Douglas Adams
Gravity never forgets about you. If you get distracted as you fall and forget to notice it you will still fall. Ouch. Not so in the Universe that Douglas Adams imagines for his hitchhikers - human flight without machines is not a dream, it happens when you are not looking.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is famous for magical realism, Adams is not. Yet his writing and its narratives and scenes have the same ethereal quality, whilst being grounded in, at times, relatively hard sci-fi. Douglas Adams is also grounded in London. If you are a Londoner you will enjoy the references both provincial and metropolitan. They are not unkind and so I hope enjoyable for someone without a knowledge of London - if you fall into this camp I suspect you will find enjoyable tours based on Douglas Adams' London available from some of our tremendous tour guides. Look out for the rather wonderfully named character Hotblack Desiato, for instance - a name which you may be familiar with if you live in Camden.
Dr Weller
Isaac Asimov
Why is Isaac Asimov one of the greatest science fiction writers ever? This is the man who grabbed science fiction out of the realms of fancy-finned space ships and square-jawed heroes with blasters and gave us genuine moral conundrums over how to treat artificially intelligent robots. The man who, while a graduate student, wrote a short story which mimicked a science paper and then was asked about it in his PhD exam. The man who gave us the three laws of robotics which have inspired not only so much other science fiction but continue to feed genuine philosophical debate even today. The man whose robot characters were as complex and deep as his human ones.
How could you not admire a man with such a prodigious output, of over 500 books spanning galaxy-wide space opera (The Foundation Series) to mysteries (The Black Widowers) with long detours into non-fiction (Asimov’s Guide to Science inspired me as a teen but he also wrote guides to Shakespeare and The Bible) and who had a wicked sense of humour to boot? And he had the most awesome sideburns!
The Physics Dept
Asimov is widely considered as one of the 'Big Three' of the science fiction genre - alongside Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. His work extends over a wide range of topics - he wrote short stories and long series, science fiction work but also mysteries and fantasies and also non-fiction about subjects such as maths, physics and history. Almost all of it is set in his 'future universe' - imagining a world in the future where humans have expanded their race and robots are much, much more prominent. His short stories and novels are set in times when humans have only just conquered the moon or have conquered most of the galaxy.
Asimov often focuses on societies and how they would act in the future, imagining planets in different positions and showing the reader how society would act within it. He repeatedly revisits the subjects of robotics and ethics in his stories - many of his stories are about robots, and many focus on the place of robots in society - one of Asimov’s most famous concepts is his 3 Laws of Robotics. Asimov’s wide range of topics are summed up almost entirely in his defining Foundation series. The series is set far in the future and captures Asimov’s ideas and writing styles almost entirely in a single series of books.
Anton Fedotov
Many thanks to Dr Weller, the Physics Dept and Anton for their contributions. So - the Three Laws of Robotics or paranoid androids? Over to you (and as always, a reminder that if you're reading this on your phone, you need to click the link to 'see web version' to vote).
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