I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  Although the Pfizer incident was the very worst ever in my job hunting, nothing else was much better. I simply couldn’t get a job.

  of good science fiction writers, is so great that it is simply impossible to pick three writers whom everyone will agree on. But perhaps that is no great tragedy. I have always thought that the

  The Big Three

  But while my job hunting remained a fiasco, what about my writing?

  There, I was not a failure but an increasing success. I continued both my robot stories and my Foundation stories, even though I slowed up a bit while I was actually engaged in my research. I sold all the stories I wrote to ASF to the drumbeat of increasing popularity.

  There was no question that by 1949 I was widely recognized as a major science fiction writer. Some felt I had joined Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt as the three-legged stool on which science fiction now rested.

  As it happened, A. E. van Vogt virtually ceased writing in 1950, perhaps because he grew increasingly interested in Hubbard’s dianetics. In 1946, however, a British writer, Arthur C. Clarke, began to write for ASF, and he, like Heinlein and van Vogt (but unlike me), was an instant hit.

  By 1949, the first whisper of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov as “the Big Three” began to be heard. This kept up for some forty years, for we all stayed alive for decades and all remained in the science fiction field. In the end, we all three commanded large advances and found our books on the best-seller lists. (Who would have thought it in the 1940s?)

  Now that Heinlein has died and Clarke and I are increasingly decrepit, one is bound to ask, “Who will be the next Big Three?” The answer, I’m afraid, is that no one will ever be. In the early days, when the Big Three were chosen by general consent, the number of science fiction writers was small and it was easy to choose the outstanding examples.

  Nowadays, however, the number of science fiction writers, and even constant harping on the Big Three was in a way a self-fulfilling phenomenon. We were the Big Three because we were successful, but how much of our continuing success arose from the fact that we were referred to, day in and day out, as the Big Three? Even though I benefited from it, I have always been uneasily aware that it might have been cheating the rest of the field.

  But in that case, if my writing was doing so well, why was I so worried about a job? The problem, as perhaps you might guess, was money.

  By 1949, I had sold sixty stories and was universally considered a leading light of science fiction. Yet in all the eleven years I had been writing and selling science fiction, I made a total of $7,700—that’s for all eleven years. An average earning of $700 a year was clearly not going to support a married couple, and so I needed something else.

  Arthur Charles Clarke

  Arthur Charles Clarke was born toward the end of 1917 in Great Britain. He is another science fiction writer who has been thoroughly educated in science and he did extremely well in physics and mathematics.

  He and I are now widely known as the Big Two of science fiction. Until early 1988, as I’ve said, people spoke of the Big Three, but then Arthur fashioned a little human figurine of wax and with a long pin—

  At least, he has told me this. Perhaps he’s trying to warn me. I have made it quite plain to him, however, that if he were to find himself the Big One, he would be very lonely. At the thought of that, he was affected to the point of tears, so I think I’m safe.

  I’m very fond of Arthur, and have been for forty years. We came to an agreement many years ago in a taxi which, at the time, was moving south on Park Avenue, so it is called the Treaty of Park Avenue. By it, I have agreed to maintain, on questioning, that Arthur is the best science fiction writer in the world, though I am also allowed to say, if questioned assiduously, that I am breathing down his neck as we run. In return, Arthur has agreed to insist, forever, that I am the best science writer in the world. He must say it, whether he believes it or not.

  I don’t know if he gets credited for my stuff, but I am frequently blamed for his. People have a tendency to confuse us because we both write cerebral stories in which scientific ideas are more important than action.

  Many a young woman has said to me, “Oh, Dr. Asimov, I don’t think your ‘Childhood’s End’ was up to your usual standard.” I always answer, “Well, dear, that’s why I wrote it under a pseudonym.”

  Childhood’s End, by the way, was the first science fiction book my dear wife, Janet, read. I Robot by her future husband, was only second. But neither of us wins top place in her literary affections. Her favorite science fiction writer is Cliff Simak, and I think that shows good taste.

  Arthur and I share similar views on science fiction, on science, on social questions, and on politics. I have never had occasion to disagree with him on any of these things, which is a credit to his clear-thinldng intelligence.

  There are, of course, some differences between us. He is bald, is over two years older than I, and is not nearly as good-looking. But he’s pretty darned good for second-best.

  From the start Arthur was interested in science fiction and in the more imaginative aspects of science. He was an early devotee of rocketry and, in 1944, was the first to suggest, in a serious scientific paper, the use of communications satellites.

  He turned to the writing of science fiction, and his first published story in an American magazine was Loophole in the April 1946 ASF. He was instantly successful.

  Arthur cheerfully admits that when he was a schoolboy he was called “Ego” by his mates. However, he is an incredibly bright person who writes fiction and nonfiction with equal ease. Despite his ego, he is an extremely lovable person and I’ve never heard a bad word seriously advanced against him, although I have said lots of bad words against him unseriously—and vice versa. He and I have the same mock-insult relationship that I have with Lester del Rey and with Harlan Ellison. I find that women are often perturbed by our banter. They don’t seem to understand male bonding in which the remark “Howdy, you ornery ole hoss thief translates into “How are you, my dear and charming friend?”

  Well, Arthur and I do the same, but, of course, in formal English to which we endeavor to introduce a soupcon of wit. Thus, when a plane crashed and roughly half the passengers survived, it turned out that one of the survivors had kept calm during the perilous attempts to land by reading an Arthur C. Clarke novel and this was reported in a news article.

  Arthur, as is his wont, promptly xeroxed five million copies of the article and sent one to everyone he knew or ever heard of. I got one of them, and at the bottom of the copy he sent to me, he wrote in his handwriting, “What a pity he didn’t read one of your novels. He would have slept through the whole wretched ordeal.”

  It was the work of a moment to send Arthur a letter which said, “On the contrary, the reason he was reading your novel was that if the plane did crash, death would come as a blessed release.”

  I suspect that Arthur is one of the wealthiest of the magazine science fiction writers, for he has written a number of best-sellers and been involved with several motion pictures, including the first of the big science fiction movie spectaculars, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  He was once briefly married, but ever since he has lived a comfortable bachelor life. At one time, he was an ardent scuba diver and, indeed, almost got killed on one of his dives.

  gave my mother infinite trouble, was always her favorite, when Stan gave her no trouble at all. Of course, women, according to tradition in romances, always go for the charming rascal and ignore the poor fellow of solid worth, but

  More Family

  Back to the postwar world: when my job misadventures had brought me to the ranks of the unemployed, and my literary endeavors were brilliant but moneyless, there was a certain coolness between my parents and me. For a while, Gertrude and I lived on the first floor of the same two-story house in which my parents lived. It was not a comfortable arrangement, and I hated to be within reach of the candy store. Consequently, when Gertrude and I were told, in 1948,
that an apartment was available for us in a new and modern development called Stuyvesant Town, we moved to Manhattan. My parents took it hard, however, and were quite angry with me. Naturally, it didn’t last.

  Even if my father had known and if he had dismissed me, with a heavy heart, as a failure, after all the promise I had shown, he had a second string to his bow, my younger brother, Stanley. (In adult life, he preferred to shorten his name to Stan, and I’ll follow him in this.)

  Stan was born on July 25, 1929, the first member of our family to be born in the United States. My mother’s pregnancy and the need to care for the new infant were what made it necessary for me to take up my duties in the candy store. In addition, I had to spend part of my time taking care of Stan, feeding him his bottle and wheeling him about in the carriage. As a result of all this, Stan seemed to me to be my baby rather than my mother’s and to this day I confuse Stan and my real son, David, tending to call each by the other’s name.

  Stan was a good kid. He never talked back to our parents and always did as he was told. He was a great relief to our parents after me

  (with my sharp tongue) and Marcia (with her self-willed attitude). It has always been a mystery to me that between Stan and me, I, who I don’t think that was the answer in this case. I was the older son, the first child, and when I was two years old, I nearly died of pneumonia in an epidemic that swept through the children of our village and of which I was the only survivor, my mother says. What’s more, I sur vived only because of my mother’s frantic and assiduous nursing, day and night, she going without sleep and almost without food, and this (she believed) had saved me. Of course, I was doubly and triply pre cious to her after that. Still, in all fairness, Stan should have been her favorite—or anyone’s.

  When I left home for Philadelphia, Stan took over my duties in the store. He was not quite thirteen at the time, but I had no qualms about that. I was only nine when I started, and Stan was stronger than I had been (being better nourished as a child, I suppose, in the United States than I was in Russia) and more deft. He could ride a bicycle, for instance, from the moment he got on one, while I have never mastered the trick to this day.

  Stan did well in school. He went to Brooklyn Technical High School, then to New York University, and finally to the Columbia School of Journalism.

  In 1949, the year when things were looking blackest for me, Stan was in college. I visited my father, who confided in me that he was having trouble raising the tuition. Well, things might not be going well for me, but I wasn’t penniless and I didn’t want my father scrabbling for dough and I didn’t want Stan’s schooling to be interfered with.

  So I said, “That’s all right, Pappa. I’ll pay the tuition.”

  Whereupon my father stiffened and said, “God forbid the day should ever come when I would have to go to my children for money.”

  And he clung to that and paid the tuition himself.

  A couple of weeks ago, when I was thinking of this section of this book, I dredged up that memory and told it to Janet and grew indignant.

  “My father made it sound,” I said, “as though I were the kind of wicked son who would begrudge him the money, or would make him feel that he had to come to me hat in hand. On the contrary. I would

  willingly have paid and considered it totally inadequate compensation for all he did for me. Why couldn’t he understand that?” And Janet said, “But, Isaac, you’re just the same yourself. Would you take money from your children?”

  I frowned and said, “That’s different. I have my pride.”

  Whereupon she went into gales of laughter and ordered me to put the story into die book. I said, “Why?” She said, “Your readers will know why.” When Stan was in school, he had engaged in extracurricular activities. (Either die candy-store duties had grown lighter or Stan was more adventurous than I was.) He got involved in the school newspa pers, and by the time he was finishing college, he was co-editor of the college paper. He had found his vocation and was going to be a journalist. Eventually, he joined the staff of Newsday, a newspaper based in Long Island, and worked his way up through the ranks to become the much-loved vice president in charge of editorial adminis tration.

  Stan is a good man in the old-fashioned sense of the word—honest, ethical, kind, reliable. Stan once said of me that I was industrious, efficient, puritanical, and absorbed in my work, so that I had all the unlovable virtues. Well, Stan has all the lovable virtues and, in point of fact, everyone loves him. Even his brother does (and the love is recip rocated). I used to say, jokingly, that I might be the brilliant brother, but he’s the good brother—and this may not be entirely a joke.

  Here’s what is to me the key example of his goodness. Considering his last name, he is in constant danger of losing his identity. People without number will say to him when he is introduced, “Are you a relative of Isaac Asimov?” He stays good-natured under the onslaught

  and says, patiently, “Yes, he’s my brother.” He does not allow it to poison our relationship, for which I am infinitely grateful to him. If the situation were the other way around, I would hate it, and it would be a source of trouble between us. But that’s the point. He’sxht good brother.

  In the 1950s, he met a sweetly gorgeous divorcee, Ruth, whom he at once decided to marry (even though her first question to him when they were introduced was whether he was related to me). They did marry and have lived in perfect accord ever since.

  They have a son, Eric, and a daughter, Nanette, both of whom have followed their father’s example and become journalists. (Ruth also has a son, Daniel, by her previous marriage, and Stan has adopted him, so that he is Daniel Asimov. He is a mathematician.)

  It is, perhaps, a measure of Stan’s success as a father that his children were willing to follow in his footsteps. I sigh sometimes when I think that my own children have not followed in my footsteps, but that’s silly of me. Why should they?

  My daughter, Robyn, when she was twelve years old, wrote a small story all on her own initiative and brought it to me to read. I was astonished. It seemed to me that it was a better piece of work than I would have managed at that age.

  I said, “Robyn, if you feel like writing, please go on and do so. I’ll help you if I can and, when the time comes, I’ll try to open doors for you.”

  Robyn said, “Oh, no. I don’t want to live like you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Work. Work. Work. I won’t do it.”

  I said, “Writers don’t have to work, work, work. That’s just the way I do it. You could write only when you wanted to.” “No,” she said. “I won’t take the chance.” And she never did. Well, maybe it’s for the best. Years later when she was trying to

  write a memo at her job, she scratched out and revised and scratched out and revised, just as everyone always does. And finally, she tiirew down her pen and exclaimed to the world in general, “Would you believe I’m my father’s daughter?”

  In general, science fiction readers of the 1930s and 1940s tended to consider only the magazines and to ignore totally the occasional literary novels. There would have been excitement if some of the magazine stories had appeared in book form or if original novels by recog

  First Novel

  Yet the same year, 1949, which saw me at my nadir also witnessed the turnaround, though it was not terribly obvious and I did not see myself as passing through the bottom and beginning the climb. It involved a science fiction novel rather than a magazine story.

  Actually, science fiction first became prominent through novels. Science fiction in the modern sense began, in my opinion, with the French writer Jules Verne. Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, he was the first writer whose major output was recognizable science fiction and who made a good living out of it. His books, particularly From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), were enormously popular all over the world. Verne was the one science fiction
writer my father had read—in Russian translation,

  of course.

  Other science fiction writers, less well-known, followed, and in the 1890s the British writer Herbert George Wells became popular with his The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898).

  Still other science fiction books followed, for the most part by British writers, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948). On a somewhat lower level, the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a popular series of books set on Mars, the first being A Princess of Mars (1917).

  The coming of the science fiction magazines, presenting science fiction of an admitted low grade, tended to swamp the science fiction novel, however. After all, the novels were relatively few and far between and the magazines poured off the presses every month.

  nized magazine science fiction writers had appeared. This, however, did not happen. Some very small-scale amateur publishers, run by science fiction fans, did put out magazine science fiction in book form, but the productions were poor, the printings were small, and the distribution virtually nonexistent.

  In the days after World War II, things changed. Science fiction suddenly became more respectable. First there was the nuclear bomb; then there were the German rockets, which raised hopes for the possibility of space flight, then the electronic computer. All these things were staples of science fiction and all these things had become reality in the immediate postwar period.

  Doubleday & Company, a major publishing firm, therefore decided, in 1949, to put out a line of science fiction novels, and for this they had to have manuscripts.

  As it happened, I had written a 40,000-word novella in 1947 that I could not sell anywhere—my worst literary failure up to that time. I had put it in a drawer and tried to forget about it. I, of course, did not know that Doubleday was planning to put out a line of science fiction novels, but Fred Pohl did, and he urged me to submit the novella to them. “If they like it,” he said, “you can rewrite it to suit their needs.”