I miss Isaac Asimov.
I didn't really know him personally. I met him once, at the 1989 World SF Convention. He looked just like his book jacket photographs, talked just like he wrote, and gracefully signed one of his science columns for me while I babbled my appreciation.
It was only a few seconds of contact. But because his personality stood out so much in his writing, I felt like I'd known him for years. I'm not the only one who felt this way, either. Whenever I came home with a new Asimov book my mother would ask, "What's Isaac up to now?"
Isaac 2K
Isaac would have celebrated his 80th birthday on January 2. He died in 1992, but I can't help but wonder how he would have reacted to the advent of the year 2000.
Asimov paid little specific attention to the year 2000 in his writing, but he had a passion for calendars and dates. He undoubtedly would have written at least one essay about the event.
He made good use of his interest in dating systems in a 1964 essay about calendars, "The Days of Our Years".
Isaac began with days and lunar months, explaining how astronomy is an essential tool in timekeeping. He then expanded the discussion to lunar calendars, lunar-solar calendars, the Julian calendar, and eventually our own Gregorian calendar. It's classic Asimov: well-organized, entertaining, and focused on science.
There's only a little history behind the astronomy of "Days of Our Years", but if he were to revise the essay today, the reverse might be true.
Isaac also loved history and made increasing use of it in his later work. If he'd written on calendars in 2000, he might have focused more on who created such timekeeping systems -- and why they created them -- and less on the science behind them.
A millennium, not the millennium
It's almost certain that Isaac would have been among the vocal minority pointing out that the year 2000 is the last year of the old century and not the first year of the new. A supreme rationalist, Asimov always placed facts above popular sentiment
But then, not even he was totally immune to the appeal of admittedly arbitrary dating systems.
In "Days of Our Years", Isaac commented that his birth was dated according to the Julian calendar, which his native USSR was still using at the time. According to the Gregorian calendar, he was actually born on January 15, a fact that led Asimov to lament, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he's 13 days younger than he is believed to be.
He might have considered the current end-of-the-millennium excitement an amusing misconception, but he probably wouldn't have been amused by our obsession with the Y2K bug. While the bug had the saving grace of being a real threat, Asimov probably would have pointed out the similarities between the irrational fear surrounding it and millennial hysteria in Europe a thousand years ago.
It's 2000 and where have we gone?
Isaac might have been a little disappointed by the state of human exploration in the benchmark year 2000. He didn't write much about the space program in his later years, possibly because it didn't live up to his early hopes. In a 1972 essay called "The Coming Decades in Space", he predicted multiple stations in Earth orbit and manned missions to Mars by the mid-1990s. Instead, the space program stalled with the space shuttle.
Fortunately, if Asimov's hopes for space travel remain unfulfilled, his worst fears for Earth didn't come to pass either. Many of his essays of the 1960s and 1970s have a touch of gloom to them -- Isaac was deeply worried about nuclear war, environmental destruction and other world-ending crises.
Still, he lived to see the Berlin Wall crumble and the threat of nuclear destruction abate. Whether humanity made it to the stars by 2000 or not, we at least made it, and he was by no means sure it would.
The recent upsurge in interest in the space program would also have pleased Isaac. Despite the recent failure of the Mars Polar Lander, exploration of the solar system and Earth-based astronomy are livelier than they have been in years, and both would have provided plenty of new topics for Asimov to write about.
Finally, if Isaac had lived to see 2000, he would have had the joy of seeing one of his greatest creations -- Andrew Martin, the robot who longs to be human -- brought to life by Robin Williams in The Bicentennial Man. Hollywood was a frontier Isaac never conquered, and seeing one of his stories on the big screen would have made his 80th birthday a happy one.
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