This has been a big week for finding out about stuff I didn’t know. First it was the story of how Blade Runner the movie got the name and now this from Michael Ian Black’s Substack.
While reading up on Asimov, I learned that, although the cause of his death was listed as kidney/heart failure, he actually died from AIDS, which he contracted following a blood transfusion in 1983. The family kept the diagnosis private for fear of public backlash at a time when the disease’s victims were stigmatized, which I would say is hard to believe that we could ever have been so callous towards our fellow human beings, but it is, in fact, incredibly easy to believe.
Sad, but yes, easy to believe.