by Isaac Asimov
I don’t think I need any excuse for this. The books sell and the readers enjoy them, if I may judge from the letters I receive, and if any further justification is needed, what might that be?
In fact, these collections are a source of great satisfaction to me. In the first place, I think I hold the world record for having published more essay collections than anyone else in history. (Please note that I make no claim whatever as to writing the best or even nearly the best, merely the most.)
What’s more, I have always heard that collections of essays are “poison at the box office” and publishers are extremely reluctant to publish them except for certain surefire cases like Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, or Lewis Thomas. I’m sorry if it makes me sound self-satisfied, but I do enjoy being surefire.
Not everyone enjoys my essays, of course. Recently, Arthur Clarke, while vegetating at his home in Sri Lanka, came across a rotten review of an essay collection of mine and, fearing that I might not see it, carefully clipped it and sent it to me for my delectation. The first sentence was: “This is a book that should never have been written.”
By Lester del Rey’s system, that review should at once have been discarded—but I had to glance over it to see if I could tell, without reading much of it, why it should never have been written. Apparently, he was appalled at the miscellaneous character of the book and at the way I jumped from subject to subject. I can only conclude that he had never seen or heard of an essay collection. I suppose illiteracy is a requirement for his job.
Actually, the value, in my opinion, of such a collection of essays is precisely the variety it offers. You are not being asked to invest the time required to read an entire treatise. You are reading short items, and if you find one such item dull or disappointing, you have not lost the value of an entire book, but of only a fragment of it. You can pass on to the next fragment, which may delight you. Moreover, short
pieces are perfect reading at bedtime or in other small scraps of leisure. Then, too, the readers of my science essays can (and do) play the enchanting game of “Let’s catch Isaac in an error.” They do this often enough to make the game worthwhile. I have always been grateful for and, actually, touched by the almost invariable gentleness with which such corrections are made and how careful all are to attribute a mistake to my haste and carelessness, rather than to my stupidity. If I haven’t praised my readers before, let me do so now. They may not be as many in number as are the fans of rock stars or of sports figures, but in quality my readers are the pick of the lot, the cream, the elite, and I love them all.
Histories
Houghton Mifflin was doing a series of American history books for youngsters, and Austin Olney asked if there was some subject I could handle that would fit into the series.
After thinking about it, I said I could do a book on Franklin’s investigations of electricity and its influence on the course of the American Revolution. Austin was willing, so I wrote a book entitled
The Kite That Won the Revolution.
The writer Sterling North was the general editor of the series, and when he saw my manuscript he clearly wanted to rewrite it closer to his heart’s desire. At least I received back a hacked-up manuscript that froze my blood. I had just escaped from the clutches of Svirsky and I did not propose to fall into those of North.
I told Austin I would have to withdraw the manuscript and explained why. Austin offered to publish it as I had written it, but explained that it could not then be entered as part of the series and
probably wouldn’t sell as well, for the series was well established and large sales would be virtually guaranteed. I said I didn’t care about sales at all, only about having a book of mine published as I wrote it and not as someone else wrote it. It was published in 1963 and its sales were only moderate, but I was happy.
After agreeing to do Realm of Numbers, which Austin had suggested, I argued him into Words of Science, a series of 250 one-page essays on derivations and explanations of scientific terms, arranged alphabetically. I remember working on those essays at the medical school with an unabridged Webster’s on the desk to one side of me. (After all, I couldn’t make up the etymologies of the words. I had to know precisely the forms of the Latin and Greek words from which they came.) Matthew Derow wandered in, looked over my shoulder, stared at Webster’s, and said, “All you’re doing is copying the dictionary.”
“That’s right,” I said. I closed the dictionary, lifted it with an effort, and handed it to him. “Here’s the dictionary, Matthew. I dare you to write the book.”
He didn’t take the dare.
The book did quite well, but the important thing was that I enjoyed doing it enormously, so I did Words from the Myths (1961), Words on the Map (1962), Words in Genesis (1962), and Words from the Exodus (1963), all by Houghton Mifflin.
I hadn’t had enough, so I cast about for other places besides mythology, geography, and the Bible that would serve as a source of words. I thought of my old passion, history, and prepared a book entitled Words from Greek History, in which I told the history of Greece, stopping every once in a while to discuss words that we used that were derived from that history.
Austin went over the manuscript and said he liked the history far more than he did the word derivations and that was all I had to hear. I discarded the manuscript and set about writing a straight history of Greece for young people. I called it The Greeks and it was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1965.
Just as Tim Seldes had asked me not to do a second essay collection until we had a chance to see how the first did, so Austin now asked me not to do any other histories till we saw how The Greeks did.
Once it was published, I waited some time, then walked into Austin’s office and said, “Is The Greeks doing well?” “Quite well,” said Austin. “You can do another history.”
“It’s already done,” I said, and brought out the manuscript of The Roman Republic. I eventually wrote fourteen history books for Houghton Mifflin, not only on Greece and Rome but on Egypt, on the Near East, on Israel, on the Dark Ages, on the early history of England and France, to say nothing of four volumes of American history from Native American times to 1918. The books were pure fun to write, and since I crammed each one with dates, places, and assorted facts, they became important reference works for me in my later writing.
I couldn’t help but notice that my books with Houghton Mifflin didn’t do nearly as well as my books with Doubleday, even if one compared nonfiction with nonfiction. My histories, for instance, never appeared in paperback editions, while virtually all my Doubleday books, of whatever kind, did appear in this way. Then, after my fourth volume of American history, The Golden Door, was published in 1977, Houghton Mifflin told me (gently, to be sure) that they didn’t want any more. That bothered me a great deal, because I don’t like to be kept from writing what I want to write. The result is that I have written very little for Houghton Mifflin since 1977.
Reference Library
I mentioned in the previous section that I use my histories as reference works for my later writings, and that reminds me that I am frequently asked whether I have a reference library.
Of course I have one. Once I reached the stage of affluence where I could buy books, I began accumulating one. I now have some 2,000 books divided into sections: mathematics, history of science, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, biology, literature, and history. I have an Encyclopaedia Britannica, an Encyclopedia Americana, a
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, a complete Oxford English Dictionary, books of quotations, and so on.
An interviewer who inspected my library on June 21, 1978, wrote afterward, in a contemptuous way, that it was quite small, but he didn’t know what he was talking about. I deliberately keep it small by getting rid of old books as I get new ones. I have no use for books that are out of date or that, for one reason or another, I have had no occasion to use. What I have is a working library, and not one for
show.
Of
course, my most important reference is my mind and memory. My memory is excellent and very useful, but some of my friends view it with exaggerated, even superstitious awe. I am, every once in a while, called by one friend or another who has failed to locate some piece of information and has, in desperation, said to himself, “I’ll call Isaac. He’ll know.”
Sometimes I do. Lin Carter, a fellow member of my club, the Trap Door Spiders, once called me and said, “Isaac, I need to know who said, ‘Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’ “ I answered at once, “Madame Roland, as she passed a statue to Liberty on her way to the guillotine in 1794.” Carter dined out on that incident for months, I think, and it just encouraged others to use me as a handy and portable encyclopedia.
Sometimes I don’t come through. Some months ago, Sprague de Camp called me from his new home in Texas to ask me about the wavelengths of the supersonic squeaks of bats. That piece of informa tion could not be dredged out of my memory, so I said with chagrin (for I like being able to answer arcane questions offhand) that I’d have to call him back.
I then ransacked my library and finally came across an excellent article on sound in my Encyclopedia Americana which contained pre cisely the information Sprague needed. I phoned him, read off the information, received his thanks, and then, after I had hung up, I found that the encyclopedia article was one that I had myself written! As I said, my own books are extremely good sources of information for me. In order to make use of them, though, I have to remember in which book I included a particular piece of information and where it might be. Prolificity has its terrors too.
When I first began to write, I naturally saved the issues of those
magazines in which I appeared, but I had no idea of the sheer volume
of material I was destined to publish. Soon I realized there would be no room in the small apartment in which I lived to keep all those magazines, so I did something I knew Sprague had done. I carefully detached my stories from the magazines, together with the table of contents (and the cover if my name appeared there), and had the stories bound into a single hardcover volume. I continued to form new volumes of such “tear sheets” as time went on. I also bound paperback editions of my novels.
What with one thing and another I now have nearly 350 such bound volumes, and though I live in a much larger apartment than I once did, I have run out of room for them. I am forced to send the less significant volumes of bound material to Boston University, which collects my papers.
Originally I kept a copy of each of my books, every edition, whether English or foreign, but they soon began to encroach on everything, so I sent all the foreign editions to Boston University. I now save only the English-language editions and I’m having trouble with that.
I keep my books in chronological order, but even that doesn’t ensure that I can find a particular book easily out of a total group that now includes 451 different titles, many of them in multiple English-language editions. What I have done, then, is to Scotch-tape a number (in chronological order) on each different title. Otto Penzler, a book-dealer and bibliophile, warned me that that would ruin the monetary value of the collection, but I told him I didn’t keep those books as a financial investment but for needed reference.
Of course, the numbers mean nothing unless I have the books catalogued by them. I do keep a card catalogue for all my books, listing their number and all their editions (even the editions I don’t save). I use other cards to record the writing and publishing history of each book, and still other cards for short stories and essays.
My catalogue system is primitive in the extreme and I can use it only because I know it so well, but when I started, I had no idea that I would ever have to deal with more than a couple of hundred cards for everything I wrote. Who could imagine that I would have to deal with somewhere close to 5,000 cards? The problem grew acute so slowly that at no time did it occur to me to get a professional to set up a filing system for me, or, better yet, to computerize the whole thing.
However, considering that I’m a science fiction writer and a professional connoisseur of change, I’m really a clod. I like to keep things the way they have always been. After all, I can still make my system
work, limpingly, and my professional career is undoubtedly approaching its end, so let it go—let it go. My very good friend Martin Harry Greenberg (not to be confused with the Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press) has a desire to do a complete bibliography of all I have written. I hate to refuse Marty anything, because he’s such an unbelievably good soul, but I didn’t want that. It would be bound to involve me, and I could see myself
throat-deep in a project that would require a book of a 1,000 pages of small print, which no one would want, or could afford if he did want it.
I said, “Gee, Marty, wait till I’m dead, then you’ll know you’ll have
the entire corpus and you won’t have to watch the bibliography grow
instantly out of date.”
“Nothing will stop when you’re dead,” said Marty. “There’ll be new editions of all kinds of a great many of your books, and they’ll keep coming out for years and years.”
“Really?” I said with astonishment, but after a moment of reflection I realized he was right and I suddenly saw an advantage to dying. I wouldn’t have to be involved with all that stuff.
Boston University Collection
I mentioned, in the previous section, that Boston University collected my papers. It came about in this fashion.
In 1964, Howard Gotlieb, the curator of Boston University’s Spe
cial Collection, told me he wanted to collect my papers. The university
was specializing in twentieth-century writers and it seemed ridiculous to neglect a prolific writer who was on the BU faculty.
It took him quite a while to convince me that he wasn’t kidding. After all, I considered my “papers” (old manuscripts, second sheets, galleys, and so on) to be trash, which is exactly what it was, and is, no matter what Gotlieb says. Every once in a while I would gather a ton or so of this office-choking material and burn it in the barbecue pit in the backyard of our West Newton home. We used the barbecue pit for nothing else (never for barbecues, you can bet), but I always felt it to be an enormously useful adjunct to the house just for its use as a way of disposing of unwanted material.
Gotlieb was very upset when he found out I burned my papers, but I gave him whatever I had, and since then I’ve given him a copy of every book in every edition, English and foreign, every magazine containing a story or essay of mine, all my correspondence and manuscripts, and so on. When I lived in Boston, I’d bring the stuff in periodically and have lunch with him. Once I moved to New York, I brought it in to Doubleday, which has always been kind enough to mail the material to Gotlieb as an accommodation to me. Periodically, I tell them to take the postage out of my royalties, and invariably they make derogatory comments on my intelligence and refuse to do it.
But I still think most of my papers are junk, and I’m beginning to rebel. Gotlieb is convinced that students of twentieth-century literature will study my papers and that innumerable doctorates in literature will result. I think he’s crazy—cherubic and amiable, and I love him dearly—but crazy.
The special vault in which my junk is stored has already come in handy. The general public is allowed to pore over the contents of the vault to their heart’s content, and one ardent young fan managed to find the manuscript of a story I had recorded as “lost.” It wasn’t, and it had even been published under a pseudonym, something I had never listed, for some reason, and had utterly forgotten. I saw to it that it was published in the next appropriate book.
Then, too, Charles Waugh of Maine (with whom I have collaborated on various books), found older versions of two of my novels and one novelette in the vault. One of the finds was the original version of the story that became Pebble in the Sky. I had those early versions published as The Alternate Asimovs in 1986 just for the historical interest (and to make up fo
r the shock, in 1947, of having had the proto-Pebble rejected). It even sold a few copies.
On the whole, though, my vault at Boston University must be the largest and the most varied collection of junk in the world. I have a nightmarish feeling that someday it will be packed too tightly and it will explode. I can see the headlines in the Boston Globe now: “Asimov Vault Explodes. Commonwealth Avenue Devastated. Nineteen dead.”
Anthologies
When I was at the NAES in the early 1940s, the first science fiction anthologies began to appear.
An anthology is a collection of stories—not by a single author, but by many. It performs the same function as a collection does, bringing to the reader stories he may be glad to have a chance to read again or stories he may have missed altogether. New readers are able to read the more notable stories of the past.
Publishers pay for the privilege of using stories in anthologies. One early anthology, published by Crown in 1946, was The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin (eventually to become a good friend of mine). It contained a rather minor story of mine, “Blind Alley” (March 1945 ASF). Street & Smith Publications had bought all rights, so the money ought to have gone to them, but Campbell insisted that in such cases it go to the authors. (It was a kindly deed, and typical of Campbell.)
I received $42.50 for the anthologized “Blind Alley.” It wasn’t much, but it was the very first time I ever received additional payment for something I had already written and sold and been paid for in the past. Within a year, another anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, contained “Nightfall,” and I got $66.50 for that. I would get many more anthology payments in the future, but I never suspected in the 1940s that such a thing could possibly happen.
In time, science fiction anthologies appeared by the hundreds and a great many of them included stories of mine. Some individual stories of mine have been anthologized forty times or more, but I imagine that some of Arthur Clarke’s and Harlan Ellison’s do even better.