A couple years ago, as the writer Sarah Elizabeth was working on her book, "The Art of Fantasy" (out September 12th), a particular illustration kept popping into her mind's eye. It was the cover for the 1976 Dell/Laurel Leaf paperback edition of Madeleine L'Engle's classic sci-fi/fantasy novel "A Wrinkle in Time."

She wanted to include the piece in her book, but she didn't know who the artist was. "I thought, 'Oh, pish posh! Surely I'm going to find this in the first page of Google.' No. No, no, no!"

The answer isn't on any page of google, or any page of the physical book itself — not the copyright page where the rest of the credit information is, not the front or back cover, NOWHERE.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database

The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books.

• Author: Isaac AsimovAuthor Record # 5
• Legal Name: Asimov, Isaac
• Birthplace: Petrovichi, Smolensk Governorate, Russia
• Birthdate: 2 January 1920
• Deathdate: 6 April 1992
• Language: English
• Note: Became a US citizen in 1928. Undergraduate degree in chemistry from Columbia University, 1939; MA in 1941; PhD in chemistry from Columbia University, 1948. Brother of Stanley Asimov. Married Janet Asimov in 1973.

Soylent Green is more famous for its twist than anything else — and that’s okay. //

Before Star Wars changed everything in 1977, most serious science fiction movies were dark. And 50 years ago, on April 19, 1973, one of the darkest sci-fi movies of all time was released. Half a century later, we’re still quoting Soylent Green and its big twist, but the movie’s cultural influence goes even deeper.

The Science-Fiction series STAR TREK uses an alternate Date/Time format: STARDATE.

Marginal note: Astronomers also use the word "StarTime" (or "Sidereal Time"), but this differs totally from StarTrek startime. 1 Astronomer staryear (= sidereal year) equals 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9.54 seconds.

So far there are several definitions of calculations between STARDATES and our Gregorian Dates

Asimov did not have a bar mitzvah, which he attributed to his parents choosing to raise him without religion and not, as some suspected, “as an act of rebellion against Orthodox parents.” However, he said, he “gained an interest” in the Bible as he got older, although he eventually realized that he preferred the type of fictional books that would one day make him famous: “Science fiction and science books had taught me their version of the universe and I was not ready to accept the Creation tale of Genesis or the various miracles described throughout the book.”

Having the first name “Isaac,” in the 21st century, isn’t necessarily a certain giveaway that a person is Jewish. But in Asimov’s time, it almost always was. And while Asimov sometimes faced pressure to change his name for professional reasons, he always stuck with his given name.

“I would not allow any story of mine to appear except under the name of Isaac Asimov,” he wrote. “I think I helped break down the convention of imposing salt-free, low-fat names on writers. In particular, I made it a little more possible for writers to be openly Jewish in the world of popular fiction.” //

As for Israel and Zionism, Asimov was something of a skeptic. In his final book “Asimov Laughs Again,” published around the time of his death, Asimov stated that he had never visited Israel and didn’t plan to, although he attributed that in part to his habit of not doing much traveling.

“I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic. I was not,” he wrote. “I said: What are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right.”

Last summer, we got our first glimpse of Apple TV's hotly anticipated adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of novels when Apple released a teaser trailer during the 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference. Production on the new show, which stars Jared Harris and Lee Pace, shut down last March due to the pandemic, but filming resumed last October. No official air date besides "late 2021" has surfaced, but there are a few tantalizing extra glimpses in the streaming platform's new summer (and beyond) preview trailer, per the eagle eye of The Spaceshipper on Twitter.

Mild spoilers for the first book in the Foundation series below.)

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The series started as eight short stories by Asimov that appeared in Astounding Magazine between 1942 and early 1950. Those stories were inspired in part by Edward Gibbons' History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the first four were collected, along with a new introductory story, and published as Foundation in 1951. The next pair of stories became Foundation and Empire (1952), and the final two stories appeared in 1953's Second Foundation. Asimov's publishers eventually convinced him to continue the series, starting with two sequels: Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986). Next came a pair of prequels: Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993), the latter published posthumously (Asimov died in 1992).

The original trilogy centered on mathematician Hari Seldon, who has developed a mathematical approach to sociology that he calls "psychohistory." Psychohistory enables him to predict the future of large populations—like the Galactic Empire, which incorporates all inhabitants of the Milky Way. Unfortunately, Seldon's theory predicts an imminent collapse of the empire—well, in 500 years, which is certainly imminent on galactic time scales. This will usher in a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years, after which a second empire will arise. The news is not received well by the members of the Committee on Public Safety, who essentially rule the empire, and Seldon is forced to stand trial for treason, along with a brilliant young mathematical protégé named Gaal. //

In his defense, Seldon argues that he cannot stop the collapse, but there is a way to limit those Dark Ages to just 1,000 years. He proposes creating a Foundation, a group of the most intelligent minds in the empire, charged with preserving all human knowledge in the Encyclopedia Galactica. Rather than executing Seldon, the committee decides to exile him, along with the members of the new Foundation, to a remote world called Terminus, where they can begin compiling the encyclopedia. Much of the first book in the trilogy follows the establishment of the colony on Terminus and the various political machinations that shape its early history, along with a startling revelation: unbeknownst to the committee, Seldon has established a second Foundation at the other end of the galaxy.

We don't yet know how much of this history will be included in the TV adaptation or how closely the show's narrative will follow the books.