His father was promoted to full lieutenant, bringing his wife and son to Puget Sound, where he served as a disbursing officer. In 1927, he was put in charge of the commissary at the U.S. naval station in Guam. Hubbard assumed that he was coming, too, but his parents were wary of the native girls, and they decided that he would live with his grandparents in Helena. It felt like an abandonment, and Hubbard was only slightly mollified by a visit that took him through Japan, China, and the Philippines. He remained in Guam for six weeks, teaching English to local kids, who were more intrigued by his red hair: “Whenever I sat down outside of a doorway, the children would gather around with a very dumb and astonished look upon their faces.”
After leaving Guam in July 1927, he enrolled in high school in Helena, lying about his age to enlist in the National Guard. The following May, after the annual Vigilante Day Parade, in which Hubbard and his friends dressed as buccaneers—he would always be drawn to images of piracy—he vanished. He caught a train to Seattle, and after a nasty spill left him bleeding on a hiking trail, he decided to return to Guam. Like many young men, he was looking for answers that his ordinary life couldn’t provide, and he was neither the first nor the last to invent his way out.
When he arrived in Guam, his parents, although upset by his departure from school, decided that he could stay, with his mother tutoring him for the entrance exam to Annapolis. Hubbard also had time for another visit to China, writing of the locals in his journal, “They smell of all the baths they didn’t take. The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.” All the while, he was filling notebooks with ideas for short stories, interspersed with algebra homework, that revolved around the exploits of white heroes in the Far East.
Yet a writer’s life wasn’t sufficiently exciting, and he wanted real adventure. Unfortunately, he lacked the necessary practical skills, and he failed the math section of the Annapolis exam. When he tried again, he was disqualified by his poor vision, which he later said he used “to escape the Naval Academy.” In contrast to Heinlein, who diligently did his eye exercises, Hubbard welcomed it as a convenient excuse—he didn’t have any patience for details, and it was easier to daydream.
In the fall of 1930, at the urging of his father, he enrolled at George Washington University: “[He said] I should study engineering and mathematics and so I found myself obediently studying.” Hubbard liked to refer to himself as a nuclear physicist who had taken “the first American class on atomic and molecular phenomena,” but in fact, he had failed it. He was more interested in the gliding club, and he claimed to have found a spiritual protector in the air—a “smiling woman” who appeared on his wing in moments of danger. Years later, he called her Flavia Julia—another name for Saint Helena, whose cathedral had loomed over his town in Montana.
When Hubbard wasn’t flying, he was writing, with a short piece about his barnstorming adventures for Sportsman Pilot followed by a few stories for the college literary review—but the sea was still calling. In the spring of 1932, after hearing that a schooner was available for charter in Baltimore, he conceived of what he grandly called the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. He convinced fifty other students to sign up, saying that they would film “strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Main,” gather specimens, and stage pirate movies for the camera.
The ship set sail on June 23, although a lack of wind meant that it had to be towed out of Chesapeake Bay. After encountering stormy weather, it made an unscheduled stop in Bermuda to procure water for its leaking tanks. Eleven members of the voyage promptly left, followed by more after their fresh stock of water dribbled away. They were stuck in the Sargasso Sea for days, with Hubbard hung in effigy by his passengers, and their captain was ordered to return. “Despite these difficulties, we had a wonderful summer,” Hubbard glibly wrote, and he never gave up on his fantasy of sailing from one port of call to another.
In his second year of college, his grades remained low, and he dropped out. His father made one last effort on his behalf, arranging for Hubbard to volunteer for the Red Cross in Puerto Rico. Instead, he prospected for gold, which was more in line with his sensibilities, and briefly worked for a mining company. Deep down, he was aware that he had disappointed his family. He later dismissed his mother as a “whore” whom he claimed to have caught in bed with another woman, and his reduction of his life to a series of invented episodes amounted to a small act of revenge against the parents who had genuinely loved him.
By February 1933, he was back in Washington, D.C., and for once he had a tangible goal in mind. One year earlier, before his departure for San Juan, he had encountered a woman named Margaret Louise Grubb, who was known to her friends as Polly. They had met on a gliding field—Polly, who hoped to get a pilot’s license, had cut her blond hair in a bob just like Amelia Earhart’s. But she was even more charmed by Hubbard, who was attracted to her as well.
At first her parents disapproved—Hubbard was six years younger, with no obvious prospects—but they were married on April 13. Hubbard seemed as aimless as always. He boasted that he had found gold on his new wife’s family farm, but when his glider pilot’s license expired, he was unable to afford the flight time required to renew it. Over the course of the previous year, working as a freelance writer, he had earned less than a hundred dollars.
Only then did he realize that the answer had been in front of him all along. His one undisputable gift had always been storytelling, and toward the end of 1933, he went to a newsstand and used some of his remaining cash to buy copies of all the fiction magazines on sale. He had never taken any interest in the pulps before, but now he saw them as a possible vehicle for his talents, reading them closely to see what the editors were buying. Polly was pregnant, and he sensed that this was his best shot at earning enough to survive on his own terms.
It isn’t clear whether Astounding Stories—which had recently been acquired by the publishing firm Street & Smith, after the bankruptcy of its previous owner—was among the titles that he purchased, but it wouldn’t have mattered. At twenty-two, Hubbard was about to embark on a remarkable career, but he had no interest whatsoever in science fiction.
THERE WAS NO DOCTOR IN THE VILLAGE IN RUSSIA, SO THE MOTHER HAD TO DELIVER HER BABY with only a midwife. She was twenty-five and diminutive, with blue eyes and light hair. For three days and two nights, she labored, walking back and forth as she leaned on her husband for support. Finally, she gave birth to a boy. He would never know his exact birthday, but he ultimately settled on January 2, 1920.
She named him Isaac Asimov, after his maternal grandfather. Petrovichi, his birthplace, was located in Great Russia, or the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, and it was too tiny to appear on most maps. Decades later, during World War II, Asimov was marking troop movements with pins on a map of Europe. Looking closely, he was astonished to see Petrovichi for the first time. He stuck a special pin there, and for the duration, he found it easier than usual to explain where he had been born: “A few miles south of Smolensk.”
Judah, his father, was born there in 1896. His wife, Anna Berman, was a year older, and she married Judah, their son speculated, “as the only way of getting rid of him.” They were inseparable, but never publicly affectionate, and Judah rarely cracked a smile, while Anna laughed loudly at jokes. She was fiercely protective of her son and his younger sister, Manya, who would later be known as Marcia. When he was two, Asimov nearly died of pneumonia—according to his mother, sixteen local children came down with it, and he was the only one who survived.
His father was content to run a food cooperative in their village, and they might have stayed there forever if it hadn’t been for an unexpected opportunity. Anna’s half brother had emigrated to Brooklyn, and when the news came of the Russian Revolution, he wrote to say that he would vouch for them if they immigrated to the United States. They decided to accept, reasoning that one could become rich in America—which didn’t make it any less of a risk. After securing the necessary bribes for pas
sports, the family left on Christmas Eve of 1922. Asimov was just three, and in Moscow, it was so bitterly cold that his mother buttoned him up in her coat.
After a stormy crossing, they arrived at Ellis Island on February 3, 1923. It was the last year of relatively unobstructed immigration, and if they had waited any longer, they might not have been allowed to enter. They settled in East New York, a Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, in an apartment that used a woodstove for heat. His parents knew only Russian and Yiddish, the latter of which the family spoke at home, but they worked themselves hard, and they were too proud to ask for help from their relatives.
Asimov had trouble adjusting—he had to be told not to urinate into the gutter—but he was already showing flashes of something special. He learned the alphabet from a jump-rope rhyme, and by five, he could read. When he was ready for kindergarten, his mother said that he had been born on September 7, 1919, allowing him to enter the first grade. His teacher skipped him ahead again, which only increased his sense of isolation. Unlike Campbell, Heinlein, or Hubbard, he didn’t have to invent forms of exile for himself, and he learned to value stability.
He never had close friends, and he was about to be set even further apart. In 1926, his father bought a candy store with a soda counter and a phone for the use of the neighborhood. Asimov had to be available to pitch in and run errands, but in practice, the store effectively orphaned him. It was open seven days a week, except for Jewish holidays, and he rarely had dinner with his father again—his mother and the children would eat first, finishing quickly so that Judah could have his meal alone, which left Asimov with a lifelong habit of wolfing down his food.
His solitude led him to take an interest in reading, and there was one obvious source of material. Along with candy and cigarettes, the store sold such pulps as Nick Carter, but when he tried to read them, his father replied, “Junk! It is not fit to read. The only people who read magazines like that are bums.”
Asimov responded with the obvious objection. “You sell them to other boys.”
“I have to make a living. If their fathers don’t stop them, I can’t stop them.”
It was clearly hopeless, but he gave it one last shot. “You read them, Pappa.”
His father ended the discussion. “I have to learn English. You learn it in school, but I don’t go to school. I have to learn it from these books.”
In the end, his father gave him a library card. Soon he was reading everywhere, and once he learned something, he never forgot it. He made no attempt to conceal his intelligence—to avoid being bullied, he helped a big kid with his homework in exchange for protection—and his identification as a prodigy became a preemptive form of defense. In third grade, he made a point of insisting that his real birthday was January 2, 1920, and the records were dutifully revised, in a seemingly trivial change that had significant consequences much later on.
Like Campbell, Asimov read through his textbooks at the beginning of the year. The only bad marks that he ever received were for talking in class, which led to spankings—his father never hit the children, but his mother kept a clothesline for whippings, during which she scolded him, calling him a paskudnyak, or nasty boy. They didn’t maintain a kosher house, and Asimov received minimal religious education, despite the fact that the synagogue was an obvious place for his talents. He never had a bar mitzvah, and early on, he began to identify as an atheist.
After they moved into the apartment upstairs from a new candy store on Essex Street, Asimov had to devote all of his spare time to it. When he wasn’t in school, he was working, and it seemed his fate to be set apart by some combination of Jewishness, youth, intelligence, and the family business. In 1928, his mother accidentally conceived again, and he had to work even longer hours.
The magazines still beckoned, and after the rare treat of a school trip to the Statue of Liberty on July 2, 1929, he was filled with a renewed determination. Showing his father a copy of Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories, with its pictures of futuristic machinery, he argued that it was educational. Science, after all, was right there in the title. His father was skeptical. “Science fiction? Like Jules Verne?”
He pronounced the author’s name in the proper French style, and Asimov, who was nine, didn’t recognize it. His father became annoyed. “He wrote about going to the moon and to the center of the earth and, oh yes, about a man going around the world in eighty days.”
As he listened to these words, Asimov’s face lit up. “Oh! You mean Jooles Voine!”
At last, his father agreed. In all likelihood, he was in no mood to argue—his second son, Stanley, would be born just three weeks later—and he said that Asimov could read the magazines, with the exception of The Shadow. Asimov promptly took to peeking at it while his father took his nap, only to be caught in the act one afternoon. His father looked at him wearily. “Well, Isaac, rather than have you steal and learn to be a gangster, you can read the magazines.”
Asimov counted the hours until his favorite titles came out each month, and he handled them carefully, since they had to be sold or returned—if it hadn’t been for the store, he couldn’t have read them at all. As he neared his teens, however, his thoughts turned to more urgent concerns. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, but to stand out from other Jewish applicants—a quota system was still in place—he had to graduate from a good school. Boys High of Brooklyn was the best available choice, but after Asimov enrolled, he felt more alone than ever. There were no girls, of course, and he had to hurry back to the store every day.
There were small consolations. He was allowed to check out three books from the library, reading as he walked, with one volume in front of his face and two tucked under his arms. After successfully persuading his father to spend ten dollars on a used typewriter, he made his first stab at science fiction, which was his ideal medium: “It was just enough of a slipping of bonds to give freedom, and not enough to seem folly and anarchy.” When he read an introspective story in Astounding, “Twilight” by Don A. Stuart, he didn’t like it, and he later wrote to the editor:
Astounding Stories as a whole is the best magazine on the market, and people who claim otherwise show lack of taste. . . . I find that your stories tend to harp rather too much on hackneyed themes such as earth-demolishing wars. . . . Interplanetary stories are getting painfully rare, and I do wish that some would appear in the very near future.
He wouldn’t publish another fan letter for years, and he had other things on his mind. It was time to go to college, and it had to be in New York—even if he had been inclined to live elsewhere, which he wasn’t, he had to stay near the store. City College, the most practical choice, wasn’t prestigious enough for the medical schools, so he decided to apply to Columbia.
His interview was scheduled for April 10, 1935. At fifteen, Asimov had never been to Manhattan on his own, so his father accompanied him, waiting outside until he was done. As usual, he was awkward and overeager, and he made a bad impression. Taking pity on him, his interviewer proposed that he apply to Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, which would allow him to attend classes at Columbia as an upperclassman. It was also predominantly Jewish, which was no coincidence.
Asimov went out to tell his father, who agreed that Seth Low was just as good as Columbia, although neither of them really believed it. Later that day, they went to a museum, where they saw Albert Einstein being trailed by a crowd of admirers. If it was a sign, it failed to comfort Asimov. He was a child prodigy, but it hadn’t been enough, and without a scholarship, he couldn’t even afford to attend Seth Low—it had to be City College after all.
No matter where he ended up, he had to leave the circle of security that he had created for himself. Asimov was fond of enclosed, windowless spaces, like the kitchen at the rear of the store, and he fantasized about running a newsstand in the subway. He also loved being alone, going on long walks in the cemetery with the latest issue of Astounding. One day, the caretaker had to ask him not to disturb visi
tors who might be there to mourn. Asimov had been whistling.
Now he faced an uncertain future. He had been three when his family left Russia, and the memory of that passage, along with the concerns of his parents, caused him to stay as close to home as possible, even as his imagination took him throughout the galaxy. For most of his life, he had lived just a short train ride away from Coney Island, but after his first crossing, he had never even seen the ocean.
3.
Two Lost Souls
1931–1937
No one should be a freelance writer who isn’t naturally irresponsible. . . . To support your wife and children on a regular and predictable food supply, in a predictable housing, with predictable supply of clothes—if you feel such regularities are important . . . then you aren’t cut out to be a freelance writer.
—JOHN W. CAMPBELL, IN A LETTER TO BEN BOVA
In 1933, while living in Durham, North Carolina, John W. Campbell had his first close encounter with the unknown. He was seated on the porch of his house, looking across the road at a thunderstorm that was lashing the field on the other side. With a clap of thunder, a bolt of lightning struck the damp ground directly in front of him, and when his eyes recovered, he found himself staring at a small glowing sphere that was drifting across the grass.
The sphere was the size of a bowling ball, roughly ten inches across, with the greenish color and apparent temperature of a mercury vapor arc lamp. It bounced three times along the tops of the stalks, moving at about ten miles per hour for a distance of fifty feet. After rebounding off the side of an old barn, it abruptly changed course, floating toward an oak tree at the edge of the road. Striking the trunk three feet above the base, it exploded.
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