by Isaac Asimov
I determined, therefore, to work up the best extraterrestrials that had ever been seen for the second part of my novel ... not ... just human beings with antennae or pointed ears, but utterly inhuman objects in every way. And I determined to give them three sexes and to have that entire section of The Gods Themselves revolve about sex-their sex.
That is exactly what I did, and I began to feel myself moved by the story I was writing.
Thirty.
MORE WORKING
WITH WORDS
[At Breadloaf Writer's Conference] Not only did I have to give talks, I also had to read material submitted to me and to discuss it intelligently and helpfully both with the students in private and with the class in public.
Every member of the faculty took his turn in delivering an evening speech to the entire student body. My turn came on August 28.
I had noted with some discomfort that each faculty member read from his works at some point in his speech.
I had not brought any works to read from, but I had done [an] article on Ruth. I therefore gave my talk on the Book of Ruth as a commentary on intolerance, went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ended with my own discussion of love overcoming the barriers of difference in "The Ugly Little Boy."
Of all the talks I had ever given, that one was the best.
I do not look at an audience, as it happens, I always focus in midair, but I listen to them. From the rustling, the coughing, the laughing, the murmuring, I have my way of judging the effect of what [ am saying, and I adjust to suit. None of it is conscious; it is an unconscious and unspoken dialog between myself and my audience and, when it is working well, it guides me and I cannot miss.
But if you were to ask what I listen for that tells me that I am exactly right, I would answer, "Silence!"
There are rare times when an audience falls entirely silent, when there is not a laugh, not a cough, not a rustle, when nothing exists but a sea of ears-and then I know I have reached speaker's heaven.
I haven't achieved this more than four or five times in all my life, but the one time I remember most clearly of all was that August 28, 1971, when I talked on the subject of intolerance at Breadloaf. And when I finished by quoting (from memory) the final climax to "The Ugly Little Boy," the silence was finally broken, for I heard sobbing.
I got the first standing ovation (I was told) that Breadloaf had ever seen.
The whole thing was summed up afterward when one of the students came to me and, with absolutely no sign of sarcasm at all, said, "Thank you for a wonderful sermon, Reverend."
[Isaac's advice, in a letter, about "limping transitions" in first drafts] So what if it limps. Its purpose is to get you into the next stage of the story and you take off from there. Time enough when you go through the novel again to correct the transition. For all you know, the material that you will write much later in the novel will make it plain to you exactly how the transition ought to have been. No amount of rewriting and repolishing now will get it right in the absence of knowledge of the course of the entire book. So let it limp and get on with it ...
Think of yourself as an artist making a sketch to get the composition clear in his mind, the blocks of color, the balance, and the rest. With that done, you can worry about the fine points.
The only education a writer gets is in reading other people's writing. You should read not through your opinion of whether or not you like something, but to see how the writer does it, why it's effective.
Of course, sometimes it's awfully hard to tell golden drops from shit.
I was in Rochester [to talk to the New York State Librarians Association] in a two-room hotel suite with (at the moment) nothing to do. ... I sat there with the strong urge to write a tenth Black Widowers story-and I had not brought a typewriter with me.
I was tempted to try to write the story with pen and ink, but it seemed to me that this would be far too tiring and that the mechanical detail of moving my hand to form the letters would interfere with the creative process.
I was desperate enough to try, though. I used the hotel writing paper provided guests and began to write--and continued to writeand kept on writing until the story (the first draft at least) was finished.
I rushed into the next room and woke Janet. "Janet," I said, you know how noisy writing is. Well, it isn't the writing that's noisy, it's the typewriter." When I wrote by pen and ink, I was conscious of writing in a profound and, to me, an utterly unaccustomed silence.
From that point on, I never took my typewriter with me on trips but relied on pen and ink if I wanted to write.
[Isaac's reaction to the last Apollo shot--at night] The giant rocket stood out against the flat Florida coast like a misplaced Washington's monument. The day darkened; night came; clouds banked on the eastern horizon; and there was a continuous display of faraway lightning-without-thunder ducking in and out of the distant thunderheads. Launch was [put on hold] ... Midnight came and we were into December 7, the thirty-first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and no one seemed to be aware of this bit of ill omen but myself. In a short time, the launch would have to be postponed to the next night, the ship would have to move away, and we would miss the sight.
At 12:20 A.M., the hold was lifted and the countdown proceeded to zero. A cloud of vapor enveloped the rocket and I held my breath for fear Pearl Harbor Day would do its work.
It didn't. The rocket slowly rose and the vast red flower at its tail bloomed. What was surely the most concentrated man-made night light on an enormous scale that the world had ever seen blazed out over the nightbound shores of Florida-and the night vanished from horizon to horizon.
We, and the ship, and all the world we could see, were suddenly under the dim copper dome of a sky from which the stars had washed out, while below us the black sea had turned an orange-gray.
In the deepest silence, the artificial sun that had so changed our immediate world rose higher and higher, and then-forty seconds after ignition-the violent shaking of the air all about the rocket engines completed its journey across the seven-mile separation and reached us. With the rocket high in the air, we were shaken with a rumbling thunder so that our private and temporary daytime was accompanied by a private and temporary earthquake.
Sound and light ebbed majestically as the rocket continued to rise until it was a ruddy blotch in the high sky. Night fell once more; the stars were coming out, and the sea darkened. In the sky there was a flash as the second stage came loose, and then the rocket was a star among stars; moving, and moving, and moving, and growing dimmer ...
In all this, it was useless for me to try to say anything, for there was nothing to say. The words and phrases had not been invented that would serve as an accompaniment to that magnificent leap to the Moon, and I did not try to invent any. After all, I had nothing more at my disposal than the language of Shakespeare.
Some young man behind me, however, was not hobbled by my disadvantage. He had a vocabulary that the young of our day had developed to express their own tastes and quality and he used it to the full.
"Oh, shit," he said, as his head tilted slowly upward. And then, with his tenor voice rising over all the silent heads on board, he added eloquently, "Oh, shi-i-i-it."
To each his own, I thought.
There had always been one aspect of the robot theme I had never had the courage to tackle, although Campbell and I had sometimes discussed it. The laws of robots refer to human beings. Robots must not harm them and they must obey them, but what, in robot eyes, is a human being. Or, as the Psalmist asks of God, "What is man that thou an mindful of him"". . .
I began a robot story entitled, "That Thou Art Mindful of Him."
[On the Canberra in 1973 for the solar eclipse off the coast of Africa] The sight of the total eclipse was wonderful. There were two things that were unexpected. The eclipsed Sun, with its corona spectacularly visible, looked smaller than I expected, and at total eclipse, it did not seem to be night but, rather, twilight.
I wa
s excited enough to be shouting wildly, at the moment of eclipse. There were people there with tape recorders and I was allowed, afterward, to listen to the deathless prose that issued from my lips.
One exclamation was, "Yes, that's it. That's it. That's the way it's supposed to look," as though I were congratulating the cosmic director who was running the show.
The other, when the brighter stars began to be visible was, "That proves it. The stars do shine in the daytime."
To me, the most exciting split second was the reappearance of the Sun. For five minutes of totality we waited and then at the western edge of the Sun there was a flash of light. The "diamond ring" effect lasted for a bare moment. The blaze broadened, and in two seconds one could not look at the Sun anymore.
[Reaction to his mother's death in 1973] My mother had died four years and two days after my father, and just one month short of her seventy-eighth birthday.
Her death didn't affect me as badly as my father's had. The slow deterioration of her health had made the event inevitable, her sad and lonely life without my father had made it welcome to her, and I had to recognize that prolonging its meaninglessness was not what she wanted ...
[His brother and sister and spouses arrived] My deep depression stirred the inevitable gallows humor within me and I said, suddenly, "If Mama had known that all six of us were going to be here today, she would have waited." It got a rather hysterical laugh.
Thirty-One.
ISAAC, HIMSELF
[At a Family Weekly awards luncheon full of celebrities] I looked up ... and there ... not six feet from where we were sitting, was Alan Alda, the star of the M*A*S*H show ...
I bounced up. "Mr. Alda," I said, "I'm Isaac Asimov."
He said, "Why aren't you at home writing a book?" so I knew he knew who I was.
"It's my wife's fault," I said. "She's deeply in love with you and she's sitting right there and wants your autograph." .. .
Alan Alda said, "Poor woman," and signed.
When I was returning from a dinner in New Jersey, I hastened, in order to get home before midnight and the last news broadcast of the day [hoping for Nixon's impeachment]. Walking into the apartment at a quarter of midnight, I turned on the radio at once so that I would not forget.
My attention was caught at once by the statements being made by whoever it was on the program in progress. I listened for a while and called out, "Janet, there's a joker here spouting my ideas."
Janet came in, listened two seconds, and said, "It's you, Isaac."
And so it was. About a month earlier I had taped an interview with Casper Citron and had forgotten about it. It was running now and as usual I didn't recognize my own voice when unprepared for it.
At NBC, I had been working on and off, for some months, with a producer, Lucy Jarvis, writing a special on the cult of youth for television. I didn't enjoy it.... Naturally, when I did arrive at NBC for story conferences, I eased my unhappiness by engaging the various pretty young ladies in light-hearted banter, and my role was clearly that of the "sensuous dirty old man" concerning whom I had written.
When I took Robyn to NBC ... the young women in Lucy Jarvis's office were horrified. There I was with my arm around a very young woman of spectacular appearance and with every evidence of extreme affection on my part-and the instant feeling was that I was flaunting every canon of good taste by bringing my latest starlet-conquest with me.
There was an almost palpable explosion of relief when I introduced Robyn as my daughter.
[While on a trip to England] We went out to the Forest of Dean at the Welsh border ... it had been raining on and off all day, mild sprinkles that never lasted long and were not very annoying. Interspersed were sunshine and summer clouds. After dinner, Janet and I took a walk among the beeches of the forest and the bluebells on the ground, until another sprinkle drove us under one of the trees.
The Sun was out even while it sprinkled, and a rainbow appeared in the eastern sky. Not one rainbow, either, but two. For the first time in my life I saw both the primary and secondary bows, separated, as they should be, by a distance of ten degrees of arc. Between them, the sky was distinctly dark, so that, in effect, we saw a broad band of darkness crossing the eastern sky in a perfect semicircle, bounded on either side by a rainbow, with the red side of each bordering the darkness and the violet side fading into the blue.
It lasted several minutes and we watched in perfect silence. I am not a visual person, but that penetrated-and deeply. Two months later, in fact, the incident inspired my 197th F & SF essay, "The Bridge of the Gods."
[In a taxi, after a TV interview] The driver had seen me come tearing out of the Channel 13 building, and asked me what I was doing there.
"Being interviewed," I said, with businesslike conciseness.
"You an actor?"
"No, I'm a writer."
"I once wanted to be a writer," said the cabbie, "but I never got around to it."
"Just as well," I said consolingly. "You can't make a living as a writer."
The taxi driver said argumentatively, "Isaac Asimov does."
I had no answer.
[At a motel in West Virginia] After dinner, we wandered out on the grounds and managed to make our way to a rocky ledge (well-fenced) and stared down into a gorge through which a river wound its way.
The cloudless sky was still bright, but the twilight was deepening; the vista was absolutely bursting with green; the river was a silver curve; and around the bend of a mountain there slowly came a long freight train dragged by four locomotives. It crawled its way precariously along the narrow space between mountain and river, with its busy chug-chug far enough away to sound like the panting of a giant anaconda.
After a long while, Janet said, in an awed whisper, "Isn't this amazing?"
"You bet," I said briskly. "One hundred sixty-six cars! Longest freight train I ever saw."
I finally began "The Bicentennial Man." It seemed to me that to avoid the actual 1976 bicentennial, I would need another kind of bicentennial, and I chose to deal with a two-hundredth birthday. That would mean either a man with an elongated life span or a robot, and I chose a robot. Why, then, the "man" in the title? I decided to write about a robot who wanted to be a man and who attained that goal on the two-hundredth anniversary of its construction.
My vague original notion was to make it a somewhat humorous story, but once again, as in the case of The Gods Themselves, the thing got away from me. It was a seventy-five-hundred-word story that had been commissioned, but I had no way of stopping it before fifteen thousand words though I dug in my heels as hard as I could. For another, it turned into a moving story that had me almost in tears when I finished.
["The Bicentennial Man" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1977.1
Thirty-Two.
MORE ON WRITING
[Isaac became involved with anthologies, especially those devised by his dear friend Martin H. Greenberg.]
Marty's] encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, and of other types of genre fiction, too, has enabled him to prepare many anthologies in science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, Western, and other fields ... there is no question that he is far and away the most prolific and, in addition, the best anthologist the world has ever seen.
He has the knack of thinking up useful "theme" anthologies-that is, collections of stories that cluster about some particular subject. What's more, he has the ability to persuade editors and publishers to do these anthologies. What is still more, he has the industry required to obtain permissions, negotiate contracts, take care of all payments, and disperse them to coeditors and to authors.
In all of this, Marty usually works with coeditors, who are always writers in the field of the anthology, who have names that are valuable on the book covers, but who don't have the time, energy, or the inclination, or all three, to do the scut work involved.
I'm a natural for this sort of thing, and Marty and I have coedited over a hundred anthologies ... there is no one else I
would trust to display the industry, the reliability, the competence, and the absolute trustworthiness that Marty does.
... All the stories are sent to me and I read them over carefully, since I have veto rights ... [but] I am chary of making use of that veto. I might not like a story and yet it might be well written, and I must place the writing above my own tastes.
I then write a more or less elaborate introduction to the anthology and, very often, headnotes for each story.
... There would appear to be some people who are of the opinion that my sole function in these anthologies is to let my name be used and that I get a free ride. This is not so. Any anthology on my list [of books he's done] is one for which I have done significant work.
There are indeed books with my name in the title where I have done no work, where I have selected no stories and exerted no editorial function. Those are not listed among my books. If I have written an introduction to a book but have done no editorial work, I do not list it. Any book on the list is a book I have worked on either as a writer or as an editor, or as both.
But why do I do all these anthologies? Of what value are these endless collections of old stories?
Remember that many science-fiction short stories (even very good ones) tend to fade into oblivion. The issues of the magazines in which they appeared are in landfills somewhere. Collections in which they may have appeared in book form are often out of print and unavailable. Anthologies bring back these old stories to an audience that has never read them, or perhaps to some who have indeed read them years or even decades before and would like the chance to read them again. Furthermore, writers, many of whom may be past their best years and may not be writing much, will have the benefit of having their early stories brought before the public, something that will brighten their fame and earn them a little extra money too.
I am willing to lend my name, and to do the work necessary to accomplish these things. I am very fortunate to be one of the handful of authors whose books continue to sell and whose stories, however old, continue to be reprinted. It is my pleasure and, even more, my duty to do what I can to help other writers not quite as well situated as I am.