I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  For instance, in 1950, I had given up the Foundation series. I had worked on it for eight years and written eight stories, totaling some 200,000 words altogether, and I had grown tired of them and wanted to pass on to other things. However, the stories still existed and it seemed to me they might be worth republishing.

  So I took the carbons of the stories (which were not in the best of shape, since I had never thought them worth anything) and showed them to Brad. He studied them and then turned them down, explaining that he wanted new novels, not old ones. (This was a huge mistake on Doubleday’s part, and even though it was eventually corrected, it meant a loss of eleven years of earnings both for them and for me.)

  Once I had moved to Boston, I took the manuscripts to the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown, and they turned it down also.

  There was, however, another publishing firm in the field. I mentioned earlier that there were semipro publishing firms run by science fiction fans. One of these, perhaps the last and best, was Gnome Press, run by a young man named Martin Greenberg. (In later life, I worked with a wonderful man named Martin Harry Greenberg. It is important to remember that these are two different people.)

  Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press was a glib young man with a mustache, quite charming, as glib young men often are, but, as I found out in the end, not entirely trustworthy.

  However, he seemed willing to publish collections of my old stories and that rather glorified him in my eyes. I put together nine of my robot stories—eight that had appeared in ASF and the first one, which I now restored to its original title of “Robbie.” He published it toward the end of 1950 under the name of I, Robot, a name that Martin himself had suggested. I pointed out that there was a well-known short story of that name by Eando Binder, but Martin shrugged that off.

  He then published the Foundation series in three volumes, which came out in successive years—Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). I wrote a speciaWntroductory section to the first book in order to introduce the saga in more specific terms, so that the very first part of the very first book was actually the last portion written.

  Gnome Press also published books by Robert Heinlein, Hal Clem ent, Clifford Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Howard, and oth ers. Virtually all the books Martin published, including mine, have since been recognized as great classics of science fiction, and it boggles the mind that Martin had them all.

  However, he could not exploit them properly. He had no capital,

  could not advertise, had no distribution facilities, no contacts with bookstores, and the result was that he didn’t sell many copies.

  In addition, Martin had a peculiarity. He had an unalterable aversion to paying out royalties and, in point of fact, never did. At least, he never paid me. The royalties could never have been very high, but, however small they were, he wouldn’t pay.

  He always had excuses, enormous excuses. His partner was sick. His accountant was dying. He had been caught in a tornado. I suggested that I was willing to wait for the money but couldn’t I at least get a statement of sales and earnings so I could keep track of what he owed me? But no, that too seemed to be against his religion.

  Yet he had the unmitigated gall to complain when I gave him no further books. He had received four books that Doubleday foolishly didn’t want, but I certainly wasn’t going to give him any that Doubleday did want, and Doubleday by now wanted all of them.

  So when Martin complained, I simply said, “Where are my royalties, Martin?” and that shut him up.

  In 1961, Tim Seldes handed me a letter from a Portuguese publisher who imagined that Doubleday was the publisher of the Foundation books. He offered to do a Portuguese edition of them. I looked at the letter, shrugged my shoulders, and said, “It’s no use. Gnome Press doesn’t pay royalties.”

  “What?” said Tim indignantly. “In that case, let’s get the books away from him.” He sent the corporation lawyers after Martin.

  Martin had the nerve to set conditions too profitable to himself, and Tim wanted to fight, but I said, in alarm, “No, Tim, give him whatever he wants and take it out of my royalties. We’ve just got to have those books.”

  That was good advice, and Tim did as I asked, but never took the money out of my royalties.

  Other authors also wormed their stories out of Martin’s grip, and he was forced out of business. What happened to him afterward, I do not know.

  Now, if Martin had kept reasonable books and paid the miserable royalties we had earned, none of the writers would have been able to withdraw their books. As each writer’s other books became increasingly famous and popular, the demand for the Gnome Press books would have increased and Greenberg might have become prosperous and made Gnome Press an important science fiction publishing house. He chose a different path, however.

  Once Doubleday had I, Robot and the Foundation books, they began to earn money at a surprising rate and Martin never got a penny of it.

  Yet though I resented the situation at the time and had hard feelings against Martin, time has shown me that, as in so many other cases, though a person didn’t mean to do me good, he succeeded in doing so.

  After all, whether Martin paid me or not, he produced those four books when Doubleday would not. They existed and remained alive until it was time for Doubleday to take the Gnome Press caterpillar and turn it into a butterfly.

  Boston University School of Medicine

  Moving to Boston meant making a new set of friends and acquaintances.

  Burnham Walker, head of the department, was forty-nine years old when I arrived. He was a quiet, noncommunicative New Englander, who was extremely bright and who, in his quiet way, did not seem to mind my boisterousness. I liked him and I must admit that he made my life at the medical school tolerable for me.

  William Boyd, forty-seven years old when I arrived, had been instrumental in getting me the job. He was a shambling bear of a man, who struck me as one who labored under a deep disappointment. He had gone to Harvard University, where J. Robert Oppenheimer had been one of his classmates. Bill could not keep up with him, of course (nor would I have been able to), and that, I think, upset him.

  He was kindness itself to me, as was his wife, Lyle. I was frequently at their house, and met their friends. That did more than anything else to make me feel at home in the new city. When he accepted a job in Alexandria, Egypt, where he was going to join the civil service at a much higher salary than he commanded in Boston, he offered to take me along. I shuddered and refused. Not only would I not go to Africa, but I warned him about the civil service and told him what it would be like. (Of course, I was influenced by the fact that I very much didn’t want him to go. He was my most effective friend in Boston and his departure would leave me alone in a strange world.)

  Boyd went off on September 1, 1950, three months after I had come to Boston, but soon returned to Boston and to his old job. He confided to me that everything I had warned him about the civil service was precisely accurate and that he wished he had listened to me.

  Henry M. Lemon, the person I worked for, seemed to take an instant dislike to me, and perhaps he was not entirely unjustified in this. On the occasion of our first meeting on the top floor of the hospital, he pointed out the window and talked of the beauties of the “Boston skyline,” which was not something to make a point of when talking to a Manhattan resident.

  I was not happy to be in Boston in the first place, and I looked out at an endless sea of two-story brick houses, and thought achingly of my home canyons, and said grumpily, “Who’s interested in the Boston skyline?”

  It was a stupid thing to say and our relationship went downhill from there. He was dedicated to his work on the relationship of cancer to nucleic acids (actually a very fruitful line of investigation, which, unfortunately, neither he nor I had the capacity to exploit properly) and I was not. I was increasingly dedicated to my writing. He wanted me to attend all sorts of scientific conferences, and I did attend s
ome, but what I wanted to do was to go to New York periodically and see my publishers. Increasingly the relationship became one of mutual hatred.

  One good friend appeared outside the school. At Bill Boyd’s house, I met Fred L. Whipple, an astronomer at Harvard University. He was forty-three when I met him, a courtly, good-natured person who won his way into my heart almost instantaneously. This is one non-sciencefiction friendship that has endured. Like Sprague de Camp, Fred does not change in appearance. He’s now in his eighties, still slim, lithe,

  active, and rides his bicycle to work. He is the very model of ageless-ness. We call each other without fail on our respective birthdays.

  But, of course, I was not at the medical school to cultivate friendships. I was expected to work. In addition to doing research for Lemon, I had to lecture on biochemistry to the freshman class in the medical school. It was rather a thankless task. Medical students want to get their hands on stethoscopes and patients at once, and to have to spend their time listening to lectures as though they were still in college must have been exasperating.

  I found ways of avoiding the research. There were lab assistants and graduate students and as far as possible I let them do the research, while I supervised the results. (They were better than I was at handling equipment anyway.) What I wanted to do was to escape from research altogether. In my heart I was through with it; I had made the wrong turning.

  However, the job was not all bad. I enjoyed being a professor (I was promoted to professorial rank as an assistant professor of biochemistry in 1951), and lecturing was simply made for me. The various members of the department divided up the lectures, each taking the subjects he felt most comfortable with. I (with a trace of my old arrogance) said that I would wait till everybody had made his choice and then I would take whatever was left. The result was that I ended up with the more chemical lectures, eleven of them.

  These, given in the spring of 1950, were the first significant lectures I gave since the seminar in graduate school three years earlier. Like the seminar, they were given to a captive audience—students who had no choice but to attend and listen. This, you can well imagine, is not the recipe for an enthusiastic audience.

  In addition, these lectures, like the seminar lecture, had to be carefully prepared. I never went to the length of writing them out, let alone memorizing them, but I had to have a pretty good notion what I was going to say and there had to be a lot of formula writing on the blackboard that I couldn’t afford to get confused over.

  As my research continued to decline, my lectures continued to improve. By the time my active period at the medical school was drawing to its end, I was generally recognized as the best lecturer in the school. The account reached me, in fact, of two faculty members talking in one of the corridors. The distant sound of laughter and applause reached them, and one said, “What’s that?”

  The other replied, “It’s probably Asimov lecturing.”

  My utter failure at research didn’t bother me in the least, considering my excellence at lecturing. I reasoned it out this way. The prime function of a medical school is to teach medical students to be doctors and one important way of doing this is through lectures. Not only was I capable of informing and educating the class with my lectures but I roused their enthusiasm as well.

  The proof of that was their reaction to my lectures. It was customary to applaud each professor at the conclusion of his final lecture of the course. It was, of course, applause that was halfhearted and perfunctory, the product of custom rather than of conviction. I alone would get applause in mid-course lectures, and real applause too. And while that took place, I felt invulnerable.

  How wrong I was! I had left one factor out of my calculations. Lecturing helps only the students. Research, on the other hand, means government grants, and a portion of the grants is invariably marked for “overhead,” which goes to the school. What it amounts to is that the school chooses research over lecturing every time—money for itself over education for its students. That meant I was not invulnerable at all, but rather a sitting duck once my research vanished altogether, which it did.

  You might argue that the school was correct in choosing itself over the students, since if the school were forced to curtail its facilities through lack of funds, the students would suffer. On the other hand, surely one could strike a balance. A superior teacher might be forgiven failure at research. That, however, as I shall explain later, was not to be.

  also added my name as senior scientist to perhaps a half dozen papers written by various assistants and students in the department. (In those cases, however, I at least supervised the research, read the papers, and

  Scientific Papers

  An important, even the most important, function of a researcher was to write papers on the work he was doing and get them published in some appropriate learned journal. Each such paper was a “publication,” and a scientist’s hopes for promotion and prestige rested on the quality and number of his publications.

  Unfortunately, the quality of a publication is a hard thing to estimate, while the number is very easy to determine. The tendency arose, then, to judge by number alone, and this provoked scientists into writing a great many publications with somewhat less regard for quality than is quite becoming.

  Publications appeared that had just barely enough additional data to qualify as a new item. Some publications were broken into fragments, each fragment published separately. Some publications were signed by everyone who had had anything to do with the work, in however tangential a manner, since it would then count as a publication for each named author. Some senior scientists insisted on putting their names on every paper produced by their department, even if they had had nothing to do with the work at all.

  I never got into this game, nor did I plan to. In the first place, I hardly ever produced any data that was worth publishing. In the second, I didn’t like the writing style required for such papers and didn’t want to expose myself to it. And in the third place, I had no hope whatever of achieving any renown in research, and I had no intention of engaging in a useless struggle for it.

  I was not totally lacking in papers. My Ph.D. thesis counted as one and a condensed version of it was published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society. In the course of my years of research, I did a little polishing.)

  That was everything, and it was absolutely pitiful in both number and significance. As far as I know, not a single research paper to which my name was attached ever proved of the slightest importance, was ever cited by anyone else, or ever led to anything of any great moment.

  An idea, however, occurred to me. The Journal of Chemical Education was a good and useful journal that published articles that would be of interest to chemistry students at the college level. It seemed to me that it would be interesting to write such essays and have them published. They would be fun to do and they would count as publications. I did about half a dozen of these in the early 1950s and they were all published.

  One of these turned out to be important, actually, for I pointed out the particular danger of the isotope carbon 14 as a generator of deleterious mutations in the human body. The reason this was important was that Linus Pauling later made the same point in a very detailed and convincing manner (and may conceivably have been spurred on by my own strictly speculative suggestion). The testing of nuclear bombs aboveground added carbon 14 to the atmosphere, and that meant a disproportionate increase in birth defects and in cancer. This was a factor in leading to the outlawing of such atmospheric tests, and it pleases me to think that my paper might have contributed its microscopic bit to this desirable event.

  The addition of these short papers to my list, however, turned out to be totally nonsignificant. They did not, after all, involve research. They did, on the other hand, as I shall explain in due course, lead to something much more important than merely supplying me with numbers.

  But the scientific papers I produced did not represent the only learned writing to eng
age me during my teaching years.

  In 1951, Bill Boyd determined to write a textbook on biochemistry for medical students. It occurred to him further that he could use my writing expertise and so he suggested it to me as a joint project.

  As usual, when I am presented with a new project like that, my mind goes into a whirlwind of pros and cons. Against the idea was the fact that I didn’t feel I knew enough about biochemistry to write a text and (although I may be wronging the man) I didn’t feel that Boyd did either. For it, however, was the fact that it was a challenge. Far beyond that was this: working on the textbook would give me a chance to drop research on the grounds that another important scholarly task preoccupied me.

  The pros had it and I agreed to join Boyd, provided that Professor Walker, the department head, gave his permission and agreed to protect me against the entirely just wrath of Dr. Lemon.

  We got rather more than we bargained for, for Walker insisted on joining the project. This was good on three counts. It would reduce my share of the work from one-half to one-third; Walker could supply the biochemistry expertise that Boyd and I lacked; and, finally, if he himself were part of the project, he would have to protect me.

  Actually, doing the text was not as much fun as I had expected it to be. The writing styles of the three authors were so different that we were forever arguing over what we each wrote. I almost never got my way, so that the book was the usual stilted and turgid text. It finally came out as Biochemistry and Human Metabolism (Williams & Wilkins, 1952). A second (revised) edition appeared in 1954, and a third in 1957. Although the work was enormous, the financial return was nonexistent. All three editions were complete and utter flops since other, far better texts appeared in the 1950s. After the third edition, therefore, I let the book die a much-deserved death.

  I would consider the book to have been an incredible waste of time and effort, but everything has its uses. It gave me a great deal of practice in writing nonfiction and, more important still, it taught me that writing nonfiction (when I was not being interfered with by coauthors) was easier and, in some ways, more interesting than writing fiction. This strongly influenced the later course of my writing career.