by Isaac Asimov
It was an ideal arrangement. Bob Mills was the first to call me "The Good Doctor" in blurbing my articles ... it was in these articles, in fact, that I first developed my leisurely and personal style of talking to the readers directly.
[1958] The death of Cyril Kornbluth ... had a peculiar effect on me ... I remember his death having made the first page of the New York Times in a box in the lower left-hand corner-though perhaps it was only on the obituary page.
A queer kind of envy overcame me, a feeling that I might not get equal billing when it came my time to die, and a frustration at never knowing whether I had or not.
I recognized the feeling to be a silly one and I decided to exorcise it by writing a story about it.... I called the story "Obituary," and actually it was more a thriller than a science-fiction story, but it was a thriller in which the villain used time travel to see his own obituary.
One of the few depressing lunches I have had with Austin Olney [Houghton Mifflin editor] came on July 7, 1959. I incautiously told him of the various books I had in progress, and he advised me strongly not to write so busily. He said my books would compete with each other, interfere with each other's sales, and do less well per book if there were many.
The one thing I had learned in my ill-fated class in economics in high school was "the law of diminishing returns," whereby working ten times as hard or investing ten times as much or producing ten times the quantity does not yield ten times the return.
I was rather glum that meal and gave the matter much thought afterward.
What I decided was that I wasn't writing ten times as many books in order to get ten times the monetary returns, but in order to have ten times the pleasure .. .
I found a letter waiting for me at school that asked me to come to Cornell University on November 10 to give a talk ... [for] five hundred dollars. I had never heard or conceived of anyone being paid that much to talk, and I was convinced it was a misprint for fifty dollars ... to write and say, "Surely you meant fifty dollars" was somehow unthinkable. It would expose my low opinion of myself ... after considerable hesitation ... I wrote an answer that said, very formally, "In return for your offered fee of Five Hundred Dollars ($500), I will gladly agree to . . ." If they answered me with happy outcries, I was all set. If they came back with pained explanations, it was all off.
They answered me with happy outcries.
[At a dinner with fellow science-fiction writer Poul Anderson and his wife, Karen, he said] I tried to keep my library small ... there were times when an empty space was the most valuable item in the bookshelves.
Poul turned to Karen and said, "Listen to this man. He speaks pearls."
I wish it were easy to stick to this view, however. No matter how I try, books keep adding themselves to my library-and throwing away a book, or just giving it away, is so hard. After all, when I think of the long years in which I never so much as had a book ...
[At the 1959 World Science-Fiction Convention in Detroit] I met Avram Davidson for the first time ... he had a full beard, a keen intelligence, and was a practicing Orthodox Jew. I didn't meet many ... during a discussion in which he had stressed his orthodoxy just a little too hard for my comfort, I said, when asked my stand on the matter, "I'm an atheist."
"Yes," said Avram, without batting an eye, "but what kind of atheist? A Baptist atheist? A Hindu atheist? A Seventh-day Adventist atheist?"
I got the idea. "A Jewish atheist," I said, "which means I have to fight the irrational elements in Judaism particularly."
[By the way] Science-fiction conventions have a serious purpose, one that is primarily aimed at the science-fiction reader who is given his chance to participate in a subculture that is important to him. That is why the conventions shift their site from year to year. This gives the average fan of a particular region, one who has perhaps little in the way of pocket money, a chance to attend, now and then, without having to travel far.
Most of the fans attending are young people, many of them in their teens. It is a great opportunity for them to meet those writers who are, in their eyes, legendary heroes. There are celebrity introductions for the readers, and autographing sessions ...
In one way, autographing became an increasing problem for me, since it supplied me with more and more work; partly because the number of my books was increasing steadily, and partly because those books were individually popular. In another sense, they were not a problem, because I loved autographing.... (There is the occasional joker who hands me a blank check. I just sign it along with everything else, but when the joker gets it back he finds I have signed it "Harlan Ellison.") ...
When I am feeling particularly suave during the autographing sessions, which is almost all the time, I kiss each young woman who wants an autograph and have found, to my delight, that they tend to cooperate enthusiastically in that particular activity.
The conventions include talks and panel discussions on every aspect of the writer's/artist's/editor's/agent's life; on the problems of writing and publishing; and on all the fringe areas, too, from Hollywood to comic books. Readers are fascinated by this, since so many of them are aspiring writers.
[His Houghton Mifflin book, Realm of Numbers, had his name misspelled on the cover-it was corrected.] The other thing I remember about that book was that my father read it (he read a number of my books). When he was partway through, he said to me, during one of our phone conversations, that he was enjoying the suspense.
"Suspense?" I said, astonished. "What suspense?"
He said, "Well, I'm just beginning about the square root of two. Tell me, do they ever find an exact solution for it?"
[At a party] ... someone asked the company generally if they knew what troilism was.
I said, "Sure-sex with three people participating."
The questioner looked disappointed and said, "Ah, but do you know the derivation of the word?"
I thought I might as well be polite and let him have a turn, so I said, "What?"
"Well," he said, "in Troilus and Cressida, Troilus watched Cressida making out with Diomed."
"In the first place," I said, "he didn't watch with any pleasure; he was brokenhearted, and he certainly didn't participate. In the second place, Ulysses was also there watching, which would make if a foursome. And in the third place, it is much simpler to suppose that `troilism' is derived from the French word trois, meaning `three.' "
This was an example of reversion to type. When I was young, I used to show off in that snotty fashion all the time. Since the war I had stopped doing it, which I think was the chief reason I changed from a disliked youngster to a well-regarded fellow of mature years. But even now, sometimes-I forget.
Nineteen.
MAJOR NONFICTION
The 1950s [were] the decade of my greatest science-fictional triumphs, [but as] the 1950s ended, I [ended] most of my involvement with the field.
Even as I was writing "The Ugly Little Boy," the Soviet Union sent up the first artificial satellite and the United States went into a panic, feeling it would be left behind in the technology race. It seemed to me that it was necessary for me to write science books for the general public and help educate Americans.
[Letter] You have no idea how responsible I feel as a science writer. Every one of my library copies of my science books is margined with notes, bringing it up to date, correcting or extending it. Even if no additional edition is ever called for, I still must do this for myself.
[Isaac and I had met in 1959 at a Mystery Writers of America dinner, hearing Eleanor Roosevelt speak, and had exchanged a few letters. Then he was asked by an editor at Basic Books to write a summary of twentieth-century science, for adults.]
I did have some fears that my career as a science writer might be aborted by publishers who would dismiss me as "just a science-fiction writer." This was unnecessary because the problem never arose. My reputation as both kept rising and never interfered with each other. My Ph.D. and my professorial position may have helped and I have al
ways been glad I fought to keep the latter title.
The result is that I have never found it necessary to hide my science fiction. When asked by people who don't know me just exactly what it is that I write, I answer, "All sorts of things, but I am best known for my science fiction."
[He was, nevertheless, nervous about signing the contract for this particular book. Since I knew both science and science-fiction writing, he wrote to me about the book's possibility.] I did not actually ask for advice since I have always had a reluctance to load anyone else with responsibility for my decisions, but in this case I did not have to ask. She replied that of course I could do it, and I must do it. I could not turn down a challenge like that and expect to rise in my profession.
She was perfectly right, so I signed ... I tore into the book with a fury and in a period of eight months had written and put into final form half a million words-remarkable even for me.
[The hook] gave me a chance to present a logical unfolding of a field of knowledge, to make an exciting story out of it, with the scientist as hero and with ignorance as the villain.
[The editor, without consulting Isaac, sent chapters of the book to different experts.] In one chapter I discussed the matter of overpopulation and hoisted my usual warning signals of alarm. The "expert" who read that particular chapter actually had the incredible audacitycum-ignorance to write in the margin, "I'd say this was God's problem, wouldn't you?"
It was the work of a moment to write underneath, "God helps those who help themselves" and to place an enormous STET over the entire passage. I was particularly watchful, come galleys time, to make sure the passage remained, too.
[It] was published in 1960 under the title of The Intelligent Man Guide to Science.
I objected to the title on the ground that "man" seemed unduly restrictive ... [the editor] would have none of it. He was intent on imitating the title of George Bernard Shaw's book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Naturally, there were protests from woman and all I could do was smile wryly and say, "by `intelligent man' I am referring to the writer, not the reader."
George Gaylord Simpson gave it the best review of any I have ever received. He called me a "natural wonder and a national resource"-a phrase you won't blame me for remembering.
[Letter] Someone pointed out a horrible geographic error ... I placed Lake Michigan between Lake Huron and Lake Erie instead of between Lake Huron and Lake Superior.
It is so embarrassing to pull a bad blooper in public. I risk it constantly ... and considering the volume I turn out, the number of subjects I cover and the speed with which I do it, I make amazingly few bloopers (if I do say so myself) but that does not in the least diminish my embarrassment and horror when a blooper is discovered.
[The editor] writes to me to say that just because I am a natural resource doesn't give me the right to switch geography.
[Letter] I am working away at my articles for The Book of Knowledge. When I was a little boy I knew some people who had The Book of Knowledge but my family, of course, was far too poor ever to buy me one. Occasionally I would be in the house of the lucky people who had it and invariably I would sneak over to the bookcase and-if no one were looking-I would take out one of the volumes and leaf through it. As I think back on it, now, I realize that nobody would possibly have minded and that I could probably have received permission to come there and read through it at leisure if I had only asked. Unfortunately, it never occurred to me to ask, because it seemed patent on the face of it that these wonderful books were not meant to be touched by little children.
Anyway, when I was asked to do a couple of article for The Book ot'Knowledge, my first impulse was to refuse because they gave me a very short deadline and God knows I have enough work as is. However, the thought of myself at the age of ten came sharply back to me as though the little boy were someone else with whom I could maintain contact. I was overwhelmed with the thought that somewhere the little boy existed and somehow he would know that the man he grew into was going to write articles for The Book of Knowledge and that he would be very pleased and excited by it. So I agreed to do it.
[Letter] I'm doing a section on Einstein's Relativity and my system for writing about something I have only the vaguest notion of is to close my eyes and type VERY VERY FAST.
Twenty.
WRITING AND THINKING
ABOUT WRITING
On January 2, 1960, I was forty years old, and middle-aged. There is no possibility of pretending to youth at forty. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with middle age, but it comes hard to a person who is a child prodigy by profession.
I was finally finishing up the definition cards for Stedman's Medical Dictionary, on which I had been working, on and off, for two years. It was just one of a number of little miscellaneous jobs that constantly plagued me. I would write entries for various encyclopedias ... there was also the ongoing bimonthly column of reviews for Hornbook.
These little jobs were never as pleasurable as books or stories, since they were so restrictive. They were invariably closely bounded as to subject matter and length and, for that matter, deadline.
I might have routinely refused all such tasks, but they had their usefulness, too. They managed to force me into what might otherwise have been neglected byways of knowledge, which I could then incorporate into my various books.
Nothing goes really to waste, if you're determined to learn.
I had already learned, for instance, that although I was one of the most overeducated people I knew, I couldn't possibly write the variety of books I manage to do out of the knowledge I had gained in school alone. I had to keep a program of self-education in process.
My library of reference books grew and I found I had to sweat over them in my constant fear that I might misunderstand a point that to someone knowledgeable in the subject would be a ludicrously simple one.
Sometimes I really do make an egregious error, and I can always count on letters from my readers to correct me.
[In 196411 received a letter from Linus Pauling with reference to [a science article by Isaac]. He himself, said Pauling, had frequently been caught in one mistake or another, but never in his entire career had he made a mistake of twenty-three orders of magnitude, as I had in this article. That's all he said; he didn't say where the mistake was.
I started rereading the article in a fever of panic. If I couldn't find the error, not only would I be humiliated, but also I would not be able to reprint the article in the collection Of Time and Space and Other Things.
I found it. I had made use of Avogadro's constant (the number of protons making up a gram ...) and had multiplied by it once instead of twice (or possibly twice instead of once-I forget). I corrected the error for the collection, and didn't know whether to be proud of Pauling's confidence that I could find the error without help, or annoyed with him for not having helped anyway.
[While working on putting the illustrations to the text of The Human Body, with a middle-aged female editor at Houghton Mifflin] We were working in a room that was not truly closed off but had walls that did not reach to the ceiling and that had a gap where the door should be. That meant that the full office noise of the rest of the floor reached us, but it didn't bother me. I'm a strainer; I strain out what I don't want to pay attention to. Apparently Helen could, too, so we worked on, oblivious to the noise.
Finally, when we hit the cross section of the male genitalia, I thought about it and said, "I tell you what, Helen, let's tackle this little by little starting with the easy parts. For instance, let's place the penis right here. (I was referring to the label.)
I spoke, as I always do, in my ordinary speaking voice, which does tend to rattle distant windows, and I had no sooner delivered that line when every bit of noise on the floor stopped. It was as though it were all some giant television set that had been turned off with a snap. In that sudden enormous silence, I sat, puzzled and waiting.
Finally, very slowly, as though dreading what the
re might be to see, a head began to appear at one side of the door, more and more and more, until an eye could be seen-and it was Austin [Olney-head of the Juvenile Division at Houghton Mifflin].
"Wouldn't you know? It's Isaac," he shouted, and everyone rushed in.
"It was business," I yelled. "It was strictly business. We were labeling diagrams. I tell you it was perfectly innocent."
But everyone pretended that they had interrupted an act of fornication and I grew scarlet with frustration. Helen, I noticed, wasn't in the least put out. She smiled demurely and was completely in control.
As the number of books increased, I had to make a numbered list of dedications, which I had to study more and more closely to see if some deserving person had been omitted, or whether enough time had elapsed for a repeat.
It is questionable, of course, as to whether a dedication is necessarily to be considered an honor. Consider the case of nineteenth-century English wit Douglas W. Jerrold. He was told that a friend of his, a prolific but third-rate writer, was dedicating the next of his numerous books to him. Jerrold sighed, shook his head, and said, "Ali, that's a fearful weapon that man has."
[In 1960 Playboy poked fun at science fiction, using material from Marvel, a 1938-1941 magazine which] had tried (and failed) ... to make a go by introducing the sex motif. The stories dealt very heavily with the hot passion of alien monsters for Earthwomen. Clothes were always getting ripped off and breasts were described in a variety of elliptical phrases-and these were the events and phrases quoted in the Playboy article.
Cele Goldsmith, then editor of Amazing, read the article and called me at once. She suggested I write a story entitled "Playboy and the Slime God" satirizing the satire. I was strongly tempted to do so for several reasons:
1. Cele was a beautiful woman and I happen to be aesthetically affected by beautiful women.