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Notes -
So you've never read "The Bicentennial Man"?
Asimov was known for his spare writing style, of course. The "no character development" thing is also usually tossed at him. The problem with the claim is twofold. One, it's usually referring to the short stories. Well, there's only so much room in short stories. Two, it generally ignores the characters of the robots.
What little truth remains after those considerations goes back to the two conceptions of the novel championed (respectively) by Henry James and H.G. Wells, the novel of character and the novel of incident. James prevailed and the novel of character became "mainstream literature". It's not reasonable to expect science fiction -- which descends largely from Wells -- to follow the conventions of mainstream literature; if it did it wouldn't be science fiction.
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