Isaac Asimov: The Candy Store Kid Who Built the Foundation

Isaac Asimov Photo Credit: EP

A note from our founder

Our fifteenth tribute goes to a writer whose entire universe of ideas can be traced back to a rack of pulp magazines in a Brooklyn candy store. Isaac Asimov arrived in this country as a toddler and left behind more than 500 books — a body of work that started with a kid reading science fiction he was technically supposed to be selling, not reading.

A Candy Store Education

Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov around January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia, and immigrated to the United States with his family at age three, settling directly in Brooklyn. His intellect took shape in a succession of family-owned candy stores across East New York and Park Slope. Because those stores sold newspapers and pulp magazines, young Asimov spent his childhood devouring early science fiction straight off the racks. He graduated from Boys High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant before earning his bachelor's, master's, and PhD in chemistry from Columbia University.

Building the Golden Age

Alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein, Asimov became known as one of the "Big Three" masters of hard science fiction during the genre's Golden Age, all while holding down a parallel career as a professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He coined the words robotics, positronic, and psychohistory, and helped steer the entire genre away from monster-driven space opera and toward intellectually rigorous, sociopolitical epics built on logic, science, and sociology.

A Polymath Beyond Fiction

Beyond his iconic Foundation and Robot series, Asimov was a genuine polymath, writing or editing more than 500 books that touched nearly every category of the Dewey Decimal System, including guides to Shakespeare and the Bible alongside works on physics and astronomy. He died in Manhattan in 1992 from complications related to HIV, which he had contracted from a blood transfusion during bypass surgery years earlier.

Major Books & Series

The Robot Series

• I, Robot (1950) — A foundational collection of interconnected short stories that introduced his legendary Three Laws of Robotics, exploring the logical loopholes, ethics, and psychological quirks of artificial intelligence.

  
  

• The Caves of Steel (1954) — A brilliant blend of sci-fi and detective fiction, pairing a human New York detective with a humanoid robot partner to solve a politically sensitive murder in a claustrophobic, domed Earth city.

The Foundation Series

• Foundation (1951) — The opening masterpiece of his sprawling galactic empire epic. It centers on Hari Seldon, a mathematician who creates "psychohistory" — a method of using mathematics and mass psychology to predict the fall of civilization and shorten a looming dark age.

  
  

• Foundation and Empire (1952) — The second installment, where Seldon's mathematical predictions face an unpredictable existential threat in the form of a mutant warlord known as "The Mule."

  
  

• Second Foundation (1953) — The original trilogy's conclusion, tracking the frantic search for a hidden, secretive second group of scientists tasked with keeping the galaxy on its predicted historical path.

Standalone Science Fiction Masterpieces

• Nightfall (1941 short story / 1990 novel) — Widely voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as the greatest sci-fi short story ever written, tracking a planet with six suns facing its first nightfall in over two millennia, driving its civilization to absolute madness.

• The Gods Themselves (1972) — His Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel exploring parallel universes, ecological disaster, and the complex sociology of an alien race with three distinct genders.

READ ASIMOV

Start with I, Robot if you want the book that reshaped how we think about artificial intelligence, or Foundation if you'd rather dive straight into his galaxy-spanning masterwork. Either way, it's worth remembering it all traces back to a kid in a Brooklyn candy store, reading the merchandise instead of just selling it. Get the book.

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