Tag Archives: Isaac Asimov

Ellison’s Trademarks

Posted on by
6

Harlan Ellison registered his name as a trademark in 2001. I learned this yesterday and it made me wonder if that was a regular thing among science fiction writers. My search on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website shows it is not.

Heinlein and Asimov, the two Americans in science fiction’s Big Three, were trademarked posthumously, Heinlein by the trustees of the Heinlein Prize in 2011, and Asimov by his estate in 2000. Asimov’s marks, registered for use in connection with science products, science toys, and educational materials and services have since been abandoned.

Beyond them, I found nothing. I tested several other writers’ names, picked for their marketing savvy (if this was a good idea, surely they’d have done it) or commercial success or historical significance. There is no record of a trademark application for the names of John Scalzi, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Mike Resnick, Connie Willis, Orson Scott Card, John W. Campbell, Gardner Dozois, or even Philip K. Dick. So this is not something everybody does.

But during the past decade or so Ellison, through his Kilimanjaro Corporation, trademarked his name and several other properties (some now lapsed) — Working Without A Net (2000, cancelled), Edgeworks Abbey (2001, live), Edgeworks (2002, cancelled), and Dangerous Visions (2006, live).

Working Without a Net by Harlan Ellison first appeared as a book Ivanova was reading in an episode of Babylon 5. Ellison later gave the title to a weekly series of commentaries he did for Galaxy Online in 2000. Finally, in 2008, Ellison told a radio audience he has signed with a “major publisher” to write his memoirs, tentatively called Working Without a Net.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Swanwick Resigns From Science Fiction. Not.

Posted on by
5

Michael Swanwick told Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow on April 22:

In my adopted hometown of Philadelphia there’s a move afoot to put up a plaque where Isaac Asimov lived while he was working (and writing seminal Foundation and Robot stories) at the Naval Yard during WWII. Asimov hated Philadelphia while he lived here but came back for the conventions year after year. He gave back. Now it’s time to Philadelphia to give back to him. The Change.com petition seems to have stalled at 364, 136 short of its goal. This despite the fact that you don’t have to be a citizen of Pennsylvania to sign it. I don’t want to be a part of a genre that can’t give Isaac five hundred signatures.

Swanwick’s plea must have worked. He was looking for 500 signers. The petition hit 3,000 signatures on April 25. Today it’s up to 3,223 on the way to a target of 5,000.

The mightiness of the internet has been verified once again with much pressing of the enter key.

Yet there’s still no plaque on Asimov’s old apartment building.

There never will be until somebody springs to have one made. The Pennsylvania Historical Marker Program isn’t going to pay for it even if they accept the application –

It is important that you consider the availability of funds in making this nomination. For your information, city-type markers cost approximately $1,400; roadside markers cost approximately $1,875. Final figures may vary slightly, and there are usually other costs incurred with the installation of markers and dedication ceremony.

Think Asimov needs plaque on his old apartment house? Buy one and go ask the landlord’s permission to glue it to the building. Come back and declare victory on the internet when it means something.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

SF Writer Stamps Delayed

Posted on by
9

Inverted Jenny

Only in the future could we expect to see science fiction writers on stamps – a future that is a little more distant now that the US Postal Service has postponed til 2014 an anticipated set of commemoratives honoring five of them.

The set was originally announced to subscribers of the USPS Commemorative Panel program in February with a July 2013 release date. Ever since there has been fevered speculation about the honorees, who were unnamed. Would the set be composed only of Americans? Would they be a diverse group? Did honorees have to be deceased (no), and if so, had Bradbury been dead long enough to make the list?

Linn’s Stamp News for April 29 carried news of the postponement and reportedly named the writers who will appear on the stamps –

  • Isaac Asimov
  • Ray Bradbury
  • Philip K. Dick
  • Robert A. Heinlein
  • Frank Herbert

Collectors discussing the delay observed the science fiction writer issue isn’t the only casualty of the 2013 program. They say the Ingrid Bergman stamp, Just Move stamps, and Medal of Honor Winner stamps and the March on Washington stamp were all set back.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Oh, Isaac

Posted on by
2
Frank Deford

Frank Deford

Frank Deford, for decades a writer and editor at Sports Illustrated, and briefly top editor of “The Greatest Paper That Ever Died” – The National sports daily that lost $150 million, has published a memoir titled Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter.

Deford is a character right out of Mad Men, little affected by the 21st Century. And when his path crossed Isaac Asimov’s in 1975 the Good Doctor was in typical form (a form considered here last autumn in “Monsters of the Idway”) –

One of my first books was a light cultural history of Miss America, There She Is, so I got invited to lots of book functions for women, in order that I might regale them and thus have them rush out to purchase my tome. At one of these sessions, a book-and-author luncheon in Hartford, another of the speakers was Isaac Asimov, who wrote something like eight thousand books – sometimes I think it was a dozen or so a week. He titillated the little old ladies by saying, “All I can do with my hands is type and sex.”

I thought: you are my brother.

You-Know-Who

You-Know-Who

(Anyone looking at their pictures might be tempted to take that literally – twins separated at 65.)

Deford tells several stories like this (the rest are about athletes), assuming an appreciative audience among older sports fans, but assured of a mixed reception in the sf field.

Campaign for Asimov Historical Marker

Posted on by
9

On April 6 fans and pros gathered in West Philadelphia across from the apartment building where Isaac Asimov lived during WWII and kicked off a campaign to have the site commemorated with a Pennsylvania state historical marker. Philadelphia Weekly is behind the application:

We were thrilled to be joined by a bunch of speculative-fiction luminaries—including authors Michael Swanwick, Gregory Frost, Victoria McManus, Tom Purdom and Gardner Dozois, several of whom knew Isaac personally. We all signed the petition of support that will be part of our application to the Historical Marker Commission later this year. And our favorite geektastic photographer, PW contributor Kyle Cassidy — whose idea all this was in the first place — shot a photo to commemorate the moment the Asimov historical movement officially began.

The petition is posted at Change.org. The appeal for signatures reads —   

Though he’s often thought of as a New Yorker, he spent three very important landmark years in Philadelphia. From 1942 to 1945, while living and working here during WWII as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Isaac Asimov wrote half a dozen of the key stories that comprise his two most influential cultural masterpieces: the Foundation series, which introduced the idea of “psychohistory,” the mathematical modeling of the future; and the Robot series, which introduced the famous Three Laws of Robotics governing how artificial intelligences should behave.

It was at an apartment on the corner of 50th and Spruce streets in West Philadelphia where Asimov wrote these historic stories.

Since 1946, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has authorized more than 2,000 cast aluminum markers recognizing names and sites connected with “Native Americans and settlers, government and politics, athletes, entertainers, artists, struggles for freedom and equality, factories and businesses.”

Pennsylvania added 17 in 2012, honoring both high culture — the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia – and pop culture — the “Birthplace of Commercial Ice Cream Production.” (Since a 2009 budget cut it’s been the nominators’ responsibility to cover the cost of the marker.)

None of Pennsylvania’s existing historical markers celebrate anything associated with science fiction – not even the alleged world’s first science fiction convention held in the Rothmans’ Philadelphia living room in 1936. Markers have been approved for a few writers, native-borns like Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), and others who grew up in the state like James Michener and Margaret Mead. Based on such a track record, it would be surprising if the Commission approved a marker for somebody who lived in the state only three years.

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

Asimov’s Birthday

Posted on by

Isaac Asimov would have been 93 today had he lived. Foundation’s author passed away April 6, 1992 – the first of science fiction’s ABCs (Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke) to go.

Fortunately, his memory is yet green. He was featured on Science Channel’s Prophets of Science Fiction series in 2012.

Also, in 2012 Jamie Todd Rubin made some intriguing guesses about what Asimov would have done had he lived another 20 years.

And especially worth reading today is Michael A. Burstein’s superlative memoir ”Asimov and Me”, written for Mimosa, which is framed around their several meetings.

I also remember one other thing I told him at the book fair, and this is what ties into the above discussion of my diary. I mentioned how much I was enjoying his two volume autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt. I had been reading them all summer, and I finished them in November. Now, perhaps Dracula had started my journal, but it was Asimov’s autobiography that kept it going. I read about how he started a diary when he turned 18 years old, and because of his diary he was able to write his autobiography in such detail. I decided that my diary might one day be just as valuable a resource to me, and I resolved to keep it with more regularity. Since late 1984, I have managed to keep my diary religiously. In fact, it is because of this diary, inspired by Asimov, that I am able to relate my interactions with him so accurately.

If you’re feeling sufficiently nostalgic you may view online the 1940 phone book listing for Asimov Candy Store, where he once worked for his father Judah Asimov. Or drill down to the family info in the 1940 Census –Ed Seiler says you’ll find them listed in Election District 14-1387, King’s County, Track 169, Block I, on sheet 4A.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the reminder.]

Krugman Introduces Foundation

Posted on by

Don’t you think if Isaac Asimov was still with us he would be busting his buttons to see his Foundation Trilogy introduced by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times Op-Ed columnist?

Paul Krugman’s proud, too, being a fan of the series. He told an interviewer from the Boston Globe, “I was really inspired by the psychohistorians, who used statistics and social sciences to predict the future. I knew it was fiction, but what really struck me is the notion that the science of what people do could be important. I wanted to be one of those guys.”

Krugman’s introduction is available here, written with his characteristic blend of wisdom and hubris.

Now that I’m a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilization, what do I think of Asimov’s belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier—that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny? Well, on good days I do feel as if we’re making progress in that direction. And as an economist I’ve been having a fair number of such good days lately.

Krugman follows with a self-congratulatory example, then concludes:

So yes, it’s possible to have social science with the power to predict events and, maybe, to lead to a better future.

But he does not go so far as to claim he could have predicted The Mule.

And he does make this valuable comment about Asimov’s chosen stopping point:

We never get to see the promised Second Empire, which may be just as well, because it probably wouldn’t be very likeable. Clearly, it’s not going to be a democracy—it’s going to be a mathematicized version of Plato’s Republic, in which the Guardians derive their virtue from the axioms of psychohistory.

After all, Hari Seldon’s objective – hastening the Second Empire– is a shortcut out of the dark ages, not a utopian vision.

Monsters of the Idway

Posted on by

Selected archives of Chicon III, the 1962 Worldcon chaired by Earl Kemp, were exhibited online by the Northern Illinois University’s Rare Books and Special Collections Department in conjunction with this year’s Chicago Worldcon.

There are letters from Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, E.E. Smith, and assorted other pros, plus Kemp’s invitation to Isaac Asimov to deliver a talk on “The Positive Power of Posterior Pinching” and Asimov’s coy but interested reply. (Apparently the talk didn’t happen – at least the item isn’t listed in the Chicon III program book.)

Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds spotted this correspondence and brought it to the attention of fans who are discussing harassment in the wake of Readercon, in a post called “We Don’t Do That Anymore”.

The answering comments – people groaning and throwing up on their shoes — were interrupted by the arrival of Earl Kemp himself for a pleasant stroll down memory lane, sans clue:

What a wonderful find. Thank you very much for posting this. It’s nice to be reminded of some of the good things. I admit I’ve forgotten this, but it certainly was Ike. (There are better stories about him but not here, not now.)

I’m going to disappoint the person who copied the link to me expecting I’d join him in high dudgeon, but let’s be serious. Even Asimov himself seems to have doubted it would go over in 1962 and in 2012 the idea deserves Zwan’s critique.

Paul Krugman Interview

Posted on by

Believe it or not, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s love of science fiction is the principal focus of an interview conducted by Amy Sutherland for the Boston Globe.

KRUGMAN: I just finished Ken MacLeod’s “The Restoration Game,” which was great fun. And I am rereading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” because I am supposed to write an introduction to a new edition. That is pleasure and work together.

BOOKS: That trilogy was formative for you wasn’t it?

KRUGMAN: I first read them when I was a teenager. I was really inspired by the psychohistorians, who used statistics and social sciences to predict the future. I knew it was fiction, but what really struck me is the notion that the science of what people do could be important. I wanted to be one of those guys.

He also praises Frank Herbert and Iain Banks. And Charles Stross: will this inspire another t-shirt?

[Via Michael Walsh and the peripatetic Andrew Porter.]

Asimov on Science Channel

Posted on by

Prophets of Science Fiction pays tribute to Isaac Asimov on February 15 at 10 p.m. –

He saved the future from Evil Robots! Faced with a sci-fi tradition where robots exist only to torment their human creators, Isaac Asimov dreamed a better future where we need not fear our own technology. With his breakthrough sci-fi story collection, I, Robot, Asimov laid the ground rules for robo-behavior both in fiction and perhaps one day in real life.

Update 02/14/2012: Corrected spelling of Science Channel per Bill Higgins comment. It had formerly been speloled Discovery Channel.