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Originally Posted by MickiTee
One thing that has been totally ignored by this thread (as far a I can tell) is that Asimov's fiction output is just a part of what he published. If he wasn't writing fiction, especially from the 1950's onward, he was editing anthologies, collections and magazines or writing non-fiction. He's one of the most prolific writers I've ever enountered.
If memory serves, there are 3 titles, Opus 100, Opus 200 & Opus 300 which were written & published to mark the milestones of his having 100, 200 & 300 books published. (If I've got this wrong I'm sure someone here will correct me).
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No, you are correct.
In fact, for most of the 60's Asimov was a primarily a non-fiction writer.
Over his entire career, he wrote everything from textbooks to popular science to mysteries to SF to Scholarly Guides to both Shakespeare and the Bible.
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Asimov's Guide to the Bible is a work by Isaac Asimov that was first published in two volumes in 1967 and 1969, covering the Old Testament and the New Testament (including the Catholic Old Testament, or deuterocanonical, books and the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament books, or anagignoskomena, along with the Fourth Book of Ezra), respectively. He combined them into a single 1296-page volume in 1981. They included maps by the artist Rafael Palacios.
Including numerous black-and-white maps, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in KJV order, explaining the historical and geographical setting of each one and the political and historical influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the main characters. Asimov treats the secular aspects of the Bible with intellectual instead of theological commentary. His appendix "Guides to the Old and New Testament" include biblical verse, footnotes, references and subject indices.
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To appreciate Asimov as a fiction writer you need to put him in context: he started in the age of the pulps, grew to prominence as a short story writer in Campbell's ASTOUNDING, skipped the new wave era of SF, and returned primarily as a novelist is the 80's and 90's. And then you have to add in Asimov the successful non-fiction writer.
Kinda hard to over-rate that kind of career.