovated is way too strong.
I nominate Dr. A as the closest our age has come to a true Renaissance Man. The breadth of his range of knowledge and interests was stunning. It is hard to think of anyone who has come close to writing on as wide a variety of subjects as Asimov.
I just heard on the radio that Sunday Weekend Edition on NPR will have story about the film I, Robot and the objections of Asimov fans.
(On preview, I see that Exapno has written a very good summary of Asimov’s career. Well done, Harpo!)
That whole don’t get in the way of what you’re trying to say thing is underrated, in my opinion. Most writers inject themselves into the story in silly and obtrusive ways. If I want to read, especially in genres, I generally want to read what happens, not the quirky way the author expresses him or herself.
That being said, I don’t like Asimov. But that’s because he writes in an unobtrusive way about things I don’t care about.