I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  But that’s not the way I told it. What I said was this: “I said to Paul, ‘Why do you have an M on your badge, Paul?’ and he answered, ‘It stands for “mediocre.” ‘ “ More gales of laughter (especially since he was, in actual fact, an honor student), and I felt I had punished him adequately for having pushed me into the hospital, making me miss the Johns Hopkins commencement.

  (Paul forever threatens to sue me for something he calls “patient

  malpractice.”)

  Once I got out of the hospital, I lived life normally, except that I took better care of myself. Even so, I would occasionally feel a twinge of angina when I walked too rapidly, and I would stop to let it pass. When I wrote up the tale of my heart attack in the second volume of my autobiography, one of the reviewers said that I had described it “with characteristic lack of selfpity.”

  I was glad he had noticed. As I have made plain in this book, I detest self-pity, and when I find myself falling into it, I make every possible effort to fight it off. And, after all, what reason have I to feel self-pity? What if I had not survived? I had had a reasonably good life, a secure childhood, loving parents, excellent schooling, a happy marriage, a delightful daughter, and a successful career. I had had some disappointments and sadness in my life, but, I honestly think, far less than is true for the average human being, and I have had far more success and gladness than most.

  Even had I died at fifty-seven, my life would still have been a full one, especially with regard to Janet and to my writing, and it would have been disgusting of me to have complained. And, as it happened, I continued to live, and continued to have Janet and writing success, and all the various other good things that have so greatly outnumbered the evil things that I have less reason than ever to complain or to feel self-pity.

  It seems to me that people who believe in immortality through transmigration of souls have a tendency to think that they were all Julius Caesar or Cleopatra in the past and that they will be equally prominent in the future. Surely, that can’t be so. Since some 90 percent of the human race lives (and has always, in time past, lived) in various degrees of poverty and misery, die chances are weighed against any transmigrating personality ending up in happiness. If my personality, on my death, were to transfer into the body of a newborn baby, chosen at random, the chances that I would lead a new life that was far more miserable than the one I had left would be enormous. It’s a roulette game that I do not wish to play.

  Many people believe that good people are assured a better life at death and wicked people a worse one. If that were true I would strongly suspect that I must have been a very good person in a past life to have deserved the happy life I have led this time, and if I continue to be noble and virtuous, I will have a still happier life the next time. And where will it end? Why, in that happiest state of all—Nirvana; that is, nothingness.

  But it is my opinion that we all achieve Nirvana at once, at the moment of the death that ends a single life. Since I have had a good life, I’ll accept death as cheerfully as I can when it comes, although I would be glad to have that death painless. I would also be glad to have my survivors—relatives, friends, and readers—refrain from wasting their time and poisoning their lives in useless mourning and unhappiness. They should be happy instead, on my behalf, that my life has been so good.

  Crown Publishers

  I felt rather guilty at doing the autobiography for Doubleday when it had been Paul Nadan of Crown who had first offered me a contract for it, so I let Paul talk me into signing a contract to do a book on the possibility of life and intelligence elsewhere in die Universe. It was to be called Extraterrestrial Civilizations. I promised I would do it eventually, although I told him that my schedule was tight and I didn’t know when I could start it. He was kind enough not to put a due date into the contract, therefore.

  Although Paul was ten years younger than I and was a slim man, he had heart trouble. During the period that this book was lying fallow, so to speak, he was hospitalized with a heart attack.

  I visited him in the hospital on this occasion and it was surprising that I did. In general, I do not like to visit hospitalized friends. My normal queasiness and my tendency to turn away from the unpleasant prevent me. Sometimes I manage, though.

  To give recent examples, when Herb Graff was in the hospital in Brooklyn, having undergone a triple bypass, Ray Fox (also a member of the Dutch Treat Club) was going to visit him and urged me to come along. I did and, not recognizing the bald man in the bed, thought we were in the wrong room. My obvious shock when I found out it was Herb may have been one of the factors that made him decide to abandon the toupee thereafter. (I think he looks better without one.)

  Again, when my brother, Stan, had a prostatectomy, I visited him, going out to the hospital in Long Island at which the operation had taken place. These were exceptional cases and the fact that I visited Paul Nadan therefore astonishes me. One reason, of course, was that he was such a nice fellow and we had had very good lunches together. Another was my rather intense feeling of guilt. I promised him that I would soon start Extraterrestrial Civilizations.

  In March 1978, Paul wrote to ask me if I would give him a favorable quote for a book on recombinant DNA by a science writer named John Lear. Now, in 1954, John Lear had referred to my book The Caves of Steel in a most insulting fashion, after quoting merely a one-paragraph review of it, and showing no signs of having read the book itself. “What does this author know about science?” he asked.

  I promptly wrote Lear a letter telling him flatly that I knew a great deal more science than he did and that, moreover, I was a better science writer than he was, but he never answered. Had he done so, and expressed regret, all would have been forgiven. As it was, I put him on my list of villains. I never did anything about it, of course, but neither was I about to do him favors. Therefore, when Paul Nadan asked for a favorable comment on Lear’s book, I returned a flat refusal, and told him why.

  He sent me the galleys anyway, along with a covering letter, dated March 21, 1978, in which he said, simply, “To forgive is divine.”

  That caught me in a quandary. I didn’t want to forgive, and yet what he had written made me feel ashamed of my hard-heartedness. And while I struggled with myself over whether I could bring myself to forgive Lear, I received the news that on March 22, the day after he had written to me, Paul had had another heart attack and had died.

  I had been caught with my hard and unforgiving heart and now it was too late. All I could do was begin Extraterrestrial Civilizations at once. I wished I had not been so dilatory but had begun it when Paul was still alive. But how could I tell it would happen? He was only forty-eight.

  I dedicated the book to his memory.

  Crown assigned me another editor for the book, Herbert Michelman, whom I met for the first time on November 2, 1978. Once again, I was in luck, for Herbert was another one of those editors I seem to meet with so frequently—gentle, soft-spoken, and delightful. At lunches, we would swap jokes and laugh continually.

  Once Extraterrestrial Civilizations was done (it was published in 1979), I started a new book for him called Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos, dealing with the steady expansion of the human range.

  I invited him to have lunch with me at the Dutch Treat Club, and he enjoyed himself enormously on that occasion. As it turned out, Ernest Heyn, one of our older members, knew Herbert Michelman well. He suggested that we invite Herbert Michelman in as a member and I was enthusiastically agreeable. So was Herb. So we voted him in without trouble.

  On November 11, 1980, he attended his very first luncheon as a member and said to me, in his gentle way, “May I sit with you, Isaac?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t let you sit anywhere else.”

  So he sat at the “Jewish table” and joined the fun, but the luncheon entree was a not very generous wedge of quiche and nothing more. Robert Friedman (the member who had given me my card about critics that I have held on to ever since, and who l
ater resigned in indignation over the fact that the club did not allow women as members) took out his luncheon ticket and tore it in half.

  “Here,” he said to the waiter, offering one part, “you only deserve half.”

  I was embarrassed and I hoped against hope that the next week the menu would be a bit more generous and that Herbert would more nearly get his money’s worth, but it was not to be. Herbert also had a bad heart, and on that very evening he died at the station of his commuter train line. He was sixty-seven years old and I had known him for only two years.

  The next week I came in glumly and was asked where my friend was. I answered, “I’m afraid he died last Tuesday evening, just three hours after he left us.”

  Bob Friedman couldn’t resist saying, “It was that lunch last week. It was the quiche of death.” Such is the nature of humanity that the people at the table all laughed. Even I did. Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos was published in 1982 and I dedicated it to the memory of Herbert Michelman.

  Jane West, who worked for Clarkson Potter, a Crown subsidiary, and who had suggested, in 1979, that I do The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels, died on September 11, 1981. It was cancer, in her case. In the space of less than three years, then, I lost three good editors in action, all from a single publishing house. It was a most distressing coincidence.

  the tide “Twenty Ways the World Could End.” It had been extensively edited and I was unhappy with the result and welcomed the chance to do an entire book on the subject. I was also anxious to use

  Simon & Schuster

  Until the late 1970s, I had never done a book for Simon & Schuster. I had the vague idea, somehow, that Simon & Schuster was Double-day’s great competitor and that it would be disloyal to work for them.

  In fact, I was once rather shocked when Timothy Seldes introduced me to a visitor in his office who was an editor from Simon & Schuster. Surely, I thought, it would be more appropriate if the employees of the two firms did not talk to each other, but fired when they saw the whites of the enemies’ eyes.

  I recovered, however, and said to the visitor, “I understand the women at Simon & Schuster are easy.” “What!” said he, scandalized, and Tim did me the honor of letting his mouth fall open too.

  “The reason I say that,” I said, with as naive an expression on my face as I could manage, “is that recently when I tried to flirt with a young woman here at Doubleday, Tim Seldes said to me, ‘Where do you think you are, Asimov? Simon & Schuster?’ “

  Tim had indeed said that, and he remembered saying it too, and I left him to get out of it as best he could.

  As it happened, Larry Ashmead, after he had left Doubleday, moved to Simon & Schuster, and we remained in contact, of course. I don’t give up my editorial friendships just because there is a move. Inevitably, Larry asked me if I would do a book for him, suggesting that I deal with all the different ways in which the world might come to an end.

  He couldn’t have suggested a better book, because I had just written a relatively brief article on the subject for Popular Mechanics, which had appeared in the March 1977 issue of the magazine under my own tide, A Choice of Catastrophes. I signed the contract gladly and got to work on it at the first available opportunity.

  While I was writing the book, Larry changed jobs again and moved on to Harper & Row. That didn’t bother me, for I assumed that he would simply take the book with him. This had happened to me before. When I wrote my book The Neutrino, the hardcover was intended for my old editor, Walter Bradbury, who was working with Henry Holt at the time. While the book was in preparation, Brad returned to Doubleday and took the book with him. It was published by Doubleday in 1966.1 assumed the same would happen to A Choice of Catastrophes.

  It didn’t. Simon & Schuster refused to let Larry take the book with him. He told me this and I was indignant. I went to see the new editor assigned me by Simon & Schuster and explained that the book had been Larry’s idea and that my whole intention was to do it for him because of our close friendship.

  The new editor shook his head. The contract was with Simon & Schuster and the top brass intended to keep the book. I reported to Larry and offered to stop work on the book. Larry said, “No. I don’t want you to lose the book. Just do a different one for me.”

  So I finished A Choice of Catastrophes and it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1979. It did reasonably well, but I was unhappy over it, because the editor had taken out my section on urban terrorism. He never explained why and I had the uneasy feeling that the publishers expected that what I said might have unpleasant repercussions. It felt like censorship to me and I brooded over it a bit.

  I don’t really hold a grudge against Simon & Schuster, but they have never asked me for another book and A Choice of Catastrophes remains my only book with them.

  I kept my word to Larry too. I suggested that I do a book in which I talked about longer and longer distances, then shorter and shorter ones; longer and longer periods of time, then shorter and shorter ones; greater and greater masses, then smaller and smaller ones. In every case, I would make the increases and decreases very regular and supply examples from real life—thus giving people some idea of the scale of everything about us.

  It was the kind of book I would love to do, the kind of petty calculations I loved to immerse myself in, and Larry, of course, always let me do whatever I wanted. I produced the book, which I called The Measure of the Universe, and it was published by Harper & Row in 1983. It did moderately well too.

  Incidentally, in repeating over and over that this book and that book did well, I don’t mean to say I haven’t had a few real flops. Not many, perhaps, but a few.

  There was, for instance, Our World in Space, published by New York Graphic in 1974. I contributed essays on the various planets of the solar system as they had been revealed by rockets and probes up to that point, and Robert McCall, a marvelous illustrator of space-age scenes, supplied the paintings. McCall was the senior author, justifiably, and collected 60 percent of the royalties.

  My essays weren’t bad, but McCall’s paintings couldn’t be better. It was a large, beautiful book just right for coffee tables and I hoped for great things from it—but it dropped dead and never made back its advance. And in a few years it was out of date.

  Then there was the case of Carl Sagan’s venture into book publishing. Carl’s books were doing better and better until, with his book The Dragons of Eden, he won the Pulitzer Prize. (When I read that book in galleys, I predicted to Janet that Carl had a real winner there, and I was delighted at the success of my critical acumen—something I usually feel I lack altogether.)

  Carl then made an enormous hit with his television program Cosmos, and the book derived from it stayed on the best-seller list almost forever.

  It seemed to him (and to me too) that his name was now sufficiently well known so that he could open a publishing firm of his own that would publish books on astronomy and space. He had found, for instance, a book of beautiful illustrations prepared by a Japanese artist named Kazuaki Iwasaki. The captions, however, Carl found insufficient. He asked me to write a more satisfactory set, which I gladly did, and he himself wrote a preface to the book.

  Again the artist was the senior author and the tide of the book was Visions of the Universe. It was published by Cosmos Store (Sagan’s firm) in 1981, and I anticipated enormous sales, best-seller listings, and so on. Nothing of the sort. The book never moved and, as a matter of fact, Cosmos Store went out of business.

  I’ll give you a third example. Harmony Books, a subsidiary of Crown Publishers, asked me, on May 4, 1983, to do a book on robots, their history, their development, their uses in industry and science, and so on. I refused, explaining that although I wrote about robots in science fiction, I knew nothing about them in real life.

  They said they had to use my name, and they would get me a coauthor who did know about robots. They came up with a young woman named Karen Frenkel, attractive, intelligent, and hardworking. She did the necessar
y research and much of the writing. I went over it and did some rewriting. Since she did much more than half the work, I arranged to have her get most of the advance. However, I couldn’t arrange the credits properly. I wanted her listed as senior author, but the book, entitled simply Robots, was published in 1985 with my name coming first and in larger letters. I had protested, but that did no good. It had to be that way, they said, to ensure a better sale.

  There was a somewhat grim justice, therefore, in the fact that there was virtually no sale, and the book never made back more than a relatively small portion of its advance (which, fortunately, had gone mostly to Karen).

  Some readers may try to draw conclusions from the fact that each of these three flops was a collaboration, but I have published a number of collaborations that have done quite well—the Norby books with Janet, for instance, and various anthologies with Marty.

  Several books with only my own name on them may not have been flops, but they didn’t really do marvelously well. Such outre ventures as Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost, for instance, while giving me enormous pleasure, did no more than barely earn back its modest advance.

  The moral to this, in my opinion, is that my name is not a magic cure-all and putting it on a book does not necessarily ensure success. (Nor should it. A book should be successful on its own terms and not simply because of its author’s name.)

  in the book, and looked at all those that I didn’t supply and threw out a number of them. The book was published in 1979 under the imprint of Grosset &

  Marginal Items

  I have already spoken of the difficulties I have with my 116 anthologies and my ambivalent feelings about adding them to the list of my books. I have similar feelings with reference to a number of non-anthology items (fortunately not many) that are also marginal.