by Isaac Asimov
Janet can, of course, as any woman can, attend the Dutch Treat annual banquet and she always goes with me, if only to make sure that I don’t let my annoyance at finding myself in a tuxedo lead me into obstreperous trouble. Once she attended a regular meeting under unusual circumstances which I will describe later.
Now, of course, she can occasionally attend the regular meetings as a legal guest on suitable occasions. She came along on April 24, 1990, for instance, when I gave my talk on iambic pentameter and limericks.
Best-seller
The two volumes of my autobiography had appeared and had done quite well, and went on to be published as trade paperbacks under the Avon label, but Doubleday wasn’t satisfied. They still wanted novels.
Mind you, I hadn’t been neglecting Doubleday, with whom I published The Road to Infinity, a new collection of science essays, and Casebook of the Black Widowers, a third collection of Black Widower tales. In press was still another collection of science essays, The Sun Shines Bright, and a collection of essays on science fiction, Asimov on Science Tiction and an anthology, The Thirteen Crimes of Science Fiction. I was also working madly on another edition of Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, so Doubleday couldn’t say I was neglecting the firm.
Nor was I neglecting other publishers, by the way, for in 1980 and 1981,1 had published twenty-four books. These included Extraterrestrial Civilizations for Crown; A Choice of Catastrophes for Simon & Schuster; Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts for Grosset & Dunlap; The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels for Clarkson Potter; and four How Did We Find Out . . . ? books for Walker & Company.
So I was certainly working full-time, as I always do. All this meant nothing to Doubleday. It was irrelevant. Their viewpoint was that I should simply not do some of the things I was doing, and write a novel instead. What’s more, they were no longer going to ask me; they were going to tell me.
Hugh O’Neill had replaced Cathleen Jordan as my editor after Cathleen had left Doubleday. On January 15, 1981, Hugh called me into his office. He was a young man, new at his job, facing an elderly and distinguished writer. Who could tell how temperamental, or even violent, an elderly and moody writer might get if he were suddenly faced with an ultimatum?
So all he said was that Betty Prashker wanted to see me. Betty was high up in the editorial scale and a very respected editor in the field. I was ushered to her office. This mild middle-aged woman smiled at me and said, “Isaac, we want you to write a novel for us.” I said, “But, Betty—“
She was clearly not going to listen to anything I was going to say, for she ignored my attempted remark and kept right on talking. “We are going to send a contract to you and we are going to give you a large advance.”
I said, “But, Betty, I don’t know if I can write novels anymore.” Betty said, in the usual refrain, “Don’t be silly, Isaac. Just go home and start thinking up a novel.”
I was shoved out of the office. That evening, Pat LoBrutto, who was in charge of science fiction at Doubleday, phoned me. “Listen, Isaac,” he said, “let me make it clear. When Betty said ‘a novel,’ she meant ‘a science fiction novel’; and when we say ‘a science fiction novel,’ we mean ‘a Foundation novel.’ That’s what we want.”
I heard him, but I couldn’t make myself take it seriously. I had written only one science fiction novel in twenty-two years, and I had not written a word of any Foundation story for thirty-two years. I didn’t even remember the content of the Foundation stories in any detail.
What’s more, I had written the Foundation stories, from beginning to end, between the brash ages of twenty-one and thirty, and had done so under John Campbell’s whip. Now I was sixty-one years old, and there was no John Campbell any longer, or any present-day equivalent either.
I had a terrible fear that I would, if I were forced, write a Foundation novel, but that it would be entirely worthless. Doubleday would hesitate to reject it, and would publish it; but it would be lambasted by the critics and the readers; and I would go down in science fiction history as a writer who was great when he was young, but who then tried to ride the coattails of his youth when he was old and incompetent, and proceeded to make an utter jackass of himself.
What’s more, my income was high as a result of my vast number of nonfiction books, twenty times as high, in fact, as in the days when I was writing novels. I felt that I might badly damage the state of my private economy if I returned to writing novels.
The only thing I could do was to lie low and hope that Doubleday would forget about it.
They didn’t however. On January 19, Hugh told me, with every evidence of satisfaction, that I was going to get a $50,000 advance, which was exactly ten times as much as the usual advance I received for a Doubleday book. I was nonplussed. I worry about large advances. What if I don’t earn them back? I know that the proper reaction to that is for a writer to shrug it off and keep the advance, and let the publisher take the loss, but I can’t do that. I would have to return the unearned portion of the advance (as I had actually done on one or two occasions in the past). This would give me no pleasure and it would also entail a fight with Doubleday, who would surely refuse to take the return, with their usual and oft-repeated remark of “Don’t be silly, Isaac.”
So I said to Hugh, “Gee, Hugh, Doubleday will lose its shirt with that kind of advance.” But Hugh already knew the lines. He said, “Don’t be silly, Isaac. Have you thought of a plot yet?”
It was clear that Doubleday was dead serious and I must admit that a $50,000 advance was attractive. Even if I turned out a bad book and refused to let Doubleday publish it, or couldn’t even finish it, and had to force Doubleday to take back the money, it would be something to be able to say to myself, “I was once promised $50,000 to write a book even before I had turned out a single word or had thought up a single idea.”
A week later I was given a check for half the advance (the other half to be handed to me on delivery of the manuscript), and after that there was no longer any chance to fool around. As soon as I could complete projects I was then engaged on, I would have to get started.
And before I got started, I would have to reread The Foundation Trilogy. This I approached with a certain horror. After all, I was convinced it would seem rough and crude to me after all these years. It would surely embarrass me to read the kind of tripe I wrote when I was in my twenties. So, wincing, I opened the book on June 1, 1981, and within a few pages I knew I was wrong. To be sure, I recognized the pulpy bits in the early stories, and I knew that I could have done better after I had taken a few more years to learn my craft, but I was seized by the book. It was a page-turner.
My memory of it was just sufficiently insufficient for me not to be certain how my characters were going to solve their problems and I read it with steady excitement.
I couldn’t help noticing, of course, that there was not very much action in it. The problems and resolutions thereof were expressed primarily in dialogue, in competing rational discussions from different points of view, with no clear indication to the reader which view was right and which was wrong. At the start, there were villains, but as I went along, both heroes and villains faded into shades of gray and the real problem was always: What is best for humanity?
For that, the answer was never certain. I always supplied an answer, but the whole tone of the series was that, as in history, no answer was final.
When I finished reading the trilogy on June 9,1 experienced exactly what readers had been telling me for decades—a sense of fury that it was over and there was no more.
Now I wanted to write a fourth Foundation novel, but that didn’t mean I had a plot for it. What I did then was to dig up the beginning of a fourth Foundation novel that I had written some years before. I had written fourteen pages and had then put it aside, largely because there were so many other things I had to do.
Now I went over those fourteen pages and they read well. That gave me the beginning of a novel without an ending. (Alw
ays, it’s the other way around.) So I sat down to make up an ending, and the next day I forced my quivering fingers to retype those fourteen pages—and then to keep on going.
It was not an easy job. I tried to stick to the style and the atmosphere of the earlier Foundation stories. I had to resurrect all the paraphernalia of psychohistory, and I had to make references to five hundred years of past history. I had to keep the action low and the dialogue high (the critics often complained about that in my novels, but to perdition with them), and I had to present competing rational outlooks and describe several different worlds and societies.
What’s more, I was uneasily conscious that the early Foundation stories had been written by someone who knew only the technology of the 1940s. There were no computers, for instance, though I did presume the existence of very advanced mathematics. I didn’t try to explain that. I just put very advanced computers in the new Founda tion novel and hoped that nobody would notice the inconsistency. Oddly enough, no one did.
There were also no robots in the early Foundation novels, and I didn’t introduce them in the new one either. During the 1940s, you see, I had had two separate series going: the Foundation series and the robot series. I deliberately kept them differ ent, the former set in the far future without robots and the latter in the near future with robots. I wanted the two series to remain as separated as possible so that if I got tired of one of them (or if the readers did), I could continue with the other with a minimum of troubling overlap. And, indeed, I did get tired of the Foundation and I wrote no more after 1950, while I continued to write robot stories (and even two robot novels).
In writing the new Foundation novel in 1981, I felt the absence of robots to be an anomaly, but there was no way I could bring them in suddenly and without warning. Computers I could; they were side issues making only brief appearances. Robots, however, would be bound to be principal characters and I had to continue to leave them out. Nevertheless, the problem remained in my head and I knew that I would have to deal with it someday.
I called the new novel Lightning Rod, for what seemed to me to be good and sufficient reasons, but Doubleday vetoed that instantly. A Foundation novel had to have “Foundation” in the title so that the readers would know at once that that was what they were waiting for. In this case, Doubleday was right, and I finally settled on Foundation’s Edge as the title.
It took me nine months to write the novel and it was a hard time not only for me but for Janet, for my uncertainty concerning the quality of the novel reflected itself in my mood. When I felt that the novel wasn’t going well, I brooded in wretched silence, and Janet admitted that she longed for the days when I wrote only nonfiction, when I had no literary problems, and when my mood was generally sunny.
Another reason for my moodiness was, of course, that while I was writing the novel I could not undertake large nonfiction tasks except for the continuing revision of the Biographical Encyclopedia. To be sure, during those nine months I co-edited nearly twenty anthologies, did several little science histories for Walker, and turned out a steady stream of short pieces, but I missed my big projects.
I finished the novel, at last, on March 25, 1982, handed it in at once, got the second half of my advance instantly, and received my first copy of Foundation’s Edge in September.
By that time, Doubleday was reporting large preliminary orders, but I took that calmly and without excitement. Such large orders might well be followed by large returns and actual sales could be small.
I was wrong.
For over thirty years, generation after generation of science fiction readers had been reading the Foundation novels and had been clamoring for more. All of them, thirty years’ worth of them, were now ready to jump at the book the instant it appeared.
The result was that in the week of its publication, Foundation’s Edge appeared in twelfth place on the New York Times best-seller list, and I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes. I had been a published writer for forty-three years and Foundation’s Edge was my 262nd book. Having escaped any hint of best-sellerdom for all that time, I scarcely knew what to do with one.
Foundation’s Edge reached a high of third place on the first Sunday of December, and remained on the list for twenty-five weeks altogether. I could have hoped for one more, so I could say “half a year,” but twenty-five was exactly twenty-five more than I had ever dreamed of in my wildest bits of megalomania, so it would have been ridiculous of me to complain. (And my income, I might add, which I had thought would be damaged by a return to fiction, promptly doubled.)
Incidentally, when Hugh showed me the proof of the cover, I burst into laughter, because it announced Foundation’s Edge as the fourth book of The Foundation Trilogy. When Hugh asked me why I laughed, I pointed out that “trilogy” meant “three books,” so that introducing a fourth book was a contradiction in terms.
Hugh was horribly embarrassed and said it would be changed. I said, “No, no, Hugh. Leave it. It will create talk and will be good publicity.”
But Doubleday didn’t want that kind of publicity. It was changed to a fourth book of the “Foundation Saga.” However, I have the
original on my living-room wall with the self-contradiction in plain view.
There was, of course, one little flaw in all the excitement of a bestseller. My name on the Times best-seller list set off a small tocsin of alarm in my brain and I knew I was doomed. Doubleday would never let me stop writing novels again—and they never did.
Out of the Past
As the 1980s opened and I entered my own sixties, I began to experience that phenomenon that comes to all people who approach the end of a normal life span. Their somewhat older contemporaries begin to die—and sometimes their somewhat younger ones also.
Bernard Zitin, who, at the NAES, had been my direct superior, and with whom, of course, I had not gotten along, died in 1979 at the age of sixty.
Gloria Saltzberg, the pleasant girl in the wheelchair who had chivied me into taking the test that had gotten me into Mensa, died on Janu ary 25, 1978, at the age of fifty. No doubt the sequelae of infantile paralysis had shortened her life.
John Campbell’s widow, Peg Campbell, a plump and pleasant woman who was remarkable for her ability to endure Campbell’s pe culiarities (much as Janet is able to endure mine), died on August 16, 1979.
Al Capp, who had nearly brought me into court over my letter to the Boston Globe, died on November 5, 1979, at the age of seventy. Sometime late in 1979, Robert Elderfield, who had made life hard for me in graduate school and who had then employed me for a year of postgraduate work, died at the age of seventy-five.
Burnham Walker, who had been head of the biochemistry department when I joined the faculty of Boston University School of Medicine and who had been a good boss to me (one of the few superiors I was always able to get along with—because he left me strictly alone), died on April 3, 1980, at the age of seventy-eight. I had last seen him a year earlier, on May 15, 1979, when I came to the medical school to give a talk and the old faculty of my active days there had assembled to greet me. Walker had difficulty walking and came with an aluminum aid. He had so changed that I did not recognize him at first.
Harold C. Urey, who had almost prevented me from entering graduate school, died on January 6, 1981, at the age of eighty-seven. Ralph Halford, who had asked me about thiotimoline at my doctor’s orals, died about that time too, at the age of sixty-four.
There were other markers of passing time. Charles Dawson, my beloved research professor, is still alive at this time of writing, at the age of seventy-nine. However, on February 27, 1978, he retired and I went to Columbia to eulogize him.
Such things can’t help but pound into one’s head the truth of passing time. The sense of mortality drew closer, and was personally marked by my own heart attack in 1977, and by less important but more immediately noticeable signs such as the graying of my hair, the whitening of my sideburns, and the fact that on March 29, 1978, I had to give in to old age an
d buy my first pair of bifocals.
An odd bit of the past that had nothing to do with death obtruded itself on my notice at about this time too.
When I was eight years old, I had a brief friendship with a boy my own age named Solomon Frisch. He would make up stories and tell them to me and I listened in fascination. His family moved away from the immediate neighborhood and I lost touch with him, but I never forgot him. It may well be that my experience of listening to him tell stories, and knowing that he made them up, was the first thing ever to put the germ of writing into my brain.
I mentioned him in the first volume of my autobiography, and my own fascination with writing was such that I felt certain that Solly, who so eagerly made up stories when he was just a little boy, must have grown up to be a writer, and surely a successful one. It seemed inevitable. And since I knew of no writer named Solomon Frisch, it seemed to me that either he wrote under a pseudonym or he was dead.
Actually, he was alive, and his son, noting the mention of his name in my autobiography, drew it to his attention. He promptly wrote to me and on February 7, 1981, Janet and I had lunch with Solly and his wife, Chicky, a reunion after fifty-three years.
Solly was obviously happily married and he was clearly enjoying life, but, to my astonishment and disappointment, he had never become a writer. He worked for the post office, and as he said to me cheerfully, “I guess I burned myself out at eight as far as literature was concerned.”
Word Processor
I’m very conservative in my private life. I tend to get into a rut and stay there because it is comfortable to do things as I’ve always done them. The world of technology advances and leapfrogs all about me and I ignore it until it forces itself on me.
I’m still using an old Selectric III IBM typewriter and dread the day when it breaks down to the point where I must buy a new one. I don’t particularly want the new electronic typewriters. They’re too fancy for my simple soul. I even use a fabric ribbon (increasingly difficult to get) because a film ribbon that you use only once is consumed too quicldy at the speed and constancy with which I work.