Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  ON JULY 26, 1986, GINNY HEARD A NOISE IN THE BATHROOM. GOING INSIDE, SHE FOUND HEINLEIN, who had been diagnosed with emphysema the year before, bleeding heavily from his nostrils—it had flowed down his chest to stain the front of his pajamas. After a series of hospitalizations, he underwent surgery to tie off the artery in his nose. It seemed to go well, and Ginny wrote, “Now all there is to worry about is hepatitis and AIDS from the transfusions.”

  They moved to Carmel, which was closer to hospitals, but it was clear that Heinlein—who had published several late novels, including The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which featured Colonel Colin “Killer” Campbell and his uncle Jock—would never write again. Before they left, Ginny asked if he ever regretted not having any children. Heinlein reassured her that he didn’t, although the fact that she raised the question at all indicated that it was never far from their minds.

  Settling into his new house, Heinlein contemplated a campaign to recruit the diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick, whom he regarded as tougher on communism than George H. W. Bush, to run for president. For the most part, however, he focused on his recovery, and when he learned of a treatment for emphysema that removed the carotid bodies in the neck, he impulsively decided to try it without consulting his doctor: “I’m just going to do it.” It was his last attempt at control.

  On January 5, 1988, he underwent the operation in Los Angeles. At first, his breathing seemed easier, but he began to weaken, until he was so tired that he couldn’t get out of bed. Three weeks later, he showed signs of congestive heart failure. More hospitalizations followed, leaving him wearier than ever. As his medical bills mounted, he returned to the hospital for a fifth time in April, using a walker and breathing through tubes in his nose.

  After eating breakfast at home on May 8, Heinlein said that he wanted to take a nap. Ginny left to work on their correspondence at her desk, where she was informed by their nurse that her husband was no longer responsive—he had died in his sleep at the age of eighty. As he had wished, his ashes were scattered in the Pacific with full naval honors. Afterward, Ginny wrote him a letter: “Now you know the answer to the great mystery, but I don’t. Will you be waiting at the end of that tunnel, as you promised me, or is there just nothing out there?”

  Isaac and Janet Asimov in 1987.

  Courtesy of Stanley Schmidt

  Ginny also told Heinlein that the tributes were pouring in from all over, including one from Asimov, who “spouted off in his usual fashion.” Later, however, she remembered, “When Robert died, I never heard a word from Isaac—not a note, not a phone call—nothing.”

  AFTER HIS TRIPLE BYPASS, ASIMOV TOOK TO READING THE OBITUARIES IN THE PAPER MORE CLOSELY. Many of the writers he had known were gone. Theodore Sturgeon had died in 1985, followed two years later by Catherine L. Moore. After an attack of encephalitis, Randall Garrett spent much of the last eight years of his life in an unresponsive state, and he passed away on December 31, 1987.

  Asimov himself was slowing down. For most of his life, he had relied unthinkingly on his energy, but now his legs and feet were swollen from his kidney problems. He suffered “wipeouts” in which he was unable to leave his bed, and he began to think of how nice it would be to fall asleep and never wake up—although he was worried about how Janet and Robyn would feel.

  The world continued to make demands on his privacy, which he protected with varying degrees of guardedness. At a meeting with the film producer Brian Grazer, Janet broke in after ten minutes: “You clearly don’t know my husband’s work well enough to have this conversation. This is a waste of his time. We’re leaving.” But when Marilyn vos Savant, the woman with the highest recorded intelligence in history, asked him to walk her down the aisle at her wedding, he agreed, although they knew each other only casually through the society Mensa.

  In December 1989, after an appearance at which he spoke and signed books for three hours, he found that he could barely move the next morning. He spent three weeks in bed, his legs like tree trunks, and he had to wear slippers to walk. In January, he told his doctor, Paul Esserman, that he wanted to die in peace. Esserman booked him a hospital room instead, explaining, “Well, you might have been ready to die, but I wasn’t ready to let you.”

  Asimov spent the rest of the winter in the hospital or in bed at home. His heart murmur resulted in circulatory problems, shortness of breath, and kidney trouble, and his mitral valve appeared to be infected, which led to a discussion about whether to operate. In the meantime, Janet had become concerned by another possibility. She had been reading about HIV for years, and she wondered if it might be responsible for her husband’s medical issues.

  When Asimov was tested, it came back positive, and the valve surgery was canceled. At first he wanted to go public, but his doctors warned him against it. There was widespread prejudice against AIDS—caused in part by the Reagan administration’s unfeeling response to the crisis—and he decided to keep his condition a secret, motivated largely by concern for Janet, who had tested negative. For the next two years, he slowly declined. During one hospital stay, he said to Ben Bova, “I’m seventy-one and a half years old, and I don’t like it.”

  In 1990, Asimov learned that Gertrude had died of breast cancer. He was no longer close to his son, of whom he said in his memoirs, “David’s great hobby is to tape the television shows he likes and to build up an enormous library of such things.” David eventually moved to Santa Rosa, California, where he lived off a stipend from Asimov’s estate. In 1998, after his father’s death, he was arrested for possession of “the biggest child pornography collection in Sonoma County history,” with thousands of videos found in his home. After pleading guilty to two counts, he was sentenced to three years’ probation.

  EARLY IN 1992, AFTER FINISHING ASIMOV LAUGHS AGAIN, ASIMOV GREW MORE WITHDRAWN. HE was seventy-two, and he was convinced that he wouldn’t live longer than his father, who had been one year older when he died. In a farewell essay in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov wrote, “It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys, but that’s not the way it worked out.” His final book published in his lifetime, Our Angry Earth, was a collaboration with Pohl, who had been there from before the beginning—and now it was almost after the end.

  The last months of his life were spent in and out of the hospital. As his kidneys failed, he slept a great deal. He once dreamed about going to heaven, where he asked, “Do you have a typewriter I can use?” When he was awake, he was often in pain, but in contrast to Campbell, Hubbard, and Heinlein, whose sufferings had revealed so much of what they had tried to hide, his sense of humor remained intact. On the day before his death, Janet told him, “Isaac, you’re the best there is.” Asimov smiled and shrugged, and finally, raising his eyebrows, he nodded.

  A day later, Asimov was in too much agony to speak, and it hurt to breathe. He was given medication for the pain, and Janet and Robyn were with him when he passed away on April 6. Like the others, he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered. His last words had been “I love you, too.”

  By his own count, he had published more than four hundred books, as if the ambition that had driven him and the others throughout their lives had crystallized into a visible form. Unlike Campbell, he had never wanted to create a new kind of man, but he had. More than any single story or idea, Asimov would be remembered for embodying the kind of human being who could live in the future, even if it required sacrifices in the present that few would ever understand.

  He had wanted to live to see the next millennium, and although he fell short, he made it further than the rest. If he ever paused to consider the future in which he had found himself, he would have seen that it strangely mirrored the landscape of his dreams. What had once been the closely held secret of the pulps—the ideas and images of science fiction—had penetrated into every corner of the culture, both in its inner life and in its inescapable reality. As Asimov himself had once remarked, “We are
now living in a science fictional world.”

  And the explanation was so incredible that it transcended even the claims of psychohistory. Science fiction had set its stories in the future or in space because that was where the action was, and Astounding had begun to take itself seriously as prophecy only after its core assumptions were already in place, with its best guesses arising mostly by chance. With so much wild speculation, some of it was bound to be correct—even if the man at the helm had often steered in the wrong direction.

  Yet if the future—from atomic energy to the space race to the computer age, which would threaten the existence of the very magazines from which it had emerged—felt like science fiction, it was largely because the prophecy had fulfilled itself. It had inspired countless readers to enter the sciences, where they set themselves, consciously or not, to enacting its vision. Space, which had begun as a backdrop for stock adventure stories, came to seem like humanity’s destiny. Campbell and his authors had been the men—and women—who sold the moon.

  They hadn’t predicted the future—they had made it. And Asimov knew that he was his most astounding creation. In his last week at home, he awoke one day in an agitated state: “I want—”

  Janet tried to understand what the matter was. “What do you want, darling?”

  “I want—” He managed to force out the words. “I want—Isaac Asimov!”

  “Yes,” Janet responded gently, knowing that it wouldn’t be long. “That’s you.”

  An expression of triumph spread slowly across his face. “I am Isaac Asimov!”

  Janet never forgot the note of wonder in his voice. She spoke softly to her husband. “And Isaac Asimov can rest now.”

  Acknowledgments

  I knew more about Isaac Asimov than I knew about anyone else alive. What could there be left to add?

  —MARTIN AMIS, VISITING MRS. NABOKOV

  “It’s becoming increasingly obvious that we need a long, objective look at John W. Campbell, Jr.,” the author and critic Algis Budrys once wrote. “But we’re not likely to get one. . . . Obviously, no one who knew him well enough to work for him at any length could have retained an objective view of him; the most we can hope for from that quarter would be a series of memoirs which, taken all together and read by some ideally situated observer, might distill down into some single resultant—which all its parents would disown.” In writing this book, I’ve done the best impersonation that I can of Budrys’s “ideally situated observer,” although I soon found that any history of science fiction requires countless compromises. No single volume can cover everything, and I’m painfully aware of the perspectives that this one omits, even when it comes to Campbell himself. But to the extent that I managed it at all, it was due entirely to the help that I received along the way.

  I am profoundly grateful to Leslyn Randazzo, John Hammond, Katea Hammond, Justin Robertson, and Doug Smith. For insight, advice, and encouragement, I thank John Joseph Adams, Charles Ardai, Jon Atack, Astrid Bear, Greg Bear, Chuck Beatty, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, Jennifer Brehl, Damien Broderick, Emanuelle Burton, Michael Cassutt, Hank Davis, Samuel R. Delany, David Drake, Richard Fidczuk, Alan Dean Foster, Jim Gilbert, Matthew Giles, James Gunn, Marie Guthrie, Gay Haldeman, Joe Haldeman, Bill Higgins, Michael Kurland, Rachel Loftspring, Shawna McCarthy, Barry N. Malzberg, George R. R. Martin, Jess Nevins, Annalee Newitz, Larry Niven, John O’Neill, Tony Ortega, Chris Owen, Alexei Panshin, Jason Pontin, Mark Pontin, the late Jerry Pournelle, Manny Robalino, Samantha Rajaram, James Randi, Mike Resnick, Cheri Lucas Rowlands, Jamie Todd Rubin, Yashar Saghai, Robert Silverberg, Sam Smith, Harriet Teal, Gordon Van Gelder, Lydia van Vogt, Sheila Williams, Rex Weiner, Ted White, Ed Wysocki, and many others. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Trevor Quachri and Emily Hockaday of Analog.

  In 1966, Campbell wrote in response to a request for his papers from Syracuse University, “Any scholarly would-be biographers are going to have a tough time finding any useful documentation on me! I just didn’t keep the records!” Fortunately, this prediction turned out to be wildly off the mark. The efforts by the late Perry Chapdelaine to preserve Campbell’s correspondence were my indispensible starting point, and I received valuable aid from Pilar Baskett and Wendy Mackey at Texas A&M University; John Betancourt; Gene Bundy at Eastern New Mexico University; Alessia Cecchet, Julia Chambers, Nicolette A. Dobrowolski, Kelly Dwyer, and Jacklyn Hoyt at Syracuse University; Zayda Delgado and Jessica Geiser at UC Riverside; Katie Fortier, Jane A. Parr, and Laura Russo at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University; Colleen Garcia at UC San Diego; Jake Gardner at Brown University; Salomé Gomez Upegui and Susan Halpert at Harvard University; Nathaniel Hagee at MIT; the Heinlein Prize Trust; Julianna Jenkins at UCLA; Madeline Keyser at Indiana University Bloomington; Katie Nash at Williams College; Carol Orloski at Advanced Data Solutions; Debbie Rafine at the Oak Park Public Library; Michael Ravnitzky; Robert C. Ray at San Diego State University; Jean Ross at Duke University; Geo Rule at the Heinlein Archives; John Seltzer; Arley Sorg at Locus; and Ann Williams at Blair Academy.

  My greatest hope is that this book will inspire a larger conversation about the history of science fiction. Innumerable studies and biographies have yet to be written, and many will be about important figures who look nothing like John W. Campbell. What I’ve attempted here reflects just one aspect of the story, but it seemed like a necessary step toward any comprehensive reckoning, and it owes its existence largely to three people. One is Stanley Schmidt, who bought my first submission to Analog more than fifteen years ago. Another is my agent, David Halpern, who encouraged me to tackle a nonfiction project and supported my work at every step of the way. The third is my editor, Julia Cheiffetz, who brilliantly recognized what it could be. My thanks as well to Kathy Robbins, Lisa Kessler, Janet Oshiro, and everyone else at the Robbins Office; Carrie Thornton, Lynn Grady, Sean Newcott, Eliza Rosenberry, Tom Pitoniak, Victor Hendrickson, Renata De Oliveira, Mary Brower, and the rest of the staff at Dey Street Books and HarperCollins; Jon Cassir at CAA; and Ploy Siripant and Tavis Coburn for their astounding cover. As always, I’m thankful for my friends and family, especially my parents, my brother, and all the Wongs; Wailin, the best of wives and best of women; and my daughter, Beatrix, in whom I see the future.

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