Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction

  Revised Edition

  by

  James Gunn

  SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

  Published in the United States of America

  by Scarecrow Press, Inc.

  4720 Boston Way

  Lanham, Maryland 20706

  4 Pleydell Gardens, Folkestone

  Kent CT20 2DN, England

  Copyright © 1996 by James Gunn

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First edition published in 1982 by Oxford University Press

  British Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gunn, James E., 1923-

  Isaac Asimov, the foundations of science fiction / by James Gunn.

  Rev. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-8108-3129-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Asimov, Isaac, 1920- . 2. Authors, American 20th century

  Biography. 3. Science fiction, American History and criticism.

  I. Title. II. Title: Isaac Asimov

  PS3551.S5Z62 1996

  813'.54 dc20

  [B]96-21068

  CIP

  ISBN 0-8108-3129-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Preface

  When I finished Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction in 1981, Isaac had not written a science fiction novel for ten years, and that novel, The Gods Themselves, was his first adult science fiction novel in fifteen years. But the year my study was published, Isaac published the first of his science fiction best-sellers, Foundation's Edge. It won a Hugo Award and so did my book. After that, Isaac wrote half a dozen major novels, almost all of them best-sellers, and he added another two hundred books to his list. Authors have it within their power to undermine every effort to evaluate their work.

  Sadly, Isaac died, too young, in 1992. Although his work continues to be reprinted, and will be for many years to come, it is time to take another look at the unique career that was synonymous with modern science fiction itself. This new edition of Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction has been revised, updated, and expanded to account for his prolific final decade. It is a third longer, including an additional 20,000 words about his best-selling novels of the 1980s plus a complete transcript of my 1979 interview with him and a final list of his science fiction publications.

  I realize that no single volume can do justice to the phenomenon and the person that was Isaac Asimov. My hope is that it can give those who did not have a chance to know him, or to experience his fiction as it was published, a better understanding of what his science fiction was like and the conditions under which he created it, and, most of all, return them to the stories and novels themselves.

  JAMES GUNN

  Epigraph

  On January 15, 1981, Asimov started on a path that would take him where he had never expected to arrive, what 261 earlier books had taught him not to expect, to a place on the nation's best-seller lists. On that date Hugh O'Neill, Asimov's new editor at Doubleday, asked him to see Betty Prashker, an editor higher in the editorial chain of command. Prashker told Asimov that Doubleday wanted him to write a novel. In his memoir Asimov recorded his typical objections, which Prashker brushed aside by saying that Doubleday was going to send him a contract with a large advance, which four days later turned out to be the biggest Asimov had ever received, $50,000, ten times as much as he usually got from Doubleday. . . .

  In the introduction to the 1982 edition of The Foundation Trilogy, Asimov included an introduction that contained the following account:

  . . . about the end of May, I picked up my own copy of The Foundation Trilogy and began reading.

  I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense. . . .

  I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting on giving back the money, when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some sentences by science-fiction writer and critic James Gunn, who, in connection with the Foundation series, said, "Action and romance have little to do with the success of the Trilogy virtually all the action takes place offstage, and the romance is almost invisible but the stories provide a detective-story fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas."

  Oh, well, if what was needed were "permutations and reversals of ideas," then that I could supply. Panic receded. . . .

  1 I, Asimov

  Writing about the life of Isaac Asimov is like pouring water into the ocean. Asimov has written more about himself than any living author, and generally with frankness and insight. His autobiographical output began in 1962 with the first of his anthologies, The Hugo Winners, in which he inserted references to his own life in the introductions. Like many of the events in his life, this happened by accident. In his autobiography, Asimov mentions that he had never edited an anthology, thought it would be fun to try, but was not sure of his judgment in choosing the stories. The stories in The Hugo Winners already were chosen (they were the less-than-novel-length stories awarded Hugos by the World Science Fiction Conventions, beginning in 1955), and even the order was evident. All Asimov had to do was to write introductions. Since there was no question about the reason for the stories' inclusion, he decided to deal with the authors, and in a humorous way. The general introduction would be funny too and would deal with the fact that the editor had never won a Hugo. The Hugo Winners, indeed, became a highly personal book, as much about Asimov as about the Hugos or their winners. After that, Asimov went on to edit dozens of anthologies and added comfortably to his nearly five hundred volumes.

  The Hugo Winners was a breakthrough for Asimov in another area as well. Up to that point, Asimov says, his attempts at humor had been well received in person but poorly in print. Many readers of The Hugo Winners wrote to tell him that the introductions were the best part of the book. After that, collections of his own stories began appearing with introductions, at first (The Rest of the Robots, 1964) with notes about the stories salted with a few personal comments, and later with full-blown autobiographical detail. This technique reached its grandest expression in Opus 100 (1969), the story of how Asimov came to write one hundred books, with excerpts by category; The Early Asimov (1972), a kind of autobiography with illustrations from his early writing; and Before the Golden Age (1974), which carried Asimov back to his earliest memories of reading SF and brought his life story up to The Early Asimov, illustrated with his favorite science-fiction stories among those he read between 1931 and 1938.

  All of these works were limbering-up exercises for the massive autobiography in two volumes, the first of which came out in 1979 as his 200th book (along with Opus 200, which he put together in fairness to Houghton Mifflin, which had published Opus 100). The autobiography offers 1,560 pages of Asimov's life story, complete with photographs, a list of his two hundred books, and indexes (which, he informed his readers, he did not trust anyone else to do). In 1994, two years
after his death, I. Asimov: A Memoir was published, adding some 562 pages to the story of his life.

  Asimov devoted hundreds of thousands of words perhaps as much as a million to his self-description of a man who, he admitted, had "never done anything." The recollections progressed from "and then I read" to "and then I wrote" because Asimov's life has been woven from the warp and woof of reading and writing. The triumph of his writing skill was that he made it all so readable.

  This kind of obsession with self might have been insufferable in a person who was not at the same time openly amazed at the good fortune, success, plaudits, renown, and wealth that came his way. Asimov was greatly honored and richly rewarded for remarkable achievements. Even so, to interpret everything in terms of one's own reaction to it, including World War II, may seem excessively egotistical. But Asimov's attitude of "cheerful self-appreciation," which sometimes broke over into "charming Asimovian immodesties" (a phrase coined by a Doubleday editor in response to a Time magazine article quoting some of Asimov's self-praise), was balanced by disarming Asimovian self-denigration.

  In his autobiographical writings and comments, Asimov continually invited the reader to share his triumphs, to laugh at his blunders and lack of sophistication, and to wonder, with him, at the rise to prominence of a bright Jewish boy brought to this country from Russia at the age of three and raised in a succession of Brooklyn candy stores. Asimov was aided too by the fact that his readers were predisposed to enjoy his success with him. Some were admirers of his science popularizations and other non-fiction books and were curious about his earlier life; others were science-fiction readers and fans, and the science-fiction community still retains much of the solidarity and lack of envy of its early ghetto days.

  The problem remains: what more can a critic say about Asimov's life and work that Asimov himself didn't say already in nearly a million well-chosen words? Asimov's autobiographical writings are both an asset and an intimidation, revealing valuable information about the circumstances of creation and publication but also rendering redundant the critic's job of digging out little-known facts about life and work. Asimov's life is an open book in fact, four hundred and seventy open books.

  Well, the critic can tell the Asimov story more selectively and send the still curious on to Asimov's own fuller accounts, bring the details of the life into focus in illuminating the work, and explain the work in terms of a thesis that may have been too close to Asimov for him to perceive. The critic also has an opportunity to comment on the state of criticism as well as the work and the author at hand. One reason for first undertaking this study, more than a dozen years ago, was the conviction that much criticism of science fiction has been misguided and particularly that critics of Asimov's work have headed up false trails, trying to bring to the analysis of Asimov's fiction traditional methods and traditional criteria that are unproductive when applied to Asimov and to much other science fiction. What I found myself doing as I began writing, then, was blending biographical, sociological, publishing, and critical considerations into what I later perceived (perhaps without sufficient perspective) to be something a bit unusual in criticism, perhaps unnatural in normal circumstances, that I eventually thought of calling "criticism in context." Within the following chapters, for instance, the reader will find a number of plot summaries. These are desirable for several reasons: first, because the reader may be familiar with many Asimov works but certainly not all; second, because the reader may remember the general outlines of stories and novels but not the revealing details; and third (and most important), because what happens is the most important aspect of Asimov's fiction (and most other science fiction) and what happens is revealed in plot.

  Other matters that I found important as I got into my consideration of Asimov's work were the conditions under which the fiction was written and the way in which it was published. Asimov himself kept referring to these matters in his autobiographical writings; he thought they were important to what he wrote and didn't write, and so do I. In one footnote in his autobiography, he wrote:

  In this book I am going to pay considerable attention to the details of the money I received for stories and other things. Perhaps I should be noble enough to rise above such sordid things as money, but the fact is I couldn't and didn't. The money I earned or didn't earn has influenced my pathway through life, and I must go into the financial details if the pathway is to make sense.

  In the course of the chapters that follow, the reader will find frequent mention of why the fiction was written and how it got into print. The goal of the science-fiction writer was to get published, and the writing done was shaped by what was read in the magazines, what was said by an editor, what was paid for a story, and sometimes how readers responded. More traditional critics may feel that such concerns disqualify the writing from serious literary study. And yet scholars have been trying for centuries to ferret out the same kind of information about Shakespeare's plays.

  Asimov's early ambition, for instance, was to sell stories to Astounding Science Fiction. Two of his stories were published in Amazing Stories before one appeared in Astounding; to get published was a triumph, but only the Astounding story meant true success. The relationship between Asimov and John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding beginning in 1937, was influential in Asimov's development. Asimov gave Campbell most of the credit for his early science fiction and even his later writing career.

  In the analysis of Asimov's fiction that makes up most of this book, then, the reader will find mixed in with the critical comments many details of Asimov's life as they related to his writing. This was more of his life than one might think: as Asimov himself recognized, his life was his writing, and his other relationships were either detractions from or contributions to it.

  Asimov provided a couple of illustrative anecdotes. When he received copies of his forty-first book from Houghton Mifflin, he mentioned to his wife the possibility of reaching a hundred books before he died. She shook her head and said, "What good will it be if you then regret having spent your life writing books while all the essence of life passes you by?" And Asimov replied, "But for me the essence of life is writing. In fact, if I do manage to publish a hundred books, and if I then die, my last words are likely to be, `Only a hundred!'"

  On another occasion his beloved daughter Robyn asked him to suppose he had to choose between her and writing. Asimov recalled he said, "Why, I would choose you, dear." And added, "But I hesitated and she noticed that, too."

  Asimov was born January 2, 1920 (as nearly as his parents could calculate; it may have been as early as October 4, 1919) in Petrovichi, U.S.S.R. Petrovichi is a small town about fifty-five miles south of Smolensk and about two hundred fifty miles southwest of Moscow. When Asimov was three, his parents emigrated with him to the United States, at the invitation and sponsorship of his mother's older half-brother. They settled in Brooklyn where Asimov's father, handicapped by his lack of English and of job experience, bought a candy store in 1926. The candy store, and its successors, became a major part of Asimov's existence. ''It was open seven days a week and eighteen hours a day," he reported in his autobiography, "so my father and mother had to take turns running it, and I had to pitch in, too."

  The other important fact of Asimov's youth was his precocity. He had an unusual ability to learn and, as he later discovered, an unusually retentive memory. They were to be major assets in his life and career. He taught himself to read at the age of five, entered the first grade before he was six (his mother lied about his age), and became the brightest student in his class early and continuously, even though he skipped half a year of kindergarten, half a year of first grade, and half a year of third grade, and changed schools a couple of times.

  Asimov's schoolboy practice was to read all his school-books the first couple of days after he got them and then not refer to them again. He acquired a reputation as a child prodigy and a sense of his own superiority that he didn't mind letting other people see. They did not add to his populari
ty he was considered a smart-alecky kid but he did not have much association with others anyway. His work in the candy store kept him busy after school, and the seven-day week meant that he and his parents never visited anyone or had anyone visit them.

  Asimov recalled that he was orphaned by the candy store (since he was deprived of his parents' companionship) as well as protected by it (since he knew where his parents were at all times). The candy store constricted and shaped his life until he left home. It also meant that he grew up largely in the company of adults when he was in the store, or in the company of books when he was not. Both no doubt contributed to his precocity.

  Asimov completed junior high school in two years instead of three and entered Boys High School of Brooklyn, which at the time was a selective high school that had an excellent reputation for mathematics. He was twelve and a half upon entering, two and a half years younger than the normal age of fifteen. He continued to be sheltered: he had almost no contact with girls, as he might have had at a co-educational school. But in the world encapsulated in his autobiography almost everything happened for the best how could it not have happened for the best when he rose so far from such humble beginnings? and he reasoned that though being segregated from girls may have kept him naive far into his adolescence, it also may have protected him from more severe symptoms of rejection, for he was so much younger than his female classmates. Moreover, he had a bad case of acne from twelve to twenty.