I think that's a little over the top. Great as Asimov was in many ways, he had his flaws as a writer.
Characters and dialogue are probably at the top of the list. I was reading the Foundation series recently and realised that in some of the longer dialogues the characters sounded exactly the same to the point where it was easy to forget who was speaking at any given time, and more to the point it was easy not to care. With the possible exception of the Mule and maybe a few others, the Foundation series doesn't really have any characters, it just has a bunch of puppets who get shuttled around the universe so they can explain the plot to each other.
Then we have the "creepy old man" vibe which creeps into some of his later works, where every female character (and they crop up at the rate of approximately one per book) is described with a particular emphasis on how her breasts look in whatever outfit she happens to be wearing.
But hey, he's a good writer and wrote a lot of interesting stories, plus a few dull ones. Respect is due to him, but I can't see him as one of the key figures of the twentieth century.
Characters and dialogue are probably at the top of the list. I was reading the Foundation series recently and realised that in some of the longer dialogues the characters sounded exactly the same to the point where it was easy to forget who was speaking at any given time, and more to the point it was easy not to care. With the possible exception of the Mule and maybe a few others, the Foundation series doesn't really have any characters, it just has a bunch of puppets who get shuttled around the universe so they can explain the plot to each other.
Then we have the "creepy old man" vibe which creeps into some of his later works, where every female character (and they crop up at the rate of approximately one per book) is described with a particular emphasis on how her breasts look in whatever outfit she happens to be wearing.
But hey, he's a good writer and wrote a lot of interesting stories, plus a few dull ones. Respect is due to him, but I can't see him as one of the key figures of the twentieth century.