To his memory, he added a good knowledge of where to find the information he needed, and he developed the ability to translate that information into narratives as readable and dramatic as fiction. He could make the difficult seem simple. In the book I wrote about him, I suggested that his fiction got its characteristic Asimovian flavor from the fact that it was written like science, and his non-fiction got its readability from the fact that it was written like fiction. His science fiction also was distinguished by its rationality. When I wrote about him in The Road to Science Fiction, I titled the section “The Cool, Clear Voice of Asimov.” His heroes were the most rational and had the longest view, like Hari Seldon, whose psychohistorical plans were intended to shorten twenty-five thousand years of barbarism to a thousand. His villains weren't villains but rational people whose vision was too limited. And emotional responses were frustrations of the need to behave rationally.
That is why two of his personal favorites are anomalies. His favorite story was “The Last Question,” which is cool and rational, but his second and third favorites were “The Bicentennial Man” and “The Ugly Little Boy,” which were emotional and irrational—what I have called “Un-Asimovian"—though, of course, so effective as fiction that one was made into a film and the other has been optioned. Isaac called their creation “writing over his head,” like the middle section of The Gods Themselves.
Another difference between Isaac's fiction and his non-fiction was that his fiction was always optimistic: solutions would be found, rationality would prevail. But Isaac's non-fiction, when it addressed the many problems that faced the world, like pollution or overpopulation or war, was pessimistic. It was a matter, he said, of dealing with the world as it is—"the world in which irrationality is predominant,” and he told me, “I am trying to live a life of reason in an emotional world."
In 1970 he wrote in a letter: “I wish I could say I was optimistic about the human race. I love us all, but we are so stupid and shortsighted that I wonder if we can lift our eyes to the world about us long enough not to commit suicide. I keep trying to make people do so."
But the year before he wrote: “In considering the future society, let us assume that (1) there will be no nuclear war; (2) the population will increase but not disastrously; and (3) the trend toward automation will continue.” He followed that by some predictions about work becoming more administrative and managerial, which would accelerate the trend toward sexual equality; and that the increased amount of leisure would provide a great emphasis on creativity and the purveying of amusement. “I suspect,” he concluded, “that in the twenty-first century, one third of the human race will be engaged . . . in supplying amusement for the other two-thirds."
Isaac's love for writing made him a difficult husband and, sometimes, a detached father. When he received copies of his forty-first book from Houghton Mifflin, he mentioned to his wife the possibility of reaching a hundred books before he died. She shook her head and said, “What good will it be if you then regret having spent your life writing books while all the essence of life passes you by?” And Isaac replied, “But for me the essence of life is writing. In fact, if I do manage to publish a hundred books, and if I then die, my last words are likely to be, ‘Only a hundred!’ “ On another occasion his beloved daughter Robyn asked him to suppose he had to choose between her and writing. Isaac recalled he said, “Why, I would choose you, dear.” And he added, “But I hesitated—and she noticed that, too."
Isaac did return to writing science fiction novels, with a novelization of Fantastic Voyage in 1966 and The Gods Themselves in 1972. He is ranked among hard science fiction writers, which means that the fiction is based on real science or on new developments in science, but he was not the hard science fiction writer that Hal Clement was, or Larry Niven; Isaac's fiction was more philosophical, based on concepts like psychohistory or robotics or the musings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He also was fond of history, and the Foundation stories are the fall of the Roman empire writ large. The Gods Themselves, however, showed that Isaac could do hard science fiction when he wished; it began with the challenge of writing a novella about the impossibility of plutonium-186.
In 1982, Isaac returned to his Foundation roots and wrote Foundation's Edge. His Doubleday editors insisted on it. Betty Prashker called him into her office and said, “Isaac, we want you to write a novel for us.” Isaac protested that he didn't write novels any more, but Prashker said they were going to send him a contract with a large advance; that frightened Isaac, who always signed for a small advance that allowed him the freedom to write what he wanted rather than what the publisher wanted. That evening Doubleday editor Pat LoBrutto called to say that when Betty said “a novel,” she meant” a science fiction novel,” and when Doubleday said “a science fiction novel” they meant “a Foundation novel."
I can't help mentioning that Foundation's Edge was not only Isaac's triumph—it was his first best-seller but not the last—it was mine as well. The greatest tribute a scholar can have is when his scholarship has a positive impact on his subject, and Isaac wrote that my book, Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction had made Foundation's Edge possible.
He wrote:
I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting on giving back the money when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some sentences by science fiction writer and critic James Gunn, who in connection with the Foundation series said, “Action and romance have little to do with the success of the Trilogy—virtually all the action takes place offstage, and the romance is invisible—but the stories provide a detective-story fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas."
Oh well, if what was needed were “permutations and reversals of ideas,” then that I could supply. Panic receded, and on June 10, 1981, I dug out the fourteen pages I had written more than eight years before. . . .
Let me conclude with my two favorite anecdotes about Isaac. Early in 1956, Isaac wrote me that he had just written a pornographic scene that the postmaster couldn't touch. (This, of course, was more than fifty years ago when the postmaster general was still declaring books obscene and refusing to allow them to be mailed.) It wasn't until I read The Naked Sun the following year that I knew what he meant. In that novel, Lije Baley, his agoraphobic detective of The Caves of Steel, is called to Solaria to solve an important murder case. Solaria has been settled by Spacers, who restrict their numbers to twenty thousand while the robot population has increased to twenty-five million. Solarians have become claustrophobic and neurotically afraid of personal contact, but as Lije is completing his mission and saying goodbye to Gladia, the victim's widow, she strips off her glove and touches his cheek. It is, in the circumstances, truly pornographic.
Finally, Isaac was stubbornly attached to his name, even though he was warned that it might cause him to suffer from prejudice and his stories to be rejected. When he was five, he remembered, his mother considered changing his first name to Irving, but he wailed in protest that he would never answer to any name but Isaac. Later, because his name had already appeared in print, John Campbell never asked him to use a pseudonym, as Campbell had sometimes done with other writers. His last name was not always easy for readers to spell or remember, and when it appeared in the letter columns as Azimov (with a “z” instead of an “s") he was quick with a correction. So it happened that when he received his much coveted Grand Master Award in 1987, I approached to inspect the award and congratulate him. His name had been misspelled “Issac Asmimov.” “Isaac,” I said, “are you going to give it back?” “Not on your life,” he replied.
Isaac had triple bypass surgery in 1983 and was hospitalized in 1990 for a kidney infection and in 1991 for heart and kidney failure. He died April 6, 1992. He had often expressed the hope of dying with his nose caught between two typewriter keys, but at the end he had lost the strength to write and that, for him, may have been almost worse. He had already written a couple of inscriptions for his epitaph. One of the
m said, “It's not dying I mind. It's having to stop writing,” and the other, “Wait, I'm not finished!"
In the epilogue to Forward the Foundation, his widow Janet noted that writing his last Foundation novel was hard on Isaac, “because in killing Hari Seldon he was also killing himself. . . .” The first paragraph of that novel ends “It has been said that Hari Seldon left this life as he lived it, for he died with the future he created unfolding all around him. . . ."
That could have been written about Isaac himself.
* * * *
Afterword: Janet Asimov revealed in an epilogue to Isaac's posthumous autobiographical It's Been a Good Life that Isaac had died of AIDS contracted from blood transfusions during open-heart surgery a decade earlier, a fact that she had been persuaded to conceal at the time of Isaac's death.
James Gunn, emeritus professor of English at the University of Kansas, wrote Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (which won a Hugo Award) and is the author or editor of forty other books, including The Immortals, The Listeners, Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, and the six-volume Road to Science Fiction anthology. He has served as president of both the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Science Fiction Research Associa-tion and he received a Damon Knight Grand Master award in 2007.
Copyright © 2011 James Gunn
[Back to Table of Contents]
Poetry: RELIGION IS CANCELED by Danny Adams
* * * *
* * * *
Roll up the altars, the vacuum of divinity
is announced: an emptiness of Heavens,
whether by design or abandonment the only
uncertainty. The stars are unfolding
lacking compassion in all spectra
while the universe's own creations are left
to perish without remembrance
except as elemental seeds.
—
The mightiest supernova no longer
carries judgment, scales balance to entropy.
A singularity is not watchful,
superstrings shall never intervene.
Those sending prayers upward must know
their words will now travel through no metaphysical means,
delivered without breaking the sound barrier.
—
Start the atomic time clock—the unwinding
of all things shall ultimately commence
as previously scheduled. This experiment
will be ongoing until then.
Brace for arguments from the multibillion souls
decrying the belief that our universe
is not mostly empty.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Novelette: THE DAY THE WIRES CAME DOWN by Alexander Jablokov
Alexander Jablokov's latest novel, Brain Thief, has just been released in paperback by Tor Books. He tells us that his evocative new cover story owes its long gestation to the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, the Rio Hondo writer's workshop, and Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, among others. The story is part of a possible set, involving various odd forms of transportation. If there is interest, he may write more of them. He tells us, “the original inspiration for the story was, a dream I had in my teens, which has stuck with me, of transport cables running through the upper levels of an ancient city."
Mother had gone home with a mechanical device for chopping tree roots out of drainage pipes and left her offspring to their mission. Arabella should have been getting home herself, to prepare for her going-away party, but instead she persuaded her mother that Andrew couldn't handle finding Father an appropriate birthday present on his own. Mother had agreed, though reluctantly. As her children had reached their mid-teens, she had begun to feel that each was safer out alone than when they were together.
"I think the lighting section is up here,” Arabella said.
"Will they have something appropriate?” Andrew dragged behind as they climbed the stairs to the store's upper departments. “They're kind of staid here, you know. Father never shops here when it's his choice."
"We should at least look,” Arabella said.
"I was thinking something kind of technical.” Andrew, annoyed at not coming up with the idea, tried to make up for it by over-specifying the gift itself. “Brass, gimbaled, and with a Fresnel lens. I mean, it should look good even when it's not on, right? It should look serious."
She let him prattle. Despite the skylight, Father's study had a lot of oddly dark corners. He sometimes complained when some old map or fossil was too hard to examine where it was, and had to be hauled over to the big display desk. A well-made task lamp was just the thing.
She could think of him using it while she was away.
But when they got up there, they found the lighting section in darkness, its shelves empty and cordoned off. Arabella stumbled over a length of dropped conduit, and Andrew steadied her by the elbow. She shook his hand off.
"Did you know it was closed before we came up here?” she said.
"No! Really, Arabella. The light is a great idea. But if we can't do it here . . .” He looked further up the stairs. “There's something else we can do."
He'd known the lighting section was closed, but had wanted her to get so interested in buying Father a light that she would go along with whatever ridiculous plan he'd come up with. It was a constant battle, what came from being born within fifteen minutes of someone else but still being completely different from him.
"What else?” she said.
"You'll see. Up, up."
She would have liked to refuse, just to bug him. But she didn't want to think about Father squinting to get his work done, maybe resenting her for having left him in the dark, after she was gone.
So she followed Andrew up the stairs. They grew narrower, the displays less elaborate. She caught glimpses of wire bailers and displays of burlap swatches. The windows that lit the stairs were thick with dust, with dead flies on their sills. The light that made it through was a heavy yellow, as if she was nostalgically remembering this climb even as they were making it.
She felt the rumble of heavy wheels above. Their constant vibration had cracked the plaster walls.
"Is that still running?” Pretending ignorance was a cheap way to annoy Andrew, but it was all she could come up with quickly.
"This is the last day for the lines! You mean you didn't—"
"Then we better hurry.” Arabella was running up the stairs on “hurry,” and it took him a second to catch on. Then he was pounding after her. Andrew was big, and kind of clumsy, thickly blond to Arabella's whiplike darkness. But he was surprisingly fast. She needed every second of her head start. They hit the last door together and, each claiming victory, tumbled into the telpher station on the department store's roof.
The tongue-and-groove walls had been painted over many times, by ever cheaper and thicker paints. Arabella could see traces of pink, blue, and chartreuse peeking through the gun-metal gray. Most of the decorative tiles had fallen off the double barrel vault overhead, leaving white dots of cement.
The ticket kiosk still had its brass cage and its fancy cupola, and the safety barrier still looked like an altar rail, though most of the wooden icicles between the balusters had been kicked out. A notice of the telpher station's closing had fallen from the kiosk and lay on the floor, marked with dark footprints.
Overhead, a horizontal metal wheel rotated slowly. It pulled a cable in, and then fed it back out, like a pulley. These moving telpher cables crisscrossed the city, pulling light wooden cars filled with passengers from rooftop to rooftop. The car they were waiting for would be coming from the office building there, where there was another telpher station. The moving transport cables dipped down, then rose back up toward it, each matched with a heavy static cable to support the weight of the car, making four in all.
And there was the incoming car as it swung out from the office building station and dropped down on its pair of cables. The overhead wheel that pulled its
cable gave an occasional low groan from its poorly lubricated bearings. The car dropped to its lowest point, then started climbing back up to them, like a spider making its way across its web. The arm it hung from curved up and over the cables and rested on them like curled fingers, its support wheels running on the static cable while its grip held the transport cable and pulled it along.
Then it was suddenly there. The cable grip squealed as the telpherman released the inbound moving cable. The car bumped past the wheel into the station. Its support wheels rolled off the static support cable onto the thicker rail in the station. It hung there while its doors flipped open and passengers got on and off, Arabella and Andrew among them.
The telpherman, a young man with dark hair, sat behind and above his passengers. It was his last day on the job, but he showed no signs of sadness, peering down at the passengers as he always did, to make sure no one would get trapped by a door and yanked into the sky on the outside of the car. For a moment, he looked familiar to Arabella, though a further glance at him didn't bring the memory into focus. She followed Andrew onto the wooden slats of the passenger bench.
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 3