I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  That scared me. I promptly called Wollheim and asked him for ten dollars for my story (a fifth of a cent a word) just so that I could say I had received money for it. Wollheim paid, but along with the check he sent a very nasty letter.

  He went on to do great things. He wrote a number of short stories, the first being “The Man from Ariel” (January 1934 Wonder Stories), which came out five years before my first story. The one that struck me the hardest was “Mimic” (September 1950 Fantastic Novels). He also wrote a number of science fiction novels, mostly for youngsters.

  However, it was clear that he, like the legendary John Campbell of Astounding, would rather edit than write. He edited the first anthology of magazine science fiction, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, in 1943. He was an editor at Ace Books for a long time, doing creditable and innovative work. He then founded DAW Books, the first paperback publishing house to deal exclusively with science fiction and, in the process, has developed a number of the contemporary luminaries of the field.

  A book of his entitled The Universe-Makers was published in 1971. It was a history of science fiction in which he attempted to debunk some of the wilder aspects of the Campbell legend. He also spoke favorably of stories of mine belonging to the Foundation series (which I will discuss myself in due course) and argued they had established modern science fiction. I didn’t go along with him completely on either argument, but I accepted his praise gratefully and finally forgave him the “Secret Sense” incident. (Yes, I am susceptible to praise. Just about everyone finds this out very soon, especially my editors.)

  Don suffered a stroke in 1989, which largely immobilized his body, but not his mind. DAW Books continues without a hitch under the guidance of his wife, Elsie (his only wife, a situation I sometimes think is very unusual among science fiction writers), and his daughter,

  Betsy.

  Early Sales

  It was not till I was seventeen that it occurred to me that I ought to think up a story with a defined ending instead of simply making things up randomly. I began such a story in May 1937, called it “Cosmic Corkscrew,” and worked on it by fits and starts, sometimes allowing it to remain in my desk drawer untouched for months at a time.

  In early 1938, however, Astounding changed its schedule without warning, and it did not arrive on the expected day. Fearing that it had ceased publication, I called Street & Smith and discovered it would come out on another day. The momentary panic that had resulted when I thought the magazine would be gone forever caused me to fish out “Cosmic Corkscrew” and finish it. I wanted to submit the story while there was still something to submit it to. I finished it in June 1938.

  Why the sudden urge to submit? It seems to me tfiat by 1938 I had tired of all the pulp fiction magazines except science fiction. I was reading science fiction exclusively and its writers were beginning to seem like demigods to me. I wanted to be a demigod also.

  Then, too, I might earn a little money if I sold any of my stories and I was desperate to be able to pay off some of the college tuition without turning to my father. I had had a summer job for a few weeks in the summer of 1935, but I had disliked it intensely, and I would much prefer to make my money at the typewriter.

  But now that I had written my story, how did I submit it? My fatlier, no more worldly-wise than I was, suggested I take it to the editor in person and hand the manuscript to him. I said I would be too frightened to do such a thing. (I envisaged being kicked out of the office with loud, contumelious phrases.) My father said, “What’s to be afraid of?” (Sure, he wasn’t going.)

  Obeying my father was a long-ingrained habit, so I traveled to Street & Smith by subway and asked to see Mr. Campbell. I couldn’t believe it when the receptionist called him and then told me the editor would see me. What made that possible was that I was not an unknown quantity to him. He had been receiving and printing my letters, so he knew I was a serious science fiction fan. Besides, as I found out, he was a nonstop talker who needed an audience, and at the moment he felt I would provide him with one.

  John Campbell treated me with the greatest respect, took my manuscript, promised a quick reading, and kept his promise. I received it back by virtually return mail, but his rejection letter was so land that I instantly began writing another story, called “The Callistan Menace.” This took me only one month to write.

  After that, I wrote a story a month and brought it in to Campbell, who would read it and return it with helpful comments.

  It was not till October 21, 1938, exactly four months after my first visit to Campbell, that I managed to sell my third story, “Marooned off Vesta,” but not to Campbell, who had rejected it. I sold it to Amazing Stories, which had just come under a new publisher, Ziff-Davis, who decided to publish pulpish action stories, and who, in driving down the quality, raised the circulation.

  It was then under the editorship of Raymond A. Palmer, a four-foot-tall hunchback with a most lively and unorthodox mind. In later years, he created, virtually single-handed, the flying saucer craze and he took to publishing magazines on pseudoscience. He died in 1977 at the age of sixty-seven. I never met him in person, but he was the first editor to buy one of my stories, and the time came when he would mention that fact proudly.

  I received $64 for the story, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue of Amazing. This issue reached the stands on January 9, 1939, a week after my nineteenth birthday. My father sent vain, ornate letters to all his friends (I didn’t know he had any) and seemed prepared to do so with each succeeding story I sold. I had a very difficult time putting a stop to this.

  Later, I sold my second story, “Callistan Menace,” to Fred Pohl, and it appeared in the April 1940 Astonishing. I never sold my first story, “Cosmic Corkscrew,” or some seven other early stories of mine. None of these exist any longer. I suspect that when I left town

  in 1942 (for reasons I’ll get to), my mother, unaware of what she had, threw them out. Literarily, they were no loss; indeed, the world gained by their disappearance. Historically, however, it was a shame. There’s always a certain interest in juvenilia.

  The first story I sold to John Campbell was called “Trends,” and it appeared in the July 1939 Astounding. By then, Amazing had pub lished another story of mine, a very poor one called “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use” (May 1939 Amazing), so that my first As tounding story was my third published story.

  I have never quite liked that. I have always dismissed those first two stories because I didn’t approve of the Ziff-Davis Amazing and felt embarrassed at having my stories in such low company. It was in Astounding I wanted to appear, and in my heart I try to consider “Trends” my first published story.

  I am wrong to do so, however, for those two stories in Amazing may have saved me from a fate worse than death. John Campbell was a great believer in nice simple names for his writers, and I am sure that he would ordinarily have asked me to use a pseudonym on the order of John Smith, and I would have absolutely refused to do so, and perhaps aborted my writing career.

  However, those two early stories in Amazing appeared under my real name—Isaac Asimov. Palmer didn’t care about that, bless him, and perhaps because the deed was done and my name, such as it was, had graced the contents page of a science fiction magazine, Campbell uttered not a murmur and my name appeared in Astounding^ august pages in its proper form.

  All told, in my senior year at Columbia I had earned $197. This was not much, though it meant considerably more in 1939 than it would now, but it marked a beginning. It was not only the beginning of the time when I could pay off my own tuition expenses, but the beginning of my freedom from bondage, the beginning of my ability to support myself.

  It meant much more than that too, for there was something I wanted even more than money. What I wanted—what I dreamed of— what I lusted for—was the sight of my name on the contents page and, in even larger letters, on the first page of the story itself.

  And that I had, and it warmed my heart.

  John Wood
Campbell, Jr.

  John Wood Campbell, Jr., born in 1910, was only nine and a half years older than I was, although when I first met him I thought of him as ageless. He was a tall, large man with light hair, a beaky nose, a wide face with thin lips, and with a cigarette in a holder forever clamped between his teeth.

  He was talkative, opinionated, quicksilver-minded, overbearing. Talking to him meant listening to a monologue. Some writers could not endure it and avoided him, but he reminded me of my father, so I was perfectly willing to listen to him indefinitely.

  Like so many brilliant science fiction personalities, he had had an unhappy childhood. I never learned the details, because he never volunteered any, and if someone doesn’t volunteer, I don’t ask. For one thing, I lack an instinct for nosiness; and for another, I’d rather talk about myself than about someone else anyway.

  He went to MIT for his undergraduate work and never finished. My understanding is that he couldn’t manage German. He switched to Duke University in North Carolina, best known in my youth for the work of Joseph B. Rhine on extrasensory perception, and that may have influenced Campbell’s later views on the subject.

  His first published story was “When the Atoms Failed,” in the January 1930 Amazing. It was a time when the most famous writer in science fiction was Edward Elmer (“Doc”) Smith, who wrote “super-science stories.” Smith was the first writer to feature interstellar travel in his Skylark of Space (August, September, and October 1928 Amazing), and Campbell wished to imitate him with tales of superhuman heroes tossing stars and planets about. With “Piracy Preferred” (June 1930 Amazing) he began his famous “Wade, Arcot and Morey” series, which put him nearly into Smith’s class.

  Smith, however, continued to write his superscience till he died in 1965 at the age of seventy-five. He was one of the most beloved science fiction writers there was, but he remained in one place. His earliest stories were ten years ahead of their time, and his latest ten years behind their time, though Campbell continued to publish them faithfully in Astounding.

  Campbell, on the other hand, grew tired of superscience and moved in other directions. In 1936 and 1937, he wrote an eighteen-part series for Astounding on the latest developments in solar system science. This was one of die first ventures of a science fiction writer into the realm of straightforward science.

  Even more important was a change in the style of his stories. Instead of superscience, he began to write mood pieces. So drastically different were these new stories from his old that he had to use a pseudonym to avoid disappointment among readers who would read the stories thinking they would be superscience. His pseudonym was Don A. Stuart, a simple variation of his first wife’s maiden name, Dona Stuart. The first story under this pseudonym was “Twilight” (November 1934 Astounding), an all-time classic.

  He abandoned his Campbell stories and continued with his Stuart line until he published “Who Goes There?” (August 1938 Astounding). This may possibly be the greatest science fiction story ever written.

  By that time, though, he had found his true metier. In 1938, he took over the editorship of Astounding and kept it for the rest of his life. He promptly changed the title of Astounding Stories to Astounding Science Fiction (usually referred to as ASF.)

  He was the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely. In 1939, he started Unknown, a magazine devoted to adult fantasy which was one of a kind, and marvelous—but it was killed by the paper shortages of World War II.

  He discovered and developed a dozen top-ranking science fiction writers in those wonderful ten years of his, including me. It would have seemed impossible for this giant to go into a twilight of decline, but he did. His very success, lending science fiction a new

  respectability as a purveyor of tales of scientists and engineers rather than of adventurers and superheroes, created competition. In 1949, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) was inaugurated under the editorship of Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas and proved successful. In 1950, Galaxy Science Fiction, edited by Horace L. Gold, appeared on the scene and was also successful. Campbell, in the shadow of both, declined.

  Campbell’s decline was accelerated by his own quirks of character. He enjoyed dabbling with the fringes of science, slipping over the edge into pseudoscience. He seemed to take seriously such things as flying saucers, psionic talents such as extrasensory perception (the influence of Rhine), and even more foolish items called the “Dean drive” and the “Hieronymus machine.” Most of all, he championed “dianetics,” a kind of offbeat mental treatment invented by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Its tenets were first published in an article entitled “Dianetics” (May 1950 ASF).

  All these things influenced the kind of stories Campbell bought and, in my opinion, greatly weakened the magazine. A number of writers wrote pseudoscientific stuff to ensure sales to Campbell, but the best writers retreated, I among them. I did not stop writing for him, nor did I break off my friendship with him, but there was just a bit of coolness, for I would not accept his odd views and said so.

  I wrote a story called “Belief (October 1953 ASF), which dealt with psionic talents my way. After long arguments, I agreed to change the ending for him, and I never quite forgave him that.

  Campbell continued to edit ASF, whose name was changed to Analog in the early 1960s, till his death on July 11, 1971, at the age of sixty-one. However, in the last twenty years of his life, he was only a diminishing shadow of what he had once been.

  Robert Anson Heinlein

  In my first couple of years with John Campbell, I met a number of people who were eventually to become science fiction stars of the first magnitude. The friendships formed in this way, as always when they were within the science fiction community, proved lifelong.

  The reason for this, I think, is that we all felt part of a tiny group, derided and maligned by the vast majority who totally failed to understand us. We clung together, therefore, for warmth and security and formed a brotherhood that never failed. Nor did competition for sales make enemies out of us. There was so little money involved in science fiction in those days that there was nothing to compete for. We were writing for love, actually.

  (Nowadays, I suspect it is different. There are ten times as many science fiction writers as there were in 1939, and the money involved, in advances, movie sales, and so on, is sometimes huge. It seems to me that the old sense of brotherhood cannot exist under such conditions.)

  In some ways, my most important friendship was with Robert Anson Heinlein. He was a very handsome man, with a neatly trimmed mustache, a gentle smile, and a courtly way about him that always made me feel particularly gauche when I was with him. I played the peasant to his aristocrat.

  He had been in the U.S. Navy, but was invalided out in 1934 for tuberculosis. In 1939, when he was thirty-two years old (late for a science fiction writer), he turned his hand to the writing of science fiction, and his first story, “Lifeline” (August 1939 ASF), appeared one month after my story “Trends.” From the moment his first story appeared, an awed science fiction world accepted him as the best science fiction writer in existence, and he held that post throughout his life. Certainly, I was impressed. I was among the very first to write letters of praise for him to the magazines.

  He became the mainstay of ASF at once, and he and Campbell became close friends, although Heinlein made it a condition of the friendship, apparently, that Campbell never reject one of his stories.

  Heinlein never got over his navy discharge. At the news of Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist but was rejected. He therefore came East looking for a way to serve in a civilian capacity.

  He managed to locate a position at the Naval Air Experimental Station and he looked about for other bright scientist/engineer types who might join him. He recruited Sprague de Camp (about whom I will soon have more to say) and offered me a job as well. In the end, after much travail, which I will describe
later, I accepted.

  My friendship with Heinlein, by the way, did not follow the smooth and even course that marked all my other science fiction friendships. That this would be so appeared almost at once when we worked together at die NAES. I never openly quarreled with him (I try never to quarrel openly with anyone) and I never turned my back on him. We greeted each other warmly when we met right down to the end of Heinlein’s life.

  There had to be a certain circumspection in the friendship, however. Heinlein was not the easygoing fellow that other science fiction personalities I knew and loved were. He did not believe in doing his own thing and letting you do your thing. He had a definite feeling that he knew better and to lecture you into agreeing with him. Campbell did this too, but Campbell always remained serenely indifferent if you ended up disagreeing with him, whereas Heinlein would, under those circumstances, grow hostile.

  I do not take well to people who are convinced they know better than I do, and who badger me for that reason, so I began to avoid him.

  Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward. This happened at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia.

  Ronald Reagan did the same when he switched wives from the liberal Jane Wyman to the ultraconservative Nancy, but Ronald Rea gan I have always viewed as a brainless fellow who echoes the opinions of anyone who gets close to him.