I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  Let me make a few points about pulp fiction while I’m at it. It flourished in pre-World War II days, and in those days racism and racial stereotypes were an ingrained part of the American scene. It was not till World War II and the fight against Adolf Hitler’s racism that it became unfashionable for Americans to express racist views. I don’t mean by that that racism disappeared after World War II, but merely that Hitler’s example killed its respectability except among the troglodytes we always have with us. People still may feel racist in many respects, but they are cautious about expressing it, and if they are decent (and most people are), they try to fight it in themselves.

  Pre-World War II pulp fiction was racist outright and everyone accepted the fact. Even the people who were victimized by it accepted it. There was very little militancy among the minorities, very little self-assertion.

  So the heroes of pulp fiction were invariably solid Americans of Northwestern European extraction.

  As for everyone else, well— If they were mentioned at all, Italians were greasy organ-grinder types, Russians were dreaming mystics, Greeks were olive-skinned and untrustworthy, Jews were comic characters when they were money-mad, African-Americans were comic characters who were either cowardly or murderous, according to the needs of the plot. Chinese were subtle and cruel (it was a time when Dr. Fu Manchu was a perfectly acceptable villain). Everyone but the Northwestern Europeans spoke with thick accents unheard in real life. (For that matter, motion pictures of the period were no better, and many of them would be extremely embarrassing to enlightened viewers if they were seen now.) And even I accepted it all. When it came time for me to write, however, no matter how pulpish my writing was, I avoided stereotypes. That much I did owe myself. But all my characters had names like Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan and so on. It wasn’t till further on that I began to indulge in ethnic names.

  There was another characteristic of pulp fiction that was quite curious. Though women were routinely threatened by the villains, the nature of the threat was never explicitly stated. It was a period of strong sexual repression, and sexual acts and threats could only be referred to in “family magazines” in the most distant way. Of course, no one minded if there was a continuous display of violence and sadism—that was all right for the family—but no sex.

  This reduced women to little mannikin figures who never contributed actively to the plot. They were there to be (namelessly) threatened, to be captured, to be tied up and imprisoned—and, of course, to be rescued unharmed.

  The women were there solely to make the villains more villainous, the heroes more heroic. And in being rescued, they played a purely passive role, their part consisting mostly of screaming. I can’t recall (though I’m sure there must have been rare cases) any woman trying to join the fight and help the hero; any woman picking up a stick or rock and trying to lambaste the villain. No, they were like does, idly cropping the grass while they waited for the stags to stop fighting so that they would know which harem they would belong to.

  Under the circumstances, any red-blooded male reading pulp fiction (like me) grew very impatient with the introduction of females. Knowing in advance they would merely be stumbling blocks, I wanted them out. I remember writing letters to magazines complaining about women characters—their very existence.

  This was one of the reasons (not the only one) that in my own early stories I omitted women. In most cases, I left them out altogether. It was a flaw, of course, and another sign of my pulpish origins.

  Science Fiction

  One of the branches of pulp fiction was “science fiction”—the smallest and least regarded branch. It came into being in the pulp world in the form oi Amazing Stories, whose first issue appeared in April 1926. Its editor and, therefore, the founding father of magazine science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, called it “scientifiction,” an ugly portmanteau word.

  He was forced out as editor in 1929, and went on to found two competing magazines that summer, Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories, which were soon combined into Wonder Stories. In connection with these magazines, he first made use of the term “science fiction.”

  The presence of the word “science” in the new magazine was a gift from heaven for me. I managed to con my naive father into thinking that a magazine entitled Science Wonder Stories was all about science. The science fiction magazines were, therefore, the first pulp magazines I was allowed to read. That may have been part of the reason that, when the time came for me to be a writer, it was science fiction that I chose as my medium.

  Another reason was science fiction’s more extended grasp on the young imagination. It was science fiction that introduced me to the Universe, in particular to the Solar system and the planets. Even if I had already come across them in my reading of science books, it was science fiction that fixed them in my mind, dramatically and forever.

  There was, for instance, a three-part serial entitled The Universe Wreckers by Edmond Hamilton, which appeared in the May, June, and July 1930 issues of Amazing. In it, Earth was threatened with destruction by aliens from beyond the Solar system, but they were

  foiled by the derring-do of the heroes, who traveled out to Neptune in order to save the world. (How much more exciting and suspenseful that was than merely catching a criminal!)

  It was in that tale that I first heard of Triton, the larger of Neptune’s two satellites. Alpha Centauri also played a minor role and that may be the first time I heard of it and realized that it was the nearest star.

  The first time I ever heard of the uncertainty principle, one of the basic foundations of modern physics, was through my reading of a two-part serial entitled Uncertainty by John W. Campbell, Jr., in the October and November 1936 issues of Amazing.

  Mind you, I am not saying that science fiction was necessarily a good source of true scientific knowledge. In fact, rather the reverse when I was a youngster. In those early days, many of the science fiction writers were pulp writers who tried their hand at this field as well as at the others, and did so with only the barest rudiments of science. There were also eager teenage youngsters whose knowledge of science was almost as poor.

  Still, among the garbage there were bound to be pearls and it was up to the discerning reader to find them. For instance, beginning with the September 1932 issue of Amazing, a writer named J. W. Skid-more wrote a series of stories about two entities he called “Posi” and “Nega,” which stood for “positive” and “negative” of course, and I suspect that it was in the 1932 story that I first got the notion of protons and electrons kicked into my mind.

  How fortunate I was, then, that my father had a candy store and not some other kind of store. Except that one mustn’t blame fortune. It was inevitable. Because my father was an immigrant without any skills beyond the ability to handle bookkeeping accounts, he had no choice. He did not have the specialized skills to be a butcher or a baker and he might not even have been able to handle a grocery store. A candy store, which sold only packaged items (aside from the preparation of soda-fountain specialties, which is easy to learn), was the least specialized form of store and required the least knowledge. It was rock bottom.

  One difficulty in my magazine-rack reading, by the way, was that I had to do it quickly to minimize the chance that the magazine would be needed for a customer. If a customer came in and asked for a Doc Savage when I was reading the only copy, it would be snatched out of my hands faster than a cobra strike. Fortunately, the demand for sci

  ence fiction was not great. I don’t recall a single instance when I had to give up a copy before I was done. Of course, if we received several copies of a particular magazine, which was frequently the case, I was home almost free.

  Often, one or more of the magazines on my desirable list remained unsold at the end of their publication period. You might think I could then keep a copy as a permanent possession, but when the new issue of a magazine came out, any old issue left unsold was returnable at the wholesale price, and my father returned them. Never on
ce was I al lowed to keep one—but I knew that we existed on the knife edge, so I didn’t complain.

  After all, I did get other things for free. I could have a chocolate soda periodically, although I always had to ask. Ignorant people call them “egg creams,” though they have neither egg nor cream. What they have is thick chocolate syrup and carbonated water. And don’t try to get the equivalent today. I don’t know what kind of synthetic garbage they use for syrup nowadays but it totally lacks the gooey, chocolaty riches of the stuff in my father’s candy store. And often my mother would make me a chocolate malted milk under the impression that it was good for a growing boy. And it was for this growing boy. It was milk and malt and a generous dollop of that good chocolate syrup whipped into a froth that filled one and a half large glasses and left you with a mustache you hated to wipe off.

  But I digress— You might wonder what all this pulp fiction reading did to me and to my intellectual development. My father called it “trash,” and though I hate to admit it, the old man was about 99 percent right. This, however, is what I think. However trashy pulp fiction might be, it had to be read. Youngsters avid for the corny, lightning-jagged, cliche-ridden, clumsy stories had to read words and sentences to satisfy their craving. It trained everyone who read it in literacy, and a small percentage of them may then have passed on to better things. Now consider what has happened since. In the late 1930s, comic books began to flood the market, and the pulp magazines weakened under the competition. World War II introduced paper shortages and there was a further weakening. With the coming of television, what was left of the pulp magazines died (all except, for a wonder, science fiction). In general, the trend over the last half century or so has been away

  from the word to the picture. The comic magazines increased the level of looking, decreased the level of reading. The television set has carried this to an extreme. Even the slick magazines found themselves dying because of competition with the picture magazines of the 1940s and the girlie magazines that followed.

  In short, the age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate. Now that is gone, and the youngsters have their glazed eyes fixed on the television tube. The result is clear. True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily “dumbing down.”

  It breaks my heart, and I look back on the days of the pulp magazines with a sigh not only for myself but for society.

  Beginning to Write

  I began to write in 1931, at the age of eleven. I did not try to write science fiction, but tackled something much more primitive. Before the period of pulp fiction, there was the era of “dime novels.” I witnessed the very end of that era. When my father first bought a candy store, he had for sale some old, dusty, browning paperback books involving Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell, and Dick Merriwell.

  There were dozens and dozens of books about each of these charac ters and, I suppose, about others. Nick Carter was a detective who was a master of disguise. Frank and Dick Merriwell were all-American boys who were forever winning baseball games under difficulties for dear old Yale. I never read any of these books. My father was adamantly opposed, and by the time he got around to allowing me to read trash, those dime novels were gone.

  “Series books” were hardcover books about some central character concerning whom new volumes were constantly churned out. Some were for very young children, such as those featuring Bunny Brown and his sister Sue (I actually read one or two of these when I was quite young), and, at a very slightiy older level, the Bobbsey Twins, the Darewell Chums, Roy Blakely, Poppy Ott, and so on. (Such books existed for decades afterward, notably the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.)

  The most popular of the series books in my younger days featured the Rover Boys. One of them, The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes, contained a young lady named Dora who was so primitive an example of “love interest” that I never noticed. She had an amiable but weak mother who was a continuing victim of an oily con man named Mr. Crabtree. There was also a more vicious pair of villains, father and son (although the father eventually reformed). When I started to write, I wrote in direct—even slavish—imitation of this book. I called it The Greenville Chums in College. Now the question is: Why did I start to write?

  I have frequently written about my writing beginnings, and the story I usually tell is that I felt bad about not having any permanent reading material, only books that had to be returned to the library or magazines that had to be returned to the racks. It occurred to me I might copy a book and keep the copy. I chose a book on Greek mythology for the purpose and, in five minutes, realized this was an impractical procedure. Then, finally, I got the further idea of writing my own books and allowing them to be my permanent library.

  Undoubtedly this was a factor, but it can’t be the entire motive. I must simply have had the terrible urge to make up a story.

  Why not? Surely many people have the urge to make up a story. It has to be a common human desire—a restless mind, a mysterious world, a feeling of emulation when someone else tells a story. Isn’t storytelling what one does when one sits around a campfire? Aren’t many social gatherings devoted to reminiscences and doesn’t everyone like to tell a story of something that really happened? And aren’t such stories inevitably embroidered and improved until the resemblance to reality becomes distant?

  One can imagine early man sitting about campfires telling stories of great hunting feats that exaggerate the truth ridiculously but which are not questioned because every other person present intends to tell similar lies. A particularly good story would be repeated over and over and attributed to some ancestor or some legendary hunter.

  And some people would, inevitably, be especially skilled at telling a story, and their talents would be in demand when there was some leisure time. They might even be rewarded with a haunch of meat if the story was really interesting. This would make them labor to invent bigger, better, and more exciting tales, naturally.

  I don’t see how there can be any doubt about it. The storytelling impulse is innate in most people, and if it happens to be combined with enough talent and enough drive, it cannot be suppressed. That was so in my case.

  I just had to write.

  I never finished The Greenville Chums in College, of course. I wrote eight chapters and ran down. Then I tried writing something else, and when that ran down, I tried writing something else, and so on, over a period of seven years.

  Writing was exciting because I never planned ahead. I made up my stories as I went along and it was a great deal like reading a book I hadn’t written. What would happen to the characters? How would they get out of the particular scrape they were in? The excitement was all I wrote for in those early years. In my wildest dreams it never occurred to me that anything I wrote would ever be published. I didn’t write out of ambition.

  As a matter of fact, I still write my fiction in that manner—making it up as I go along—with one all-important improvement. I have learned that there’s no use in making things up as you go along if you have no clearly defined resolution to your story. Not having one was why my early stories all ran down.

  What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem. I then begin the story, making it up as I go along, having all the excitement of finding out what will happen to the characters and how they will get out of their scrapes, but working steadily toward the known resolution, so that I don’t get lost en route.

  When asked for advice by beginners, I always stress that. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

  Humiliation

  I have explained that I have always thought of myself as a remarkable

  fellow, even from childhood, and I have never wavered in that opinion. Need I say that the feeling was not universal?

  I am not talking about people who recognized the existence of my faults, of my talkativeness, my self-assertiveness, my self-absorption,
my social gaucheries. I recognized those faults too and labored (with indifferent success) to correct them. I’m talking about people who didn’t think that I was remarkable intellectually or that I had unusual talents (or any at all).

  I had sailed through the first six years of my schooling with remarkable ease and with the comfortable knowledge that no one in any of my classes could touch me. That ended, however, when I entered high school in 1932 and joined the tenth grade.

  One trouble was that I didn’t go to the neighborhood high school, Thomas lefferson High School. I wanted to go to Boys High School, which was a considerable distance away, though it was still in Brooklyn, of course, the borough in which I spent my entire youth. Boys High School was, in those days, an elite school, and my father and I thought it would make it easier for me to get into a good college if I graduated from Boys High.

  But that meant that Boys High collected the “smartest kids” from all over the borough and some were smarter than I was, at least as far as getting high grades was concerned. I suspected this at once when I tried to join the math club (Boys High invariably won the math competitions) under the impression that I was a hotshot mathematician. I quickly found out that the other students knew math I had never heard of, and I dropped out in confusion.

  I also discovered after a while that there were a number of students who got better grades in this particular subject or that than I did. This did not ruffle me. I remember that in junior high school one boy won the biology prize but was terrible in math, and another boy won the mathematics prize but was terrible in biology—and I was runner-up in both.

  Unfortunately, I also discovered that some students ended up with better overall averages than I did. Their averages were not only higher but stayed higher. These averages were posted, and I had the annoyance of seeing my name down in tenth or twelfth place. (It was no disgrace but I was no longer the “smartest kid.”)