It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  I had to take it and hold it as briefly as possible-but I did shake hands. Ever since then, I have had the queasy feeling that I have shaken a hand that shook the hand of Adolf Hitler.

  The panel itself went by without incident. I spoke last and perforce went beyond the speculations of the others by speaking of the possibilities of interstellar travel.

  Afterward several people, including some panelists, met with the press. I was among them. In the fifteen minutes that followed, however, no reporter bothered to address a single question to me, since I was only a science-fiction writer.

  Then they took our names to make sure they were all spelled right. Finally, one reporter, addressing us en masse, asked, "Should any of you be referred to as `Doctor'?"

  I waited for someone else to speak, and when no one did, I said, dryly, "I have a Ph.D. so you can call me `Doctor.' I'm the sciencefiction writer."

  IHe'd been persuaded to join Mensa, but was getting disenchanted] In a way, I was a marked man at the meetings. A certain percentage of the members, especially the younger and newer ones, seemed to feel that the way to establish their credentials was to take me on in a battle of wits and shoot me down.

  I didn't feel the same endless necessity to take on new competitors, and I was in no mood to be an old gunfighter forever compelled to shoot it out with any challenger who could say, "All right, Ringo. Reach!" .. .

  It struck me that I did not particularly want to associate with people on the sole ground that they were like me in whatever quality it is that makes one do well on an intelligence test. I wanted people who more or less shared my common assumptions and universe outlook so that there could be a reasonable dialog.

  I met astronomer Carl Sagan, then of Harvard, and had lunch with him. We had already corresponded and I had received some of his papers. He was an ardent science-fiction reader.

  I visualized him as an elderly person (the stereotype of the astronomer at his telescope), but what I found him to be was a twentyseven-year-old, handsome young man; tall, dark, articulate, and absolutely incredibly intelligent.

  I had to add him to Marvin Minsky [of MIT] and thereafter I would say that there were two people I would readily admit were more intelligent than I was. We have been very good friends ever since.

  [About a talk to a pharmaceutical company, which videotaped it] The young man in charge of the TV cameras told me he would signal me when the time came to bring the talk to a halt because the film was running out. There would be signal cards telling me how much time remained.

  When I was done, he told me ebulliently, "I don't know how you did it, Dr. Asimov. You never seemed the least bit concerned as the signal cards went up. You didn't hurry, you weren't rattled, and you finished in the most natural way with just twenty-two seconds to spare."

  Once again, as on so many previous occasions in my life, I missed my chance to be suavely sophisticated. I should merely have smiled and murmured, "We old-timers have no trouble with this sort of thing."

  Instead, I goggled at the young man and said, "What signal cards?"

  "Didn't you see them?" he said, disbelievingly.

  I shook my head. "I forgot all about them."

  He staggered away. People never realize how nonvisual I am.

  [Letter] I'm pretty temperamental about sounding untemperamental. I've thrown many a fit at any editorial suggestion that I'm the kind of author who throws fits. [Isaac, you are a very stubborn man. Are you sure you're not part Swede?] Well, I'm Russian, and you know about Rurik ...

  [Letter] There is no orgastic pleasure whatever in reading galley proof on a bus ... the galleys kept slipping this way and that and the motion of the bus kept lulling me to sleep. The worst moment I had was when I went to the rear to visit the rest room ... I took my galleys with me being too paranoid to leave it on my seat. There is a handhold on the side of the rest room so that you don't get killed while the bus careens. I grabbed hold of it with the same hand that held the galleys. Then I waited for something to happen (the mad swaying of the bus back and forth and the certainty of imminent death inhibited the natural urinary process.) As I waited I noticed that my galleys were swinging back and forth with the bus's motion as I held them with two fingers and that if they shook loose they would go RIGHT INTO THE HOPPER. It took me a tenth of a second to put the galleys down in a safe place, but during that tenth of a second, the vision of those galleys in the hopper seared my soul. I still haven't quite recovered.

  When I hear music that makes me feel happy, I know it's Tschaikovsky. When I hear music that makes me feel awed, I know it's Beethoven.... Odd, isn't it, how Sousa and Strauss had the trick of writing original compositions that you already know?

  [Letter] History is the best thing to reread-and to write. I know history so well that Earth's past is like a rich tapestry to me.... In history, everything's one piece. You pick up history by any strand and the whole thing comes up ...

  I suppose history books are mainly written by liberals because most conservatives can't write.

  [Letter about a review of King Lear] The reviewer complained about the play itself and I was most indignant. He thought that King Lear was a miserable human being. OF COURSE he was ... all through the first half of the play, Lear was unreasonable, autocratic ... so rotten that one actually ought to sympathize with Goneril and Regan, if one didn't know the end of the play to begin with. The point is not where the people started, but where they ended. Goneril and Regan grow more frozen in villainy steadily to the very end. Lear, however, CHANGES. That is the heartbreak and the glory of the play; that at the age of eighty, he is still capable of redemption through suffering. It is the only play I have ever read that makes it clear and understandable that suffering can be a good thing if through it you attain a new view of the universe and of yourself, EVEN IF ONLY FOR A FEW HOURS.

  [Letter] To learn is to broaden, to experience more, to snatch new aspects of life for yourself. To refuse to learn or to be relieved at not having to learn is to commit a form of suicide; in the long run, a more meaningful type of suicide than the mere ending of physical life.

  Knowledge is not only power; it is happiness, and being taught is the intellectual analog of being loved.

  Twenty-Four.

  SEXISM AND LOVE

  [At a New York University session on creativity] Someone read a paper which listed the criteria of creativity in scientists. Criterion after criterion began "The scientist expects his wife to be . . ." or "The scientist chooses a wife who ..."

  Finally I could stand it no more and broke in and said, "The scientist might choose a husband, you know."

  There was a sharp intake of breath all around the table, and as I stared in surprise from one to another, I realized that they thought I was implying homosexuality.

  Well, even if I were, so what! But I wasn't! I said, irritably, "For God's sake, the scientist could be a woman, couldn't she?"

  And everyone exhaled in relief. What amused and irritated me was that two of the scientists sitting around the table were women, and they had been just as shocked at the thought of scientists choosing a husband as the men were. It was 1963, and I was still alone in my feminism. Women's Liberation had not yet arisen to join me.

  [Letter] Bright women learn to measure their responses to avoid seeming brighter than their male companions. Some learn to do it so automatically they forget how not to do it. Those women who resent the necessity feel such relief at meeting a man so secure as to not require the measuring of response that they are apt to fall in love on the spot. What such women sometimes fail to realize is that to the man the relief is equal. To any decently intelligent man, it is ruinous to sexual attraction to have to talk down always and forever.

  All my life I have been a great believer in equality of the sexes (arguing with Campbell bitterly on this point) and I think a woman should NOT submerge herself in a man (biologically, the reverse seems appropriate, but let me eschew ribaldry). However, this feminist viewpoint breaks down in the case of
true love. TRUE love can't be very common, it suddenly seems to me; particularly when combined with sensitivity, articulateness, and philosophic seeking after truth. Submergence of the woman is all right then, for the man submerges too and a greater unit DOES exist ...

  [After going to a party where a striptease film was shown] The striptease is obviously the acting out of an exaggerated bout of sex in public, vertical instead of horizontal, and without a man. I tried hard to overcome a sense of prudish shock. It seemed so pathetic that a woman should have to make a living in this fashion and equally pathetic that an audience should have to watch for default of anything better-and I was a little indignant that something which I prize very highly should be exposed in this undignified manner. I frequently have the feeling that I have invented sex and patented it and that any infringement on the patent is to be strongly resented ...

  [Letter] I would not want to live in a weather paradise like southern California or Hawaii. [In the northeast] the change in rotten weather from one kind of rotten to another kind of rotten is very stimulating and keeps you on the move and the thoughts racing. To live in a salubrious climate justs gets you lying under palm trees while coconut milk is dribbled into your mouth by a native girl and nothing GETS DONE. Well, nothing ELSE gets done.

  [Letter] ... I love to be told that I am good. Why? Not because it convinces me that I am, in any absolute sense. But because it con vinces me that I impress another in such a way that that person thinks I am good. For that person, I AM good.... That is a very wonderful thing, for intelligence you are born with and cannot help, and many very horrible and disgusting people have been luminously intelligent. Ditto, good looks; ditto good health; ditto musical talent or writing ability; ditto, almost everything.

  But the capacity to be good, to make someone happy, is a creation of yourself; a very difficult thing to create; a very rewarding thing.

  Twenty-Five.

  LIFE WHILE FAMOUS

  In 1964] Boston University expressed a wish to collect my papers. Dr. Howard Gotlieb, the head of special collections, wrote to ask me for them and I thought he was joking ...

  Gotlieb assured me solemnly that he was serious, and so I dragged out what manuscripts and papers I had, together with some spare copies of various books in various editions, and took them down [to B.U.]...

  "Is this all?" asked Gotlieb.

  "I'm afraid so."

  "But what have you done with all the rest?"

  "Lately, I've been giving some of the stuff to the Newton Public Library, but mostly I've been burning them."

  Gotlieb turned a pretty shade of mauve. "Burning them?"

  "You know, when they crowd up my filing cabinets, and I don't need them anymore, I get rid of them. They're just junk."

  I then received an emotional lecture on the value of a writer's papers to the cause of future research ... I didn't have the heart to argue. I faithfully promised to bring in all material and not burn anything. It took a while, though, to educate me ...

  "Holographic corrections!" he said. "How valuable that makes this!"

  "What are holographic corrections?" I asked.

  "I mean you've made corrections in writing."

  I laughed. "That's nothing. I make many more corrections in first draft."

  "Where's the first draft?"

  "Oh, I tear up each page as I finish with it."

  Gotlieb frowned fearfully. "Didn't you promise to bring in everything?"

  "First drafts, too?" I said, thunderstruck.

  Then, on a still later visit, it turned out that he wanted the fan mail also. He wanted everything.

  "You won't have room," I protested.

  "We'll snake room," he answered firmly.

  So in the years since then, I have been periodically flooding the Special Collections Division of Boston University Library ... All of it has their storage vault under severe internal pressure, and the explosion, when it comes someday, will probably wreck a half-mile stretch of Commonwealth Avenue, but my conscience is clear. I've warned them.

  [After Isaac died, his brother Stan went through all the huge quantity of letters stored at B.U. He put together and edited a lovely book of excerpts-Yours, Isaac Asimov, A Lifetime of Letters, published by Doubleday just before Stan died in August 1995.]

  [Isaac never had e-mail.]

  I might say, in passing, that the postcard is a noble invention. It saves enormous amounts of time and postage. It sacrifices privacy, but I have never written a postcard I haven't been willing to have the postman read.

  Of course, there is the case of the jovial woman editor with whom I carried on a genial mock flirtation. (In my younger days, I flirted almost indiscriminately with every woman in sight and not one of them ever took me seriously-which may not be exactly complimentary, now that I think of it.) In any case, I wrote her a brief card and, out of sheer habit, ended with a double entendre.

  Back came a letter: "Dear Isaac. I have been propositioned before-but never on a postcard."

  [He was persuaded to novelize the movie Fantastic Voyage.]

  One thing bothered me. The ending, as it was to appear in the movie, was fatally flawed. The crew had to get out of the body within an hour because the miniaturization would only last that long. Expansion to normal size would kill the patient, of course. The crew did manage to get out at the very last second, but ... I told [the editor] I would have to change the ending ...

  "It leaves the submarine inside," I said. "The sub will expand and kill the patient."

  "But the submarine is eaten by a white cell."

  "So it expands inside the white cell."

  "But the submarine is digested."

  "A white cell can't digest metal, and if it could, that would only rearrange the atoms and ... trust me, that submarine has to get out ... and there has to be an understanding that the Hollywood people won't change the ending back, or interfere with any other changes I make."

  It was a lucky thing I made that stipulation, for there were numerous inadmissible points in the movie as it was made. There was no consideration of surface tension or even of the fact that air was made up of atoms and molecules and wasn't a continuous fluid.

  I did my best to correct the worst of the flaws, but there were some that were intrinsic in the whole notion of miniaturization, which is, of course, basically impossible even in theory, in my opinion.

  [Isaac's novelization came out before the movie was released. Without discussing the scientific flaws with his family, he took them to the movie preview.]

  I got my first look at Raquel Welch ... [and] wondered if I had been entirely wise [in refusing to fly to Hollywood]. There are worse things than being in an airplane, I thought, and not meeting Raquel Welch was surely one of them.

  I was particularly impressed by the scene in which Raquel was attacked by antibodies. Those antibodies had to be stripped from her body before they killed her, and four pairs of male hands moved instantly to her breasts to begin the stripping-and there was room there (it appeared to my fevered vision) for all eight hands.

  When the movie ended, the spaceship had been left behind, inside the white cell, and Robyn turned to me and said at once, "Won't the ship expand now and kill the man, Daddy?"

  "Yes, Robyn," I explained, "but yvou see that because you're smarter than the average Hollywood producer. After all, you're eleven."

  [He won a Hugo-the prestigious award given at the World Science-Fiction Convention-first in 1963 for his science essays in Fantasy & Science Fiction.]

  [During the Hugo awards ceremonies at the Cleveland World Convention in 1966] 1 considered [Tolkien] a shoo-in, whatever the competition [for the best novel series containing three or more novels].... Other series were nominated just to make it look legitimate ... I was pretty sure that Foundation would end in last place, but just being nominated was a great honor, so I went ...

  I was the winner over Tolkien, Heinlein, Smith, and Burroughs ... that was my second Hugo, and the most valuable ever handed
out.

  [He won four more, including one posthumously.]

  [In 1966 his first humorous piece on television science fiction appeared in TV Guide.]

  I said [Star Trek] "seems to have the best technical assistance of the current crop," but I did wax a little jovial over one particular blooper. That was when I ran into the Star Trek phenomenon. The viewers of the other shows didn't mind my comments (it may be they didn't know how to read), but the "Trekkies" were heard from at once. Even Janet Jeppson wrote me an angry letter.

  Surprised, I watched the program and could see that it had its points. It was certainly the most intelligent science fiction I had seen yet on any of the visual media.

  I began to feel that I had worked to harm something I should have labored to save, and for the first time I approached TV Guide and asked to do an article. They agreed ...

  I turned out "Mr. Spock Is Dreamy," in which I was funny, but in which I managed to say a lot of nice things about Star Trek....

  Janet sent me a mollified letter. It also established my friendship with Gene Roddenberry, the producer of the show, and I felt enormously better.

  At the end of the first year, those who make such decisions decided to cancel [Star Trek]. This decision was greeted by instant and massive protest from the fans, which caught the decision makers by surprise. The poor half-wits didn't know just how articulate and impassioned science-fiction fans could be. The decision was withdrawn and [the show] continued for two more years before it finally went off the air.

  However, it never died. Reruns went on forever, and they still go on. There were ... motion pictures made with the old cast ... and a new TV series ... [and more] ...

  [And Isaac was often a guest speaker at the huge Star Trek conventions.]

  [In 1976] Two young women, who had met me casually at one of the Star Trek conventions, happened to share the same birthday. It occurred to one of them that a good birthday present for the other would be a luncheon with myself as guest. I let myself be talked into it...