I think what Asimov did superbly was conceptualize. He came up with
the 3 Laws of Robotics (well, Campbell found them in an Asimov
story and codified them) when most robots were girl-chasing monsters,
he developed a much grander future history with the Foundation books
than Heinlein's somewhat earlier future history, and he coudl create
a very believable future city in THE CAVES OF STEEL, even if it wasn't
quite the creation Clarke pulled off in THE CITY AND THE STARS.
But those were creations of his time, and they've been done so often
now that the brilliance of the initial conceits has faded somewhat.
What remains are the fault: rather clumsy prose, an inability to create
believable or memorable characters (there's the Mule, and -maybe-
Lije Bailey and Susan Calvin out of how many tens of millions of words?),
the total lack of action/movement in his plots, the fact that for
the last 20 years of his fiction career every conversation was a
Socratic dialogue. And there was the fact that he was a kneejerk liberal,
and most of his political beliefs have been shown to be as untenable
as those of Heinlein, who was a kneejerk conservative. This
is what remains after the concepts have been done to death, and this
is why Isaac is less worshipped today than in, say, 1965.
-- Mike Resnick
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