I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  Of course, I suspect that many anthologists, particularly those people who prepare “readers” for schools, do not go back to original sources in their search for material, but to other anthologies. This means that once a story has been anthologized a few times, it keeps on appearing in still others out of sheer inertia.

  Then, too, as writers become better known, and as their stories come into greater demand, the tendency is to demand larger fees for their use. My principle has been the reverse. I never ask for much, in the hope that this will encourage the use of my stories in anthologies. I want my stories and my name broadcast widely, believing that, in the end, this would be more profitable than gouging would be.

  Although many anthologies appeared, some being edited by my science-fiction-writing friends, and although I knew that the editor usually got half the royalties (the other half being divided among the authors), I was never tempted to edit one myself. It would mean reading back numbers, deciding on which to include, writing to different authors for permissions, and so on. Too much work. I wanted to spend my time writing rather than fiddling with anthologies.

  In 1961, however, Avram Davidson had an idea. He had published a short story, “Or All the Seas with Oysters” (May 1958 Galaxy), and it had won a Hugo. Avram’always needed money and knew he could make some if that story were anthologized. It would be sure to be anthologized if someone could be persuaded to edit an anthology of Hugo Award winners.

  Avram’s agent, Bob Mills, thought of getting someone as editor who (1) was a well-known science fiction writer and (2) had never won a Hugo. He thought of me at once. I was reluctant, but since I didn’t have to select the stories and Bob Mills would get the permissions, the job seemed easy and I agreed.

  The Hugo Winners, the first anthology I edited, was published by Doubleday in 1962, and it did very well. However, I found that I had miscalculated in one respect. Every six months, royalties for The Hugo Winners would arrive. I would have to send 10 percent to Bob Mills, divide what was left in half, keep one half, and divide the other half among nine authors in pro rata shares according to the length of their stories, and mail checks to them or to their agents.

  I might have endured this for one or two royalty periods, but the anthology kept selling, one way or another, for twenty years. I grew deathly tired of the task and determined never to do another anthology unless I could persuade someone to do all the paperwork.

  I held to that resolution. By 1977 I had edited eight anthologies, and others did the paperwork, in every case. The anthologies I did in this period included two more volumes of Hugo winners, a volume of Nebula winners, an anthology of science fiction short short stories with Groff Conklin, a book of science fiction stories selected by Doubleday, and one called Before the Golden Age, which was entirely my idea.

  On April 3, 1973, I dreamed that I had prepared an anthology of the great stories I had read and enjoyed in the 1930s (including Cliff Simak’s “World of the Red Sun,” Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun,” Charles Tanner’s “Tumithak of the Corridors,” and so on). I told the dream to Janet and she said, “Why don’t you do it?”

  Why not? I called Larry Ashmead, stressing the historical importance of such an anthology, and he gave me the go-ahead. I called Sam Moskowitz, the unofficial historian of science fiction. Sam said he had always hoped to do such an anthology himself, but no publisher was willing to have him do it, whereas he could see they would be willing to have me do it. He then loyally got me tear sheets for all the stories I needed in record time, and I paid him for it, of course.

  The book was published by Doubleday on April 3, 1974, the anniversary of my dream. It sold only moderately well, but it was a book that gave me enormous satisfaction. I wished with all my heart that I could go back in time to that junior high school boy I once was and tell him what I had done to preserve the stories he loved so.

  And that sated me where anthologies were concerned. I didn’t anticipate doing any more of them, except, perhaps, additional Hugo Winners volumes, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do those.

  In 1977, however, I met Martin Harry Greenberg and that changed everything, as I shall explain in due course.

  Headnotes

  The Hugo “Winners presented me with a problem. Should I or should I not count it as one of my books?

  By the time it appeared, I was forty-two years old and had published forty-six books. I was beginning to realize that the most important thing about me, literarily, was the number of books I was publishing. No one ever acclaimed me as a great literary light. I was never a threat to the reign of the Bellows and Updikes and I never could be. Yet we all want recognition, we all want to be known for something, and I was beginning to see that there would be a good chance that if for nothing else, I would be known for the vast number of books I would publish and for the range of subjects I wrote about. It would be nice if the good quality of the books were also appreciated, but I had the feeling that no one would notice this; they would notice only the number.

  Consequently, I was anxious to count The Hugo “Winners and make it Book #47, adding by that little bit to my chances for fame. After all, my name was on the cover. There it was: “edited by Isaac Asimov.”

  Unfortunately, my sense of ethics and all those paternal admonitions about honesty that filled my childhood stood in the way. The fact was that I had not edited the book. The nine stories were selected by the science fiction fans. The order in which they were inserted was strictly chronological. I had spent no significant time on the book, and anyone could have done it as easily as I did.

  Then I had a brilliant idea. Why did I not introduce myself into the book? I could write a lengthy and highly personal introduction and, in addition, write a lengthy and highly personal headnote for each story.

  In that way, I would make the book mine and be able, quite legitimately, to add it to my list.

  I did exactly that. I made the introduction a humorous one in which I praised myself fulsomely and objected to the vileness with which I had been deprived of a Hugo (the old Bob Hope attitude toward Oscars). I started reading the introduction to Tim Seldes in his office, and by the time I had finished the first paragraph, there was general shock. Tim’s beautiful secretary, Wendy Weil, looked over my shoulder and said, “He really did write that, Tim.”

  Tim snatched the introduction from my hand and read through it. He said, “Well, I suppose it will go over with science fiction fans, but how about the people in Dubuque?”

  “The people in Dubuque,” I said, with a show of confidence I didn’t really feel, “will love it. They will feel themselves to be inside the world of science fiction.”

  Tim hesitated, then decided to take the chance. The book was published with my introduction and headnotes exactly as I had written them and it went down in my list as Book #47.

  And, as it happened, it was quickly apparent that I had done the right thing. The Hugo Winners sold remarkably well for an anthology and the letters flooded in to the effect that the introduction and head-notes were the best part of the book.

  I don’t need an anvil dropped on my head to get me to see a point. Until then, my collections of stories and essays had been bare. I had just put them together and let them lie there without a single editorial word from me.

  Never again! From the time of The Hugo Winners, every collection of my stories had extensive wordage from me in the form of forewords or afterwords (sometimes both) for each story. The material I added was highly personal and usually told how I had come to write the story. What’s more, the material was cheerful and openly self-appreciative. If I thought a story was good, I said so; if it had achieved some fame, I said so; if I thought it was underappreciated, I said so, and, moreover, I grumbled about it.

  The result was, on the whole, a very good one. Readers did get the feeling that I was talking to them freely and openly, and, generally, a sensation of warmth and friendliness was generated. I was no longer only a peculiar name, I became a person. I be
gan getting letters that started off: “Dear Isaac, please forgive my use of your first name but I have read so much of what you have written that I feel we are friends.”

  I even got a letter from a young woman in British Columbia that began as follows: “Today I am eighteen. I am sitting at the window, looking out at the rain, and thinking how much I love you.”

  She meant, of course, how much she loved my stories, but my headnotes had made me inseparable from them.

  I responded with a thank-you letter, but I couldn’t resist adding: “I must raise the following question, however. When I was a lonely twenty-one-year-old, where were all you loving eighteen-year-old girls then?”

  All this warmth and affection that I generated was infinitely pleasing to me. After all, who doesn’t like to be liked? And I was just practical enough to realize that it helped sales too.

  Even my science essay collections received my editorial help. In fact, I took to prefacing each one of my F&SF essays with a personal, usually humorous anecdote that was, to begin with, quite true, and, secondly, that fit (or could be made to fit) the subject of the essay. It served the function of a headnote and such an initial bit of fun helped slide the reader into a sometimes arcane subject and may even have helped him get all the way through the essay in one piece.

  Of course, some people did not like my headnotes. They took them to represent an unhealthy, hypertrophied ego on my part. It’s not true, of course. I just like myself, that’s all, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. One critic wrote something I’m willing to agree with. He said, “The man is very immodest, but he has much to be immodest about.”

  tion that I could and now I actually accused them of ignoring me out of mean and vicious anti-Semitism.

  Then I opened the envelope and, of course, it was a special award to

  My Own Hugos

  For a while I made a big deal of the Hugo tirades I had begun in The Hugo Winners. It didn’t really bother me that I hadn’t won a Hugo, since most of my major stories had appeared before Hugos had existed (though I did feel that “The Ugly Little Boy” might have won one). However, it was a good handle for humor, and I made the most of it.

  In 1963, the World Convention was held in Washington and was to be run by George Scithers, a fan with whom I had made friends when we left Detroit together, by train, after the World Convention of 1959. George phoned me and asked me if I would be coming to Washington and mentioned that Theodore Sturgeon would be master of ceremonies.

  A distant hope awoke. Why should they try to make sure I would come if someone else was to give out the Hugos? Was it possible I might get one for something? —I said I would come and tried to conceal my satisfaction.

  But then, some time later, I got another phone call. Ted was having serious family problems and couldn’t come to Washington. Would I be master of ceremonies in his place? Well, that obviously meant I was getting no award, but I had already promised to go and I couldn’t back out. So I put the best face on it and agreed.

  I handed out the Hugos with particular emphasis on the Bob Hope angle, my wit sharpened by my disappointment. When the last envelope was to be opened, I had become too obsessed to note that there was no category written upon it. I waved it in the air for a goodish while as I inveighed against the committee. I had been making even wilder accusations against them to milk all the humor out of the situa

  me for my science essays in F&SF. I stared at the audience helplessly as I found myself unable to complete the pronunciation of my name and they all collapsed in hysteria. (I have a feeling they all knew what was coming except me.)

  Afterward I said to George Scithers, “How could you ask me to hand out the Hugos when I was going to get one?”

  He said, “We weren’t going to till Ted Sturgeon got into trouble and then we decided that you were the only author in science fiction who could hand himself an award without embarrassment.”

  In 1966, the World Convention was held in Cleveland, where, eleven years before, I had been guest of honor. I decided to go because the convention committee was going to award a Hugo to the best novel series containing three or more novels. As an example, they pointed to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of three books (or four, if you count The Hobbit). This was a clear indication they expected Tolkien to win, and such was the popularity of his books (I have read through them five times) that I considered him a shoo-in, whatever the competition.

  However, other series were nominated just to make it look legitimate: Heinlein’s Future History series, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars series, E. E. Smith’s Lensman series, and my own Foundation series. Obviously, I had to go to Cleveland. Generally, Hugos are valued the more the longer the story, so that the most valuable Hugos are those given for the best novel of the year. But here for the first time (and, so far, the last time too) there was an award for a series of novels, and it was labeled “all-time” too and was by no means merely the best of the year. It was therefore the most valuable Hugo ever offered up to that time (or since). I was pretty sure that Foundation would end in last place, but just being nominated was a great honor, so I went.

  This time I took Gertrude and the children with me, which, for a while, I thought might turn out to be a disastrous mistake. The drive by automobile was a tedious one and when we got to Cleveland the hotel proved to be an old one and our room to be a rotten one with virtually no closet space. Gertrude took it all very hard and I anticipated an absolutely awful weekend.

  Fortunately, and quite fortuitously, as we went to the registration desk in a blue funk, we bumped into Harlan Ellison and I had a

  chance to observe his effect on women at close range. In no time at all, he had both Gertrude and Robyn eating out of his hand. Gertrude and I stayed with him virtually all night and Gertrude enjoyed the convention after all. And if she did, of course, so did I.

  At the banquet, the Hugos were given out in reverse order of importance, so that the novel series award came last. When that came up, Harlan replaced the master of ceremonies (apparently, he had insisted on this, and no one liked to cross Harlan) and read off the list of nominees, leaving out the Foundation series. I shouted at him in annoyance, but he paid no attention, and read off the winner. I was the winner over Tolkien, Heinlein, Smith, and Burroughs. That was why he insisted on making that announcement—to watch my face.

  I thought this was Harlan’s idea of a joke, and I sat there, frowning and annoyed, until I got it through my skull that I had really won, then I made the kind of faces Harlan was looking for. That was my second Hugo, and the most valuable ever handed out. I was to get three more Hugos, but I’ll mention them at the appropriate place.

  Incidentally, I pointed out to Doubleday after I had gotten my first Hugo that that really disqualified me from doing further Hugo winner anthologies. (I was hoping that load would be lifted from my shoulders.) That sort of thing never works for me, however. I got the usual answer: “Don’t be silly, Isaac.”

  Walker & Company

  Editors move from one publishing house to another. Sometimes they carry me along like a virus.

  Thus, Edward Burlingame worked for the paperback house New American Library (NAL), under Truman Talley, in the early 1960s. I did some science books for them. One was The Wellsprings of Life, which was published in hardcover by Abelard-Schuman in 1960. Two others were The Human Body and The Human Brain (excellent books, if I do say so myself), which were published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1963 and 1964, respectively.

  But then there was a shake-up at NAL, and Ed left for a position with a small firm, Walker & Company. I had, at the time, written a three-volume book on physics for an adult audience, called Understanding Physics, which NAL was to publish in paperback form. Once Ed was ensconced at Walker & Company, he offered to do the hardcover version, and so he did, in 1966. He also persuaded me to do a book on astronomy, The Universe, which was also published in 1966. In this way, Walker & Company became a regular publisher of mine.
r />   Walker & Company is a small pop-and-mom publishing house, a breed that is now almost nonexistent. Pop is Samuel Walker, a tall and urbane gentleman with a ready smile. Mom is his wife, Beth Walker, a tall and very attractive woman with a keen sense of humor. She is a joy and pleasure to banter with.

  A couple of years ago, for instance, when I had lost a few pounds in weight, Beth patted my abdomen with approval and said, “Keep it down, Isaac, keep it down.”

  Whereupon I said, “If you do that and I were younger, I wouldn’t be able to.”

  After she finished laughing (she laughs heartily and infectiously), she said, as I have heard so many women say, “Why do I feed you lines like that?” (The answer is simple. The only way to avoid feeding me useful lines is to say nothing at all.)

  Walker & Company became my outlet for frivolous books. It was a time, for instance, when The Sensuous Woman by J and The Sensuous Man by M were selling in runaway lots, though, in my opinion, they were rotten books even on their own terms (judging by what little I could read of them without gagging).

  Beth said to me, “Why don’t you write a dirty book, Isaac?”

  I said, “What about? Being a dirty old man?”

  “Great,” said Beth, so I wrote The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, which Walker & Company published in 1971. I completed it in a weekend and filled it puns and with misquotations and made it sound as though it were forever on the point of becoming “dirty” without ever actually managing to do it. I wrote it in Janet’s office, which was not in use weekends (we were not yet married), and hid it nervously when she

  walked in. I thought she wouldn’t approve, but little did I know her. She enjoys ribaldry as much as I do.

  The book didn’t do at all well. It was too frivolous for my regular readers and not pornographic enough (or at all) for the trashy readers. In connection with this book, I did one of the few things I’m really ashamed of. The cover of the book showed a picture of me with my eyes masked by a brassiere. The author was presented as “Dr. A” to match the initials appended as authors to the other “Sensuous” books. Actually, my true identity was revealed as soon as the book was published.