Isaac Asimov

@Nate The Great: Oops, that was a silly mistake, sorry. Asimov also wrote a lot of great non-science nonfiction, but it's even harder to find now (His roman stuff goes for ~$50 used on amazon B( ).

Found on the news snippets section of Locus Online: someone is apparently starting a petition to dedicate a historical marker at a house Asimov lived in in Pennsylvania, while writing I, Robot and the first Foundation stories, among other things. I haven't really looked at the petition in detail, so I'm not sure if it's limited to PA residents, but I thought I'd pass it along in case people are interested.

eta: whoops, almost forgot! Petition found here.

edited 23rd Apr '13 3:48:14 PM by Xtifr

Change.org is a site set up by the federal government.

This seems like something it would be more effective to contact the Pennsylvania state or Philadelphia local government about. It's a bit small for federal-level.

edited 23rd Apr '13 4:49:54 PM by WarriorEowyn

A challenge has been made in Ask The Tropers. The challenge is to write a new work page every day until all of the works by Dr Asimov have pages. I'm going to try to meet this challenge, but I'm going to need some cheerleading to keep me going.

Here are the rules I'm laying down:

1. Start date is 6 April 2018 (twenty-six year anniversary of his death)
2. I will be taking a "vacation" during November and December, restarting on 2nd of January.
3. A new work page with at minimum 3 examples and 1500 words every day.
   • I may retroactively declare certain days a "cheat day", where instead I edit an already posted work page by adding 1500 words. This cannot be one of the pages I wrote, and I cannot use that page for another "cheat day".

Why do I need your help?

1. I don't actually have every published story/book. I'd like help to track down the more obscure stuff.
2. If I haven't posted by 0100 GMT, I need a PM reminder to upload a new work page.
3. I need some extrinsic motivation and getting a couple of cheers a week, in the form of "you forgot this trope" and "what did you think of X versus Y", will help me keep going.

I don't know if I'm proud or embarrassed to have inspired such creative madness, but I'm more than happy to cheer you on.

I'm not sure I can be a lot of help, though. While I was a big fan in my teenage years, my interests have grown in other directions since then, and I currently only have a small handful of his works left in my collection.

There are a few problems I foresee with your plan, though.

• While he has over 500 books, the majority were non-fiction, which is harder to trope, and many of those were collections of short science essays, which is about the hardest thing I can think of to trope. I might leave the nonfiction for last. Make pages for short stories instead. He has over 600 of those, which, coupled with all his novels, should give you plenty to do.
• A lot of his older work may be out of print. (Especially, I suspect, the non-fiction, which may be another reason to skip that for now.) You may need to investigate inter-library loans, and even that may not get you everything.

Still, none of that is a reason not to try!

Ooaye, the nonfiction part of the collection is the hard mode of this challenge. Despite the fact that I'm a voracious reader and have been trying to find his works since before I became a teenager, Dr Asimov is the one author I'm afraid has written more than I can read in my lifetime. However, I've got a respectable 14 physical copies of different nonfiction books of his, an estimated 90% of his published fiction, and access to an online archive of his magazines (I've only found 2 physical copies of them).

What will make the nonfiction easier to trope is that Dr Asimov had a distinctive "lecture" style when he was communicating to the audience, which brings in Second-Person Narration and Affectionate Nickname. Bam! Two tropes down and all I need is a reasonable summary of publication and content to fill out the word count.

I am planning on starting the project with The Further Adventures of Batman, where the Good Doctor wrote "Northwestward" in the Black Widowers universe.

edited 20th Mar '18 4:57:07 AM by crazysamaritan

Which title do people think is better, {{Opus 100}} or OpusOneHundred? Each of the three books has sections of stories, and occasionally works that were unpublished until then. Obviously if we go with Opus One Hundred I'd use Custom Wikiword to make it display as the numeral.

"Northwestward" is up and crosswicked.

I'm going to be modifying one of the rules I laid down, mostly the markup text obscures the wordcount, and 1500 was a little larger than I can chew off. I'm aiming for at least 6000 characters per page, but the actual minimum will be 5000. The next page will be for Martin H. Greenberg. Why would I make a page for him when I'm troping Dr Asimov? Find out tomorrow!

Today I wrote The Return of the Black Widowers, and tomorrow I'll write "The Acquisitive Chuckle".

Okay, so today I took a cheat day to update Black Widowers. The books are now set to be indexed with a null edit, which will make it easier for future uploading. I've only got two books (and access to a third), so this Mystery streak will end somewhat soon.

On a (supposedly) unrelated note, I want to share the news that Apple will be producing a TV series adaptation of Foundation. Based on the producers, I'm pretty certain it'll be released rather than suffering Development Hell (like many other Dr Asimov adaptations have).

edited 10th Apr '18 5:32:43 PM by crazysamaritan

Call me crazy, but I'm honestly more open to adaptions of the Good Doctor's works then most. Probably helped by the fact that something like Foundation leaves a lot of room for impressive visuals in between the talking and plotting. If nothing else, it gives the different planets of the galaxy a better chance to stand out more in terms of visual design besides Trantor and Terminus.

...holy shit an actual show huh? well I wish it luck.

Does Apple normally produce shows?

I think it'll take a special director's vision. Someone who can turn Dr Asimov's Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue into action without sacrificing his plot.

It's not the special effects that need to be high-quality, it's the adding of dynamic characters who won't change the story's flow. Adaptation Expansion would actually serve better than Adaptation Distillation here.

edited 11th Apr '18 4:17:54 AM by crazysamaritan

Yesterday I uploaded "Ph as in Phony" (and since I can't spell, it was initially uploaded as "Ph As In Phoney"), today I uploaded "Early Sunday Morning", and tomorrow I will try to upload Tales of the Black Widowers. Not sure about that, because I'm feeling a bit stuck at under 5,000 characters right now. That buffer that I was trying to create ran out, so I need to double-time my reading for a bit so that I can figure out enough Anthology and Discussed Tropes for a full upload.

cheers on crazysamaritan. You go, cs!

edited 12th Apr '18 7:23:43 PM by lakingsif

Thanks!

I've been distracted by interesting facets of "Insert Knob A in Hole B", which is why today's upload was delayed. I also had to dive into the translated versions of Tales of the Black Widowers to get enough tropes to pass 5000 characters. The Annotated Edition is a trope that's gonna get a lot of use from this author.

hey, it may seem like cheating but a trope is a trope

Oh, I don't think I was cheating by delving into the tropes from the translations. Cheating would be trying to pass off my previously uploaded examples as part of the 5000. That might happen later, but I've been trying not to do that.

In today's news, I finished the hardest story I expect to create a page for, "Insert Knob A in Hole B". My online word counter tells me it only has 286 words, but supposedly it's 350. Anyway, it's kinda funny to read the magazine publication and see the editor write an introduction longer than the story itself.

It's a good page (and it has 13,405 html characters)

Really? My word counter gives me only 5245 characters for the work page.

html includes links, formatting, various other internet-induced blank spaces

Huh. Interesting.

Yesterday's upload was "Truth to Tell", and today's upload is "Go, Little Book!". Hey, Sif? Since you're always uploading an image for your pages, do you mind doing the legwork on the book pages?

Tomorrow will probably be "The Obvious Factor", but I'll try to upload something else instead to build up my buffer.

I’m sure I can find images for them

Yesterday I uploaded "The Pointing Finger", today I uploaded "Miss What?", and tomorrow I'll probably upload "The Lullaby Of Broadway".

Gues there isn't much to say about that.

I'm running behind, but the pages are still being uploaded.

• "Yankee Doodle Went To Town" represents the Saturday upload.
• Tell Me a Story: Science Fiction One represents the Sunday upload.
• "The Curious Omission" is supposed to be uploaded today, and it won't be.
• "Out of Sight" is supposed to be uploaded tomorrow, and it might be.

The Cross Wicking is pretty behind, since I'm having trouble focusing and searching up tropes that apply to each work. I do like the minimum 5k characters because I feel like every page is reasonably complete when I do upload them, even when I know there's other tropes that I could include on the page.