hosting tonight's program and marilyn welcome to the program and isaac asimov welcome very much indeed the conversation i wonder i wonder if you might you've written in such a wide variety of subject matter over the course of your career and so forth i wondered maybe i might ask you a question the outset is what areas have not come under your purview as far as writing is concerned because you've written such a wide variety of topic areas but maybe that we just move to a different kind of question in a certain sense but some areas you've not chosen to turn your attention to and what are some of the areas that you haven't well i've never written a book specifically on psychology although i have written some science fiction stories which were psychological now broke i've never written an art  which accounts for why for poor is that but you have but you have had an interest in such a wide variety of subject matter haven't you i mean ranging all the way from esoteric questions of science to shakespeare and to other kinds of question that makes it easier to write you rather than becoming heavily specialized in one particular field a lot of people complain is too much specialization say within academia i just wonder generally where we're going to have some specialization there are some fields where you can't really contribute anything new until you spend practically your whole life studying scholarship and i think there's no harm in having some people be generous even if it means that any want to give and feel that they're a little superficial so i want it's interesting to interest yourself in a lot of different things and be able and yourself as you write oh yes oh yes a great many subjects i've had to educate myself i've written more books on astronomy than any other single subject and that's never taken a course in astronomy and my knowledge of astronomy report about them it seems that there's so much inaccuracy to the point that it's almost comical and sometimes i wonder if there's any value at all and i am sure that i know that people feel that autobiographies are going to be very down long sections of the piece of the day and so and then about the middle of a year i began submitting stories it was just my luck that i started the diary the very year in which i started my professional life and once i started submitting stories suddenly everything changed it became mostly a literary diary what i was writing that day when i had submitted it when i had an acceptance of rejection i would also write other things sometimes i'm lucky they just somebody says something i read something and it starts me thinking on one occasion i was in science fiction was a mystery story i dreamed the story at least in my nothing but the desert as well it just goes on and on or they could rob blend one internet you see continuity between all of the things that you've writing i mean is there in your consciousness in your understanding continuity between all the pieces that we outside of your consciousness might see is complex background there are different aspects of it and it makes life a little easier for you if you don't have to start from scratch with everything you do so that i have my foundation series of which the th book is going to be published but there are three so called empire novels that come before it and i now have five robots five robot books of from before that so that i have thirteen books and there are still one to two more of i think of writing between the st and last and then maybe keep on growing but i might not  that's all gone history will never capture the foreground the technology has allowed us to capture in reality more and more and we're going to have a sort of replay of technology of reality perhaps more and more then certainly we ever had historically i mean the technological capability capturing the sergeant knowledge and information that's true for instance you know i think i can look back at my early books and it's not with any pain that i look back at my early books in fact graduate chemistry course and on that day in my diary i wrote this was just about the worst day i ever had online i won't write anything about it because it's burned into my head never forget it but i just stare at it all ways we can call upon reality reality was there was a reality that was there and these are ways in which we can call upon reality and we're getting a better and better fix at being able to have really i want to ask you a broad general question you've  range in other words we've got a mess of problems right now that we may not win if we don't stop we're going to destroy ourselves if we do solve them if were sufficiently saying to solve them all very nuclear war to correct pollution to maintain a livable environment to expand the human range and move out into space if we can do world that and achieve sanity then it seems to me the future is gold but can really achieve sanity the record of the human species is not a very good one and that respect you think we have in our hands now after i don't know what three million years or thirty thousand years or whatever when humanity st is counted to begin to appear in the evolution support of the species and we're at that promethean condition now after three million years it's incredible that we should be alive conscious and participant at a time when that it is in our hands in a way that it hasn't been historically we can try and wipe out the tribe in the other valley carl sagan says this is the most glorious most glorious generation for an astronomer to be alive because he witnesses to gain the knowledge in so many are right here where we are right this is making these enormous advances i know it is an amazing time and you can also say this is an unfortunate generation because until now no matter how much human beings tr they could never stop the spring time they could never stop the generations no matter who died and how many humanity would continue on and in future generations will be either dead or else we have would have solved this problem and will know we're going to continue in this one generation there d is a the possibility of the strong ourselves and the lack of knowledge whether we will or not it's the only thing that keeps i think humanity from from getting very upset about this is that almost nobody thinks about it nobody thinks about it they prefer to think about they where the next meal's i don't play the where the next meal is coming from and who's going to win the next book ballgame what program to watch on television busy having a fight with their wives or husbands as the case may be i mean there are all kinds of small concerns small day to day concerns so how many times do they stop and say will humanity survive will there be a nuclear war what will happen if we continue to poison the of the they don't that would make them very happy if they did and even if had one other thing that has always faced human beings ever since the consciousness of the st entered their minds which is personal death that's right i mean the even if you thought that humanity was going to continue forever you knew that you yourself would have to die someday and very few people think about that either you always behave as though you're going to live forever and and you can only do one thing if you're reading one thing you can't write another i mean you can only direct your attention on one project at a time or something you know how do you do determine your priorities i mean you know well what i was saying i mean there's a lot of things you can be really experience in terms of that creative d member and so we live our lives that peak experience creative output peak experience all of the time i think we would get to be burned with it we would get burned out even if it's creative did it desirable it is in its long jevon to creating the one fund that it was supposed to have to have time just to relax and allow things to well rejuvenate or something well i've often said that you know if you have a writer's block very painful said must be and you have interesting that we advance from fields of knowledge that we have that we can draw on fifteen years ago we didn't know about neurotransmitters and biochemistry there was the knowledge base that were the knowledge base is advancing almost faster than we can keep up with the interest of trying to understand it almost constantly stand we're constantly inventing new words for new knowledge new concepts and so on it's a little humbling to think that what is most likely to survive everything i after all i've published now i publish now at least twenty million dollars words i have to figure it out maybe even more but all those millions of words and i've published i am convinced that one hundred years from now only transformation even at this point it gets harder and harder to look ahead because things are changing so quickly that's this problem however so far i had my robots begin to be practical in the eighty's and ninety's in some respects there are complex the robots we actually have some respects the robots we're having are shall we say more i said was that violence is the last refuge of the in the competence i don't really truly enjoy allow to allow a dispute to come to the point of violence means that someone was and smart enough to settle the matter before scoundrel whether they say they did it for the nation whether people could say we did it for the species or something or it's out of the things we didn't get to is a trans national identity or we can begin to move into trans national identity politics what would be the i think we're going to have to y to have to we can no longer try to try to divide humanity into a tiny little groups with each one having the right to do anything it wanted to do in the name of its own security  at the present moment any nation which develop the power could destroy all of humanity and claim if they could be viewed as a by the claim they have done it in the name of sacred honor of national security and all that we can't afford anymore we've got to recognize the fact that the world is too small for nations particularly when we can as you indicated earlier on at some point here in the t century reached the point where we can create species wide with the technology to build our hands there's a term that i've used marijuana use sometimes james joyce has daedalus a history of the nightmare from which we're attempting to awaken i wonder if maybe that's something you might feel in a certain sense accord with the a verse side of this destructive capability that we can see the human society if we look ahead in our times it's almost millennia in use that are millennial signs of the times in which we live interesting time that's the chinese curse or happy the happy the nation that has no history and in fact given wish i could call them exactly of course i can given in discussing the rain  time passed without notice without history which after roll speaking of history is nothing but a list of the crimes of some misfortune of the human species devoted for him to be able to put a frozen to be able to communicate these things well i tell you touched on a wide variety of subjects and so forth and it's really exciting i don't know how to graduate all the work you've done you've heard that many many times to do congratulate you on all the work i certainly want to thank you for participating