CLIL CLIL CLIL LANGUAGE IMMERSION LITERATURE ISAAC ASIMOV Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi, Russia, then part of the Smolensk District in the Soviet Union. Although his father made a good living, changing political conditions led the family to leave for the United Stated in 1923. The Asimovs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where they owned and operated a candy store. Asimov was an excellent student who skipped several grades. His interest in science fiction began as a boy and soon he became a fan: he wrote letters to editors, commenting on stories that had appeared in magazines and tried to write stories of his own. In 1934, he published his first story in a highschool newspaper. He graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor s Degree in Chemistry in 1939, but he is surely best known for his works of science fiction and his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books. Isaac Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction. His most famous work is the Foundation series, other major series are the Galactic Empire and Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified future history for his stories. The prolific Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much non-fiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. In 1942, he published the first of his Foundation stories, which recount the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in a universe of the future. Taken together, they are his most famous work of science fiction, along with the Robot series. His positronic robot stories were begun at about the same time. They made known a set of rules of ethics for robots and intelligent machines that greatly influenced later writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. In one of his biographical pieces, Asimov notes that he was largely inspired by the almost relentless tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creator. In 1966, the World Science Fiction Convention honoured his Foundation stories with a special Hugo Award as the best all-time science fiction series. 254