I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  In the case of both Ed Newman and Bill Moyers, by the way, I did not know beforehand what questions I was going to be asked. There was no rehearsal, no preparation. I simply sat down, was asked questions, and answered. I am too old a hand at public speaking and too clear in my opinions (which I have been working out in innumerable essays) to require preparation, and I speak most easily and eloquently when I haven’t been chewing the matter over in my mind until most of the taste has been lost.

  Then there are telephone interviews. After the advent of television, radio found that most of its entertainment staples had moved over to the new medium. What proliferated, then, was the radio talk show. The hosts of those shows must constantly be interviewing people, and since I won’t travel, I accept telephone interviews without objection. It’s the only way I’m ever going to be heard by people in Detroit, or Tampa, or San Antonio.

  Naturally, such requests for phone interviews come in clusters. Each time a novel of mine appears, or an important nonfiction book, I can count on numerous phone calls asking to set up a time for an interview.

  Sometimes, an interview is requested because something has happened that has a scientific or a science fictional angle. When the Viking probes landed on the Martian surface, I had a rash of interviews, the general tenor of which was that since no life was found on Mars, the whole thing was useless and a waste of money, wasn’t it, Dr. Asimov?

  · And each time I had to explain patiently the enormous value of scientific knowledge concerning Mars even if it did not contain life. This sort of thing reached its peak after January 28, 1986, when the Challenger shuttie blew up shortly after takeoff, killing seven astro nauts. The news reached me just as I was walking into the Union Club to preside over a Dutch Treat luncheon. Someone had brought a portable radio so we could all hear the latest bulletins and that was one sad meeting, let me tell you.

  But I knew what would come next. My telephone was ringing continually for several days as every radio talk show in the United States wanted my opinion on the matter. What opinion could I have but that it was a desperately deplorable tragedy. And what further opinion could I have but that every great and risk-laden project has its tragedies, yet the projects must continue anyway.

  Honors

  One can’t live a normal lifetime and accomplish anything at all above the level of being a drunken bum without getting awards for something. I have been at numerous conventions in the course of my oratorical adventures and there are few of them where awards aren’t handed out to various people—sometimes in gratitude (I think) for their consenting to retire.

  Even in science fiction, awards keep proliferating. There is the Hugo award (given in ever increasing categories) and the Nebula award. In addition, there are awards in the names of dead superstars of science fiction; awards named for John Campbell, Philip Dick, Ted Sturgeon, and so on. Perhaps in time to come there will be an Isaac Asimov award.

  Naturally, I have collected a number of awards (and would collect more if I were willing to travel more than I do). Some are quite trivial, and the most trivial of them, and one I rather like just the same, is a fancy plaque that says on it: “Isaac Asimov, Lovable Lecher.” That’s something to get an award for, isn’t it?

  I’ve also collected diplomas; not only my own legitimate Ph.D., which is framed and up on the wall, but fourteen honorary doctorates as well, stored in a trunk.

  I never had an academic robe of my own (I refused to attend my own graduations) and so each school for which I gave a commencement address had to supply me with one, and with a mortarboard and tassel. When I got my honorary doctorate from Columbia, however, they let me keep the academic robe instead of taking it back at the end of the proceedings. What a pleasure! Now I could wear my own.

  However, the very first time I wore it at another commencement, it started raining during the address, for the first time it ever had on such an occasion. I had to put up an umbrella while speaking so as to protect my precious robe.

  I have never worn it again, because I am getting too old to sit in the sun for two hours and watch hundreds of youngsters get diplomas, just so that I could make a twenty-minute speech.

  There were also honors I got for reasons that had nothing to do with my accomplishments, but simply came to me because of where I was born, or the circumstances of my childhood.

  Thus, when projects arose for renovating Ellis Island as a kind of museum to honor the achievements of immigrants who had come to the United States during the years when it was the Golden Door to die Promised Land, Life magazine decided to find some people who had actually come through Ellis Island. It meant finding old people, for Ellis Island had been shut down decades before.

  I was one of die old people they found. On July 28, 1982, I was taken down to the lower tip of Manhattan (in a driving rainstorm, as it happened) and was ferried over to Ellis Island. It was the first time I had set foot on it since that time in 1923 when I arrived and got the measles to celebrate the fact. The buildings were in a state of shabbiest decay and I was photographed sitting rather glumly in the middle of one of them.

  The photograph appeared in Life, and everyone who saw it asked, “Why are you wearing rubbers?”

  And I said, “Because it was raining heavily. Why else?”

  A couple of years later, I was awarded some sort of medal or other for having (a) been an immigrant and (b) done something to make the United States not too sorry that I had arrived. I was there in Battery Park with dozens of other well-known immigrants on a gloriously sunny day. Mayor Ed Koch (whom I had introduced on three different occasions as a speaker at Dutch Treat) made a speech, and someone sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and my name was called out in due course.

  Perhaps the most surprising honor I got was to have my name inscribed on a slab of rock on a pathway in the Brooldyn Botanic Gardens. I was not the only one, of course. As one went along that path, there was rock after rock with the names of Brooldyn-born people who had become famous. (Mae West’s name was there, for instance.)

  When I was told my name was being added, I said I hadn’t been born in Brooklyn. They told me that since I had been brought up in Brooklyn from the age of three and had been educated in Brooldyn public schools, that was enough. Janet and I therefore went to the Botanic Gardens on June 8, 1986. When the taxi got us to Grand Army Plaza, we found the whole area blocked off for the party (which was much huger than I had been led to expect) and the taxi would not have been allowed through if one of the policemen hadn’t recognized me.

  Janet and I followed up the path, read all the names, and met various celebrities who were also being honored. I was asked to say a few words, but the real star present was Danny Kaye, whom I had always admired, and whom I now met for the first and only time. He called me payess (Yiddish for “sideburns”) and then gave a charming talk.

  However, he looked ill and, as a matter of fact, he died on March 3, 1987, only nine months later, at the age of seventy-four.

  Russian Relatives

  I knew, of course, that I had Russian relatives. My father had three brothers and a couple of sisters, and my mother had siblings too. And presumably these had children, and so on. However, there was no contact with them as far as I was concerned, and never had been.

  In their early years in the United States, my parents occasionally got letters from Russia, but they did not read them to me or tell me anything about them. (And, to be honest, I wasn’t interested.) The result was that I grew up with only my own core family—father, mother, sister, and brother—and was quite contented with that situation. There was my mother’s half brother and his wife and son, but they impinged on us only slightly.

  After the war, I somehow took it for granted that it was not likely that any of my relatives had survived. Those that joined the army might well have been among the millions who were killed. Those that were trapped by the Nazi invaders might well have been among the millions who were killed by Nazi brutality.

  It was only after my
earlier autobiographic volumes reached the Soviet Union, however, that I became aware that there were relatives still surviving; or, rather, that they became aware of me.

  For years, to be sure, I had been a popular writer of science fiction in the Soviet Union (perhaps helped out by the “-ov” ending of my name), and it was possible that those who bore the same name, or were married to those who had, might have suspected that I was a relative.

  Asimov, however, is not an uncommon name in the Uzbek Republic in Central Asia, and it is there spelled (in Cyrillic characters) with an “s.” In Byelorussia, where I was born, it was spelled with a “z,” but my father had made a spelling mistake when he arrived in the United States. Judging by name only, it was hard for other Byelorussians to tell whether I was a relative or not. In fact, I got word once that there were Uzbekis who claimed relationship.

  Once my autobiography came out, however, my birthplace, Petrovichi, became known, as did my grandfather’s name, Aaron. That was enough. I began to receive letters, notably from my first cousin, Serafina, the daughter of my father’s younger brother, Samuel, who had been an officer in the Soviet army and who had survived the war, but was now dead. (Another younger brother, Ephraim, had died fighting in the Caucasus in 1942.)

  My father’s youngest brother, Boris, had survived the war and lived in Leningrad, but managed somehow to get out of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and migrated to Israel. My brother, Stan, with a greater sense of family than I had, tracked him down. We thereupon decided what to do (we had to do something, since he was undoubtedly penniless, and he was our father’s brother).

  I suggested that Marcia carry on a correspondence with Boris in which she would include checks. I would supply the money for those checks, and Stan was to be the decision maker. If Marcia had any questions involving our Uncle Boris, she was to consult Stan, who has the virtual monopoly on common sense in the family.

  It didn’t work out too well, for Marcia made very heavy weather out of the correspondence, but we managed somehow. Stan even got one of the people at Newsday, who happened to be planning a visit to Israel, to promise to look up Boris and see how he was. She did so. He was very old, very feeble, and apparently not quite in his right mind either. He died on August 30, 1986.

  This did not put an end to the matter of Russian relatives at all. I had first cousins, second cousins, and people who had married them and had children, and all wrote letters to their famous American relative. Once Mikhail Gorbachev eased conditions in the Soviet Union, a number of them came to the United States and then letters began to come from America.

  One letter expressed annoyance that I didn’t hasten down to Florida to see my long-lost stranger-relatives. I had to reply politely that I never traveled.

  Another group came to the apartment house without warning. When a suspicious concierge called to tell me there were strangers there who claimed they were my relations, I had to go down to see them. When I did, a middle-aged woman threw herself into my arms and wept all over my shoulder at the joy of seeing her beloved something-or-other. I didn’t quite find out just exactly how they were related to me, but what they really wanted was for me to find them a place to live. I said that there was a large colony of Russian Jews who had settled in Brighton Beach, but they said they knew that, and wanted a better neighborhood.

  Did they expect me to pull an apartment out of my pocket? They eventually left. Meanwhile, letters still come from various people in the Soviet Union. The family ramifications seem to be incredible.

  This is one of those matters that make me wretched. I can’t help but feel that most people have extended families, with enormous family feelings, and must live according to a family code whereby any member of the family can call upon any other member of the family for help and be sure of receiving it. I gather that Janet’s relatives were like that.

  But I have never had an extended family, and I don’t feel that sort of togetherness outside Janet, Robyn, and Stan. I don’t want to seem cruel and heartless and I’m willing to hand out money to any of them who are down and out, but I can’t go beyond that. I just haven’t got it in me to greet them with tears of joy and invite them in and make much of them just because they are distant relatives—or say they are.

  Grand Master

  By the time I was sixty-seven years old, it might have seemed I had everything I could possibly want as far as the science fiction world was concerned. I had Hugos, Nebulas, and best-sellers. I was one of the Big Three. I was treated as a monument at science fiction conventions, and young newcomers to the game of science fiction writing viewed me with awe. Thanks to my prominent white sideburns I was routinely recognized in the street and I was sure that, if I traveled, I would find myself recognized all over the world. I was as popular in places like Japan, Spain, and the Soviet Union as I was in the United States, and my books have been translated into over forty languages.

  What remained?

  One thing! In 1975, the Science Fiction Writers of America instituted a very special Nebula to be called the Grand Master award. This was to go to some science fiction superstar at a Nebula awards banquet for his life’s work, rather than for any single production.

  The first one went, inevitably, to Robert Heinlein. There was no argument about that. He was the general favorite among science fiction readers and he had pioneered the advance of our kind of science fiction into the slicks and the moving pictures. He was respected outside science fiction as well as inside. Sprague de Camp happened to be at a function along with Heinlein on October 23, 1984, and we took the opportunity to take a photograph in the same pose that had been taken of the three of us back at the NAES exactly thirty years before.

  Other Grand Master awards were handed out in later years. Jack Williamson received the second, and Clifford Simak the third. Others went to L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Arthur C. Clarke, and Andre Norton. All were well deserved. All, except Norton, were closely associated with John W. Campbell and the Golden Age.

  What’s more, all were well stricken in years but had fortunately survived to receive the honor. In fact, I can only think of two people in magazine science fiction who would surely have deserved the honor but who had died before 1975. They were E. E. Smith and John W. Campbell himself.

  Naturally, it seemed to me that I was an odds-on favorite to get a Grand Master award someday, but when?

  The awards were not given every year. In the eleven years from 1975 to 1986 inclusive, only seven awards had been handed out. All seven Grand Masters were older than I was, and all had begun publishing in the 1930s or 1940s, so I had no quarrel with their getting the awards. Of the writers that remained, two worthy candidates I could think of that were older than I were Lester del Rey and Frederik Pohl, and that might delay my turn anywhere from two to four years.

  I was nervous about that. I was having a rash of medical problems that did not fill me with much confidence as to my chance of surviving three or four years, and I certainly didn’t want people to go about saying, “We should have given him a Grand Master award before he died.” A fat lot of good that would have done me.

  It may sound rather greedy of me to hunger for the award, but I’m human too. I wanted it. Besides, I honestly thought I deserved it. However, I kept my hunger entirely within myself. In no way did I campaign for it, and by no word or deed did I ever indicate openly that I was interested.

  But the time came at last, and I was still alive. On May 2, 1987, at the Nebula awards banquet, I received my Grand Master award. I was the eighth Grand Master and all of us were still alive, a point I made gleefully in my acceptance speech.

  (It was the last opportunity to say that, alas, for in the next year two of the Grand Masters, Robert Heinlein and Clifford Simak, died. What’s more, in 1988, the ninth Grand Master was to be Alfred Bester, but he was dying and the award had to be made posthumously. Fortunately, he was told of the award before he died on September 20, 1987, at the age of seventy-four. The tenth award, and the last at thi
s time of writing, went to Ray Bradbury in 1989. I hope that Lester del Rey and Frederik Pohl get one soon. Lester is seventy-five and Fred is seventy, at this time, and they both deserve it in full measure.)

  In my acceptance speech, incidentally, I said we all looked for special distinction. Thus, though Bob Heinlein was the first Grand Master, Arthur Clarke was the first British Grand Master, and Andre Norton was the first woman Grand Master. I, although the eighth all told, was the first Jewish Grand Master.

  After the banquet, Robert Silverberg (who, next to me, is the most prominent Jewish science fiction writer) said, “Now that you’re the first Jewish Grand Master, where does that leave me?”

  Unless Bob dies prematurely, he is sure to be a Grand Master someday, and so I said to him, “Bob, you will be the first handsome Jewish Grand Master,” and he broke into a smile and was pleased.

  young children and, since Robyn was about to turn seven at the time, I read it to her and she seemed fascinated. The publisher for whom I wrote it, however, underwent an earthquake of changes and it was not

  Children’s Books

  I have written a considerable number of books intended for the teenage market. In fiction, there were, for instance, the Lucky Starr series, which I did as “Paul French,” and the Norby series, which I do with Janet (though she does most of the work by far). In the case of nonfiction, the series of science books I wrote for Abelard-Schuman were aimed at teenagers.

  It is not very difficult to write for teenagers if you avoid thinking of them as children. I do not simplify my vocabulary for them, though I often add the pronunciations of the technical terms, merely to reduce the terror they inspire visually. I do avoid sentences that are too long and complex and I do not indulge in obscure allusions. What is lacking in a teenager is not intelligence or reasoning ability, but merely experience.