by Isaac Asimov
Fortunately, the problem of medical school was decided for me by the medical schools themselves and the decision was the proper one. I applied only to the five medical schools in the New York area (since I was determined not to leave home). Two of them, including Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, rejected me out of hand, probably because their quota for Jews was filled. The other three interviewed me and, as usual, I made an unfavorable impression on the interviewers. This was not done on purpose, mind you; I did my best to be charming and lovable, but that sort of thing simply wasn’t in me; at least, not at that time of my life.
I was rejected by all five while still in my junior year at college and when, the next year, I applied again, I was rejected even more rapidly.
It was a great disappointment to my father. It was the first time his remarkable son had tackled something he felt to be of great moment and had been defeated. I believe he felt the fault was, to some extent, mine (which it certainly was), and relations between us were cool for a while. As for me, I felt a certain hurt pride; I would not have been human if I hadn’t. My best friend in college, with lower grades but with far greater social presence, was admitted to medical school, and briefly I was smitten by a painful emotion I almost never feel—envy.
I recovered, however, and the passing of the years has only confirmed my notion that I would never have made it in medical school. I would have suffered the far greater humiliation of having to drop out, even if I had had all the money that was required, simply because I lacked the necessary ability and, even more, the suitable temperament.
What a blow that would have been. From that, I might not have recovered. I never think of that dangerous period in my life without feeling enormously grateful to the perspicacity and intelligence of the various people in charge of entrance requirements who carefully barred me from entrance into medical school.
The Futurians
I had become a science fiction “fan” (the word is short for “fanatic”
· I’m not joking) by the mid-1930s. By that I mean that I did not confine myself merely to the reading of science fiction. I tried to par ticipate in the machinery. The simplest way was to write letters to the editor.
The science fiction magazines all had letters columns, and readers were encouraged to write. The magazine that now most attracted me was Astounding Stories. This began its life in 1930 under the management of Clayton Publications. It, and Clayton, were forced out of business by the Depression after the March 1933 issue, but the tide was picked up by Street & Smith Publications, the largest of the pulp fiction publishers.
Half a year after its death, then, Astounding was resurrected with the October 1933 issue. Under the imaginative direction of its editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, it quickly became the most successful of the science fiction magazines, and the best. It still exists today, although it has changed its name to Analog Science Fact-Science Fiction. In January 1990 the magazine celebrated its sixtieth anniversary (but illness, to my utter disappointment, prevented me from attending).
It was to Astounding that I wrote my first letter in 1935, and it was printed. In the usual fan fashion, I listed the stories I liked and disliked, said why, and asked for smooth edges, rather than the typical messy rough edges of the pulps that shredded and left paper lint everywhere. (The magazine did provide smooth edges, eventually. Nor were they holding back out of callousness. Smoothing the edges cost money.)
By 1938,1 was writing letters to Astounding every month, and they were usually printed. This turned out to be more significant than I could have imagined. There were other ways of being a fan too. Individual fans might get to know each other (perhaps from the letters column, since names and addresses were given). If they were within reach of each other, they could get together, discuss the stories, swap magazines, and so on. This developed into “fan clubs.” In 1934, one of the magazines invented the Science Fiction League of America and fans who joined could make friends over still wider areas.
Stuck in the candy store as I was, I knew nothing about the fan clubs and it never occurred to me to join the League. However, a young man who had gone to Boys High with me noted my name on the letters in Astounding and sent me a card in 1938 inviting me to attend meetings of the Queens Science Fiction Club.
The chance to do so excited me extremely and I began negotiations with my parents at once. First I had to make sure that for the time of the meeting I could be spared from the candy store. After that I had to persuade them to give me the necessary carfare plus a few extra dimes in case we would eat something at the club and I had to make a purchase.
I might say at this point that I never got an allowance of any sort. I worked at the store for food, board, clothing, and an education and my parents felt that that was enough, and so did I. I had heard of allowances for children in movies, in comic strips, and so on, but I always had the vague feeling that that was a romantic departure from reality.
Of course, if I needed money for some legitimate purpose (carfare to school, lunch, or even something frivolous like the movies) it was never denied, but I had to ask. It was only after I started receiving checks for my stories that I was able to start a bank account of my own and then under the completely understood condition that the money was to go for tuition and other unavoidable school expenses and for nothing else.
It struck me as strange, later in life, that despite keeping me penniless, my father had no hesitation in allowing me access to the cash register. Of course, the register recorded all sales and if I had abstracted an occasional quarter it would show, but it was perfectly possible for me to have made some small sale of candy or cigarettes and then “forgotten” to put the money in the register and pocketed it myself. However, I was carefully brought up and it never once occurred to me to do such a thing, nor, apparently, did it ever occur to my father that I might.
In any case, I received permission to attend the fan-club meeting and was given the necessary funds for the purpose, and on September 18,1938,1 met, for the first time, other science fiction fans. However, between the first invitation and a second card giving me instructions on how to get to the meeting place, there had been a split in the Queens club, and a small splinter group formed a new fan organization. (Eventually, I came to understand that science fiction fans were a quarrelsome and contentious bunch and that clubs were forever splitting up into hostile factions.)
My high school friend belonged to the small splinter group and, in all ignorance that I was not going to the Queens club, I joined them. The splinter group had broken off because they were activists who felt that science fiction fans ought to take a stronger anti-Fascist stand, while the main group held that science fiction was above politics. Had I known about the split I would have resolutely sided with the splinter group, so that by ending up there I came to the right place.
The new group gave themselves a rather long and grandiloquent name but they are popularly known as the Futurians and they were certainly the most astonishing fan club that was ever founded. They consisted of a group of brilliant teenagers who, as nearly as I could tell, all came from broken homes and had led miserable or, at the very least, insecure childhoods.
Once again, I was an outsider, for I had a tightly knit family and a happy childhood, but in other respects I was charmed by all of them and felt that I had found a spiritual home.
To tell you how my life changed, I must explain my views on friendship—
One often hears in books, and movies, of childhood friendships that last throughout life; of onetime schoolmates who associate with each other through the years; of army buddies who are constantly getting drunk and reliving the joys of barracks life; of college chums helping each other through life for the sake of the old school tie.
It may happen, but I am always skeptical. It seemed to me that people who went to school together or were in the army together were living in a state of forced intimacy that they had not chosen for themselves. A kind of friendship-by-custom-and-pr
opinquity might exist among those who happened to like each other independently or who were thrown into social togetherness outside of the artificial environments of school or army, but not otherwise.
In my own case, I had not one school friendship that survived school and not one army friendship that survived the army. Partly this was because there was no opportunity for social interaction outside either school or army and partly it was because of my own self-absorption.
However, once I met the Futurians, everything changed. Here, although there was little chance for social interaction most of the time, although I sometimes remained out of touch with this one or that one for a long period of time, I made close friendships which lasted in some cases for half a century, right down to the present.
Why? At last I met people who burned with the same fire I did; who loved science fiction as I did; who wanted to write science fiction as I did; who had the same land of erratic brilliance that I had. I did not have to recognize a soul mate consciously. I felt it at once without the necessity of intellectualizing it. In fact, in some cases, both within the Futurians and without, I felt soul-matehood and eternal friendship even with people whom I didn’t really like.
In any case, I intend to devote small essays in this book to the individuals who strongly influenced my career or whose lives intertwined with mine in certain ways, and I cannot do better than begin with some of the more prominent Futurians.
Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl was born in 1919 and is just a few weeks older than I am. When we met as fellow Futurians in September 1938, we were each of us edging toward his nineteenth birthday. Despite the equality of our chronological age, he has always been more worldly-wise and possessed of more common sense than I. I recognized this and I would turn to him for advice without any hesitation.
Fred is taller than I, very soft-spoken. He has a pronounced overbite and an often quizzical expression on his face that makes him look a bit rabbity but, in my eyes, cute, because I am very fond of him. He has light hair that was already thinning when I met him.
Fred is a very unusual fellow. He does not flash from time to time as I do, and as several of the other Futurians did. Instead, he burns with a clear, steady light. He is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met, and he frequently writes letters or columns for the fan magazines or professional magazines, expressing his views on scientific or social issues. I read them avidly, for he writes with clarity and charm, and I have never in fifty years had occasion to disagree with a word he has said. On a very few occasions when he expressed a point of view differing from one I had expressed, I would see at once that I had been wrong, he right. I think he is the only person with whose views I have never disagreed.
I always felt closer to him than to any other Futurian, even though our personalities and circumstances were so different. He had had an unsettled childhood, though he never spoke of it in detail, and the Great Depression had forced him out of high school. He makes the best of it by treating the matter humorously and referring to himself as a “high school dropout.” Don’t let him kid you, though. He continued his program of self-education to the point where he knows a great deal more about a great many more things than does many a person with my own intensive education.
His social life has been more hectic than mine. For one thing, he has been married five times, but his present marriage, his fifth, to Bette, seems stable and happy.
At the time we met, he and the other Futurians were writing science fiction at a mad pace, alone and in collaboration, under a variety of pseudonyms. I did not join them in this, insisting on writing my stories on my own and using my own name. As it happened, I was the first Futurian to begin to sell consistently, but they tumbled into the field on my heels.
He began to use his own name on his stories in 1952, when he, in collaboration with another Futurian, Cyril Kornbluth, published a three-part serial in Galaxy entitled “Gravy Planet.” It appeared in novel form as The Space Merchants in 1953 and made the reputation of both Fred and Cyril. Each was a major science fiction writer thereafter.
His connection with me?
In 1939, he looked over my rejected short stories, called them “the best rejections I have ever seen” (which was very heartening), and gave me solid hints on how to improve my writing. Then, in 1940, when he was still only twenty years old, he became the editor (and a very good editor too) of two new science fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. For those magazines he bought several of my early stories. This kept me going till I got the range of the best magazine in the field, Astounding. Fred and I even collaborated on two stories, though not very good ones, I’m afraid.
In 1942, when I was stuck and could not proceed with a novelette I was writing that had to be submitted in a week or so, he told me how to get out of the spot I had written myself into. I remember that we were standing on the Brooklyn Bridge at the time, but what my difficulty was and what his solution was, I don’t remember. (We were standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I found out many years later, because Fred’s first wife, Doris, thought I was a “creep” and wouldn’t have me in the apartment. I was struck in a heap when I found this in Fred’s autobiography because I had liked her and had never dreamed of her distaste. Nor could I make it up with her, for she had died young.)
In 1950, Pohl was instrumental in the highest degree in getting my first novel published. In short, Fred, more than anyone else but John W. Campbell, Jr. (about whom I shall have more to say soon), made my career possible.
Cyril M. Kornbluth
Cyril M. Kornbluth was the youngest of the Futurians and, in some ways, the most erratically brilliant. He was born in 1923 and was only fifteen when I met him. He was short and pudgy, with curly brown hair, and there was a cutting edge to his speech, so that he was not a really pleasant person.
He was brighter than I was and, I think, showed much more promise, but, as in the case of Fred Pohl, his schooling had been aborted for some reason I never found out. I might have envied him his brightness, but it was clear that he was an unhappy person. What he was unhappy about, I don’t know, but I suspect it was at finding himself in a world populated by people so much less intelligent than he who appreciated him so little.
On the other hand, he couldn’t have lumped me together with the “less intelligent” and yet it was my impression he didn’t like me, and that’s a mild way of putting it. I have no direct evidence on this. He never told me in so many words that he disliked me, but he did avoid my presence, never spoke to me, and, on occasion, sneered at me. On the other hand, he tended to be morose and sneering at all times, and it may have been overly sensitive of me to feel that he was picking on me. Perhaps he found my consistent loud cheerfulness hard on his nerves, but I didn’t do it to irritate him. I was as helplessly cheerful as he was helplessly morose.
Once when I sang the tenor song “A Maiden Fair to See” from H.M.S. Pinafore, I sang the high note in the last line with ease, and Cyril muttered, “Nuts! He hit it!” as though he had been waiting for my voice to crack so that he could savor my discomfiture.
And once, when I was giving a talk at a science fiction gathering, Cyril interrupted me so frequently, and in so unfriendly a manner, that I stopped dead for a few moments in order to build suspense and ensure attention, and then said loudly and clearly, “Cyril Kornbluth— the poor man’s George O. Smith.”
George O. Smith was another science fiction writer, and an unrelenting bore. In any gathering, he drove everyone to distraction, speaker and audience alike, with his inane non-sequiturish remarks. The comparison of Cyril, unfavorably, with George seemed to stop him dead. There were no further interruptions.
But Cyril turned out to be a brilliantly smooth writer and displayed in his writing a wit and a sense of humor that he never displayed in real life. He was at his best in short stories, and his most famous one is “The Marching Morons” (April 1951 Galaxy). In it he depicts a world consisting largely of subintelligent morons
who have outbred the few bright people who alone keep the world going. I’m sure that Cyril felt a personal application here.
He collaborated with Fred Pohl on “Gravy Planet” and wrote several novels on his own. I’m convinced that he was on his way out of the science fiction field, and would soon be writing mainstream novels and making an enormous name for himself, when it all came to an end.
He had a bad heart, and on March 21, 1958, he shoveled snow after a surprise vernal-equinox storm. He then ran for his train, had a heart attack at the station, and died. He was only thirty-five years old.
Donald Allen Wollheim
Donald Allen Wollheim was the oldest of the Futurians, having been born in 1914. He was the most dynamic member and dominated the society, but, then, he was probably the most active science fiction fan in the country, with the possible exception of Forrest J. Ackerman of Los Angeles.
He was not a handsome man, for he had a rather bulbous nose, and when I first met him, he also had (as I did) a bad case of acne. There was undeniable force to him, however, even though he was as dour as Cyril Kornbluth. In 1941, he became the editor of two science fiction magazines, Stirring Science Fiction and Cosmic Stories. These were put out on a frayed shoestring. In fact, he didn’t have the money to pay for the stories and had to depend on fellow Futurians to supply him with material that they could not otherwise sell. He even asked me for a story, and I gave him one called “The Secret Sense,” which appeared in the March 1941 issue of Cosmic. I had not been able to sell it, because it was a real stinker, even in my own eyes, so I was willing to contribute it, without pay, for friendship’s sake.
But F. Orlin Tremaine, who had edited Astounding till 1938, had also started a new magazine, Comet Stories, and he paid the top rate of a penny a word. He told me that writers who gave stories to magazines that didn’t pay helped such magazines take readers away from magazines that did pay. Such writers were harming their fellow writers and science fiction in general, and should be blacklisted.