MANHATTAN, 1929 — Coming from “the old country,” the faded Russia of shtetls and babushkas, a young boy suddenly finds himself in the future. New York! Skyscrapers and subways!! Jazz and radio and — right there in his father’s candy store — the greatest prize of all!!! Pulp science fiction!!!!

Isaac Asimov was nine when began reading — no, devouring — the first wave of fantasy and sci-fi. Weird Tales. Amazing Stories. His father, a stern Yiddish-speaking immigrant, banned the pulps until Isaac showed him how many story titles included the word “science.” And on the boy read on. And on. . .

Life soon forced other bright boys on the block to take up worldly matters — Depression and war — but Asimov doubled down on imagination. The result was, to say the least, fantastic.

Though best-known for his science-fiction, Asimov published more than 500 books in his fifty-year career. Without his “Foundation Trilogy,” there would have been no “Star Wars.” His “I Robot” series, recently made into a movie, took a humanistic look at robots and AI. But as a “great explainer,” Asimov also wrote about every topic under the sun. Plus the sun.

”Asimov has a rare talent,” a fellow writer said. “He can make your mental mouth water over dry facts."

Though fed on fantasy, Asimov was still forced to live in the real world. There he pursued a career in hard science. A child prodigy, he graduated from high school at 15, college at 19. But his imagination was constantly on call.

Asimov published his first stories while in college, and at 20, his name was on the cover of Amazing Stories. He wasn’t making much money, however, and while working at the Philadelphia Naval Yard during World War II, he considered giving up on writing. Co-worker and future science fiction star Robert Heinlein talked him out of it. Asimov soon published “Nightfall.”

Describing a perpetually sunlit world where darkness finally comes and drives people mad, “Nightfall” is now a classic. Asimov had considered himself “a third rater,” but “Nightfall” was “a watershed in my professional career. I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed.”

As his “day job,” Asimov cruised to a Ph.D. in chemistry and was hired at Boston University. He remained on the faculty his entire life, but as his novels soared, he was allowed to give only occasional lectures. Writing 16 hours a day — in his attic! — his typewriter flew him to galaxies far away. Then in 1957, actual news from space brought him back to earth.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Asimov was as shocked as America itself. Dreaming up other worlds suddenly seemed less important than explaining to everyday folks how this world worked.

For the next 25 years, Asimov pumped out books on every imaginable topic. Chemistry, physics, and general science, of course, but he also annotated Gulliver’s Travels, and Byron’s Don Juan. He offered “Asimov’s guides” to Shakespeare, Greek and Roman history, Paradise Lost, the Bible. . .

“How does it feel to know everything?” Asimov’s friend, Kurt Vonnegut, once asked him. Asimov answered that he merely had the reputation of omniscience, which made him “uneasy.”

And the books kept coming, a dozen a year, year after year. His novel Fantastic Voyage sent a spaceship through the human body. Other works humanized tech-sated sci-fi , creating a genre he called “social science fiction.”

Yet the man who took readers to other planets seemed edgy on this one. He was deathly afraid of flying. He never learned to swim or even ride a bike. Never drank, rarely drove, just wrote and wrote. “The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psycho-analytic treatment is my compulsion to write.”

Critics charged that, like most sci-fi specialists, Asimov was no stylist. His dialog is often stilted, his prose sometimes purple. Asimov was unapologetic. “I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be 'clear.' I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally.”

During the 1980s, while dreaming up another 100 books, including mystery novels and “lecherous limericks,” Asimov found time to apply reason to an increasingly superstitious world. He served as president of the American Humanist Association and was a co-founder of that hardcore de-bunker of nonsense, the Committee on Skeptical Inquiry.

By the time he died, in 1992, Asimov’s future was coming true — for better and for worse. The super computers, robots, and space travel he had imagined were all in the news. So were the nightmares.

His last book, Our Angry Earth, warned about over-population, global warming, and other “ticking ecological bombs.” “The coming of doom,” he wrote, “is because of deeds that do not seem evil on the face of it.” Humanity had “industrialized ourselves in order to lift the curse of physical labor from our backs,” but our success bore the seeds of destruction.

Today, when machine “intelligence” goes by a single acronym, AI is everywhere. Back in the 1950s, Asimov imagined three simple rules that AI zealots would do well to consider.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey human orders except when it conflicts with the first law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as that doesn’t interfere with the first two laws.

Thank you, Professor Asimov. Will this be on the test? Or is this the test?

THE MAN WHO KNEW IT ALL