One of the most common impressions of Asimov's fiction work is that his writing style is extremely unornamental. In 1980, SF scholar James Gunn wrote of I, Robot that:

Except for two stories—"Liar!" and "Evidence"—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent.... The robot stories—and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.

This description applies to a large proportion of Asimov's fiction, including that written after 1980. However, it is worth noting that this applies to the majority of science fiction produced during the so-called "Golden Age" of science fiction. It has been argued that early science fiction authors were deliberately more focused on imagining future technologies rather than in-depth characterization. While this trend appears to have played itself out, it is still apparent even in modern-day science fiction that the interactions of the character with the technology and future social situations are frequently of greater importance than the characters themselves.

Gunn observes that there are places where Asimov's style rises to the demands of the situation; he cites the climax of "Liar!" as an example. Sharply-drawn characters occur at key junctures of his storylines: in addition to Susan Calvin in "Liar!" and "Evidence", we find Arkady Darell in Second Foundation, Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels. (In Forward the Foundation, Seldon becomes a partial mirror of Asimov himself.)

These criticisms are to some extent the flip side of Asimov's aforementioned rationalism: his books, like his characters, tend to be cerebral and more interested in ideas and puzzles than in character and feeling. His idea of "psychohistory," where the individual quirks of human beings could be averaged out at the statistical level of an entire galaxy's population, is perhaps revealing in that regard. What helps keep Asimov's fiction readable is the charm of the author, which is conveyed to his characters.

Asimov was also criticised for the lack of sex and aliens in his science fiction. Asimov once explained that his reluctance to write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astounding's editor John Campbell rejected one of his early science fiction stories because the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. He decided that, rather than write weak alien characters, he would not write about aliens at all. Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens, sex, and alien sex. Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves.

Others have criticised him for a lack of strong female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings he acknowledges this, and responds by pointing to inexperience. His later novels, written with more female characters but in essentially the same prose style as his early SF stories, brought this matter to a wider audience. One of the most notable of these female characters could be said to be Dors Venabili, even though it is acknowledged she was a humaniform robot. For example, the 25 August 1985 Washington Post's "Book World" section reports of Robots and Empire as follows:

In 1940, Asimov's humans were stripped-down masculine portraits of Americans from 1940, and they still are. His robots were tin cans with speedlines like an old Studebaker, and still are; the Robot tales depended on an increasingly unworkable distinction between movable and unmovable artificial intelligences, and still do.

In the Asimov universe, because it was conceived a long time ago, and because its author abhors confusion, there are no computers whose impact is worth noting, no social complexities, no genetic engineering, aliens, arcologies, multiverses, clones, sin or sex; his heroes (in this case R. Daneel Olivaw, whom we first met as the robot protagonist of The Caves of Steel and its sequels) feel no pressure of information, raw or cooked, as the simplest of us do today; they suffer no deformation from the winds of the Asimov future, because it is so deeply and strikingly orderly.

This is perhaps slightly overstating the issue given that, for example, The Naked Sun (1957) deals with social issues as a core part of its central setting and motivation, depicts genetic engineering in the guise of eugenics as a fundamental part of that society, presents the reader with inverted arcologies where a single person is the focal point of the artificial environment as well as a hero who hails from a "normal" archeology on earth. Meanwhile, totally artificial birth, although not specifically cloning, is the aim of the leaders of the society, sexual want is the major driving force of the main female character albeit veiled in 1950s sensibilities, and the entire story is used to make the point that too much order is ultimately a stagnant dead end to be avoided.

Be that as it may, a considerable portion of such criticism boils down to the charge that Asimov's works are simply dated. In fact, some details of Asimov's imaginary future technology as he described more than 50 years ago have not aged well. He, for example, described powerful robots and computers from the distant future as still using punch cards or punched tape and engineers using slide rules. In one dramatic scene in Foundation and Empire a character gets the news by buying a paper at a vending machine. His knowledge of a newborn's psychology (in Second Foundation) is also incorrect.

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