In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954
Page 27
In between the postcard I received on the twelfth and the one I received on the fifteenth, the final split took place. The Sykora group renamed itself the Queens Science Fiction Club, while the activists called themselves the "Futurian Science Literary Society," a name that was quickly shortened to Futurians.
The Futurians were, perhaps, the most remarkable science-fiction club that ever existed. Among the group that formed it or later joined for longer or shorter periods after its formation were people who in later life were extremely important to science fiction as writers or editors or both. They included Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert W. Lowndes, Richard Wilson, Damon Knight, and James Blish, for instance.
It included me, too, for that matter, for the September 15 postcard was from Fred Pohl and I was invited to attend the first meeting of the new club at a place in Brooklyn on the following Sunday.
I was delighted. I knew nothing of the split-up, nothing of the existence of the two factions or of the nature of either. I naturally thought that I was being invited to the club that Rubinson had mentioned and that its meeting in Brooklyn, rather than Queens, was a lucky break that made it easier to reach.
Once I learned of the split, much later on, I did not, you understand, feel either cheated or hoodwinked. As a matter of fact, had I known of the issues involved, I would, of my own accord, have joined with the Futurian group, the members of which have been, by and large, among the most intelligent (if sometimes erratic) people I have ever known, and the surviving members of which are all still my friends.
Fortunately, the meeting was on a Sunday afternoon, the slowest time of the week (no afternoon papers), so I obtained my mother's permission to desert the store and sent off a postcard accepting the invitation. 1
On Sunday, September 18, 1938, I traveled to the meeting place
1 There was a great deal of postcard correspondence in those days since postcards cost only a penny.
and, for the first time, took part in any grouping of science-fiction fans. Here is what I had to say in my diary:
"I attended the first meeting of the Futurians and boy! did I have a good time. Attending likewise were such famous fans as Don A. Wollheim, John Michel, Frederik Pohl, 'Doc' Lowndes. . . . Dick Wilson was also there. . . . Jack Rubinson was also there. Altogether there were twelve.
"We enjoyed a three-hour session of strict parliamentary discipline. You know, motions, and amendments, and votes, and objections, and so on. 2 This was a meeting of organization in which we settled details, adopted a constitution, elected officers, and so on. Next time, we will proceed to the business of speeches, debates, and so on. Dues are ten cents a month with a twenty-five-cent initiation fee, which I paid. I also spent a nickel on a chance (they were raffling a book) but I lost.
". . . We have an organ called 'The Science Fiction Advance' which comes out once every two months. . . .
"After the meeting we all went down to an ice-cream parlor where they bought $1.90 worth of sodas and banana splits and sandwiches. I didn't get anything, though. There I had an uproarious time, especially with Wollheim who has taken a liking to me. They all know me from my letters to Astounding and Amazing and I got along famously."
I attended almost every meeting of the Futurians thereafter, for a year or so. On Sunday, October 2, I was there and "had more fun than last time." After the heavy work of parliamentary discussion, we relaxed by playing Ping-Pong.
The third meeting, on October 16, was a disappointment. It was in Manhattan's far north, at 190th Street. That was new territory to me and I managed to get lost. Some of the members were missing and contentiousness was setting in again, for Wollheim and Michel had already discovered after two meetings that the Futurians were not ideal and they wanted to reorganize. I myself had learned how to be contentious too, for, as I said in my diary, "I opposed it like hell."
The Futurians were the occasion for my first argument with Campbell. During my fourth visit to him, on September 28, I was, of course, filled to overflowing with the glories of that meeting and told him all about it and about the Futurian philosophy as expounded by Wollheim, the most articulate of the Futurians.
That was when I found out that Campbell was (my diary says) "a hidebound conservative." I argued with him but "was afraid to extend myself for fear of antagonizing him."
I went away distressed. The meeting had begun most promisingly,
2 I had never encountered this sort of thing before and I was fearfully impressed.
for he had said "Hello, Mr. Asimov," and had shaken my hand as though he were meeting me as an equal—and then I went and argued with him.
3
My letters in Astounding had not yet ended their usefulness. On September 1, 1938, I received a letter from Brainerd, Minnesota.
It was from Clifford D. Simak, who was at that time a minor science-fiction writer. Back in 1931 and 1932, he had published about five stories, one of which (though I only found this out much later) was "The World of the Red Sun," which I had so enjoyed in junior high school and which I had retold to the classmates gathered around me.
In 1938 he had returned to the field, and his first story after this return was "Rule 18," which had appeared in the July 1938 issue. I had "hated it," my diary says, and in my letter to Astounding I gave it a very low rating.
Now Simak was writing to me to ask details so that he might consider my criticisms and perhaps profit from them. (Would that I could react so gently and rationally to adverse criticism—but I grew to know Cliff well in later years, though we rarely met, and I learned that gentle rationality was the hallmark of his character.)
I reread the story in order to be able to answer properly and found, to my surprise, that there was nothing wrong with it at all. What he had done was to write the story in separate scenes with no explicit transition passages between. I wasn't used to that technique, so the story seemed choppy and incoherent. The second time around I saw what he was doing and realized that not only was the story not in the least incoherent, but also that it moved with a slick speed that would have been impossible if all the dull bread-and-butter transitions had been inserted.
I wrote Simak to explain and to apologize, and adopted the same device in my own stories. What's more, I attempted, as far as possible, to make use of something similar to Simak's cool and unadorned style.
I have sometimes heard science-fiction writers speak of the influence upon their style of such high-prestige literary figures as Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. This may well be so for them, but for myself, I make no such claim. I learned how to write science fiction by the attentive reading of science fiction, and among the major influences on my style was Cliff Simak.
My correspondence with Cliff continued over the years.
On September 27, 1938, I registered for my fourth year at Columbia. I was taking integral calculus now and Sidney was taking more sociology while I was doing that. After calculus, I would go around to the sociology class, where the professor held court after the lecture was over. When that was done, Sidney and I would have lunch.
It made for dull listening, generally, for I never have been impressed by the soft sciences. On October 10, I found the sociology professor (his name was Casey) had made a table on the board in the course of his lecture in which he divided people into rationalists and mystics. Under mystics he had listed mathematicians.
I studied that for a while and then, even though I was not a class member, I interrupted the postlecture session by saying, "Sir, why do you list mathematicians as mystics?"
He said, "Because they believe in the reality of the square root of minus one."
I said, "The square root of minus one is perfectly real."
He said, "Then hand me the square root of minus one piece of chalk."
I said, "The cardinal numbers are used for counting. The so-called imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one, have other functions. If you hand me a one-half piece of chalk, however, I'll hand you a square
root of minus one piece of chalk."
Whereupon Casey promptly broke a piece of chalk in half and handed it to me with a smile. "Now your turn," he said.
"Not yet," I said. "That is one piece of chalk you're handing me."
"It is half a regulation length of chalk."
"Are you sure?" I said. "Will you swear it is not 0.52 times a regulation length or 0.48 times that?"
By now Casey realized it was time for hard logic if he was to win the argument, so he decided that since I was not a member of the class, I would have to leave the room at once. I left, laughing rather derisively, and after that I waited for Sidney in the hall.
Not wanting to be separated from Sidney for more than one period, I agreed to take a course in the History of Philosophy with him. That was a terrible mistake. It began well, with several of Plato's Dialogues, but I understood neither the lecturer nor the later readings, and I have rarely been so inflicted by ennui in any course I ever took.
Things were much better in organic chemistry and in medieval history, of course.
I remember that in medieval history the professor once asked the class to volunteer arguments for and against the social value of monasti-cism. I eagerly offered one I didn't think the other students would think of.
"Against monasticism," I said, "is the fact that since the monks were celibate there was a tendency to remove from the gene pool those genes that were clearly adapted to determining a capacity for education and learning/'
The professor smiled slowly and said, "Don't overestimate the celibacy, Asimov. I think the genes managed to find their way into the general pool."
The class laughed and I'm afraid I was shocked. It was my first introduction to the thought that a vow of celibacy and celibacy itself might not necessarily go together.
My biggest disappointment, however, was integral calculus. Until now for thirteen years, all the way from arithmetic to differential calculus, I had understood math without any trouble—even if I weren't mathematician enough to join a math club. In integral calculus, I found suddenly that I had to sweat it out.
It was a horrible and embarrassing situation to get a B in a math course. I realized I had encountered my ceiling of comprehension in mathematics and I took no more courses in the subject.
5
In the fall of 1938, the political discussions between myself and my father reached their peak.
After all, my father had no one else to talk to. He and my mother rarely saw each other except in the context of the candy store, and usually when one was in the store, the other was in the house. Nor could my father talk to the customers. To a man, they seemed to be Republican or conservative Democrat, and he had a deadly fear of offending them with his own liberal views.
So he would talk to me.
Each day he and I would go over the news in those slow intervals when customers happened to be few and far between, my father analyzing past events and predicting future events with a doctrinaire certainty that was typical of him. I was a good deal more uncertain, but we ended in the same place—no faith at all, even before Munich, in the ability of Great Britain and France to face up to Hitler.
With respect to the United States, we disagreed. I took it for granted that if, somehow, President Roosevelt (whom we both re-
vered) could move the United States into active opposition to Hitler, that would be it. I was absolutely certain that the United States could quickly defeat any nation or combination of nations, and I was endlessly frustrated at the fact that our isolationists were allowing the danger to rise to the point where it would be many times more expensive to defeat the enemy than might otherwise have been true.
My father, on the other hand, seemed to be activated by a kind of atavistic Russian patriotism. This was made the stronger by the fact that when he had left the Soviet Union, its government had claimed to be building a classless society in which there would be no racism of any kind and therefore no anti-Semitism. My father desperately wanted to believe that was so.
And since, as he insisted on believing, there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, he felt he could rely on the Soviet Union to be the ultimate destroyer of Nazism. As for the United States, he decided that the detectable anti-Semitism in our neighborhood proved that the United States would move hesitantly, if at all, in the fight against Nazism.
There, then, was the crux of our arguments. He saw events leading up to an ultimate clash between Germany and the Soviet Union; and I to an ultimate clash between Germany and the United States. We both saw Germany as the loser (and, as it happened, we were, in the end, both right).
We shared the same reaction to the situation in the Far East—one of irritation with Japan. We saw Japan as a small nation that was achieving success only because the west was divided against itself, and we both feared that her aggressive actions in China, not dangerous to us in themselves, would make it more difficult to defeat Germany by distracting either the Soviet Union, the United States, or both.
PART III
Advanced Degrees and Elementary Love
My First Sales
As October wore on, I continued to hear nothing from Amazing Stories about "Marooned off Vesta." Since the editorial offices were in Chicago, I couldn't telephone. Since I didn't value the magazine highly and was concentrating entirely on Astounding, I didn't even bother to write them.
But then, on October 17, 1938, I received a form letter from Amazing informing me that a sister magazine, Fantastic Adventures, would soon be published. They were asking all their contributors for stories suitable for it and I was dreadfully flattered that they considered me a "contributor." I replied at once, promising stories, and inquiring, as diplomatically as I knew how, as to the fate of "Marooned off Vesta." 1
The news wasn't long in coming. On Friday, October 21, exactly four months to the day after my first visit to Campbell, I returned from school to find my mother beaming, and my sister (who, two days before, had finished business school) laughing. I was sent upstairs, where my father was just waking up from his nap. He had a letter to me from Amazing (which he had calmly opened), and it contained a letter of acceptance.
The letter was signed by Amazing's editor, Raymond A. Palmer, a small gnome of a man who became, in this way, the very first editor to buy one of my stories. In later years, he became very famous as one of the first flying-saucer enthusiasts, and for years afterward, he published a variety of mystical periodicals and books, none of which are of any value to anyone interested in the merely rational.
As it happens, I never met him in person.
For years, I kept that letter of acceptance framed on the wall. It had been written on gray paper with a thoroughly dead ribbon so that the words could barely be made out. This, too, had its uses.
After all, I didn't like to call attention to the letter. I was proud of it, delighted, overjoyed, but the good usages of society dictate a certain
1 Thrilling Wonder also had a new sister magazine, by the way, one called Startling Stories, the first issue of which reached me on October 18. This meant not only more reading, but also a greater need for stories by the publishers and, therefore, a greater chance at sales.
modesty. And yet since the words could scarcely be seen, everyone who visited me would look at the frame and say to me, "Why do you have an empty frame on the wall?"
I would mutter, "Oh it's just a letter," and then they would go up to it and read it.
In the vicissitudes of time, that letter and that frame have disappeared, and I'm dreadfully sorry.
On October 31, the check arrived. Payment was at the rate of $.01 a word, and since the story was 6,400 words long, the check I received was for $64. That was not much, perhaps, but it was the first money I ever earned as a professional writer, 2 and it wasn't so little, either. It was, after all, the equivalent of more than four months of my NYA earnings and would pay more than one month's tuition.
My parents took it big. That one sale had instantly made me a famous and
established literary figure as far as my father was concerned, and he sat down to write formal letters.
The first went to Uncle Joe, whom, as it happened, my mother, Stanley, and I had visited just a month earlier. I suspect my father wanted to rub it in a little bit, getting across the notion that we-might-be-despised-greenhorns-but-look-at-what-we-have-done. With the same thought in mind (undoubtedly) he also sent off letters to the people we had known in our previous neighborhoods—all of them written in Yiddish, in stiff, old-country style.
I found it embarrassing and told him so, but it didn't help. Thereafter, on similar occasions over the next year or so, he sent off his letters again. Each time my objections became louder and finally my father stopped.
Not everything was great, however, quite apart from the dreadful atmosphere of Western surrender hanging over the world that Munich autumn. There were medical problems.
In those days, we had never heard of regular medical checkups. The thought that we would have a doctor go over us and then pay him good money to tell us there was nothing wrong with us would have struck any one of us as insane. If something hurt, then you saw a doctor —and only if it hurt very badly or if it kept on hurting for a long time.
2 In this book, I am going to pay considerable attention to the details of the money I received for stories and other things. Perhaps I should be noble enough to rise above such sordid things as money, but the fact is I couldn't and didn't. The money I earned—or didn't earn—has influenced my pathway through life, and I must go into the financial details if the pathway is to make sense.
It was only if Nature the Great Healer (who didn't charge) wasn't on the job that you sought out some helper.
My father was particularly reluctant to see doctors,