Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  High school, however, was the beginning of a series of disillusionments. Asimov discovered limits to his intellectual ability. He was not as good a mathematician as some of the other boys, who may not have been as intelligent but had a special feeling for math. He never made the math team. He discovered as well that other students could study harder and accomplish more; Asimov stuck by his "understanding-at-once-and-remembering-forever" pattern. He had to abandon his illusion of universal brilliance when he discovered, for instance, that he disliked and could never understand economics. And even his attempts at creative writing were ridiculed in a high-school writing class. This bothered him more than anything else, because his ambition to write fiction had been growing since the age of eleven, when he had begun writing a series book for boys called The Greenville Chums at College, copying it out in longhand in nickel copybooks. When Asimov was fifteen his father had found $10 to buy his son a much-longed-for typewriter, an office-size model.

  More disappointments awaited him. His father wanted his elder son (there were two other children, a girl, Marcia, and a boy, Stanley) to become a physician, and the fifteen-year-old Asimov had come to share this ambition. But getting into medical school was not easy; medical schools had quotas on the number of Jewish applicants they would accept. For a variety of reasons, Asimov was never to be admitted to the study of medicine. By the time he was ready to apply, however, his goals had changed. After high school, he applied to Columbia College, but was rejected, possibly, he speculates, because he did not make a good showing in interviews. He was asked to change his application to a Brooklyn branch of Columbia University called Seth Low Junior College, where enrollment was heavily Jewish.

  Asimov also applied to City College of New York, which had no tuition and accepted him because his grades were excellent. He actually spent three days there before receiving a letter from Seth Low asking why he had not showed up. When his father explained to Seth Low authorities that the family could not afford the tuition, Seth Low came up with a hundred-dollar scholarship and a National Youth Administration job for $15 a month. Asimov switched colleges. His second year,

  after a summer spent in manual labor to earn enough money, was at the Morningside Heights campus because Seth Low had closed at the end of its tenth year. He was enrolled in Columbia University, not its more prestigious undergraduate college. Asimov was a second-class citizen throughout his undergraduate education, and he never forgot it. When he was graduated, he received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry instead of the bachelor of arts degree, for which University undergraduates were not eligible, he wrote.

  In his second year of college, Asimov's distaste for zoology (he killed a cat and dissected it but never forgave himself) and embryology (he was not good at picking out details through a microscope and even worse at drawing them) led him to drop the biological sciences and switch to chemistry as a major. He liked chemistry and did well at it. After graduation from Columbia he applied (somewhat halfheartedly because of his distaste for biological courses) to a number of medical schools and was rejected by all of them. He went on with the study of chemistry in Columbia's graduate school, but only after some difficulty because he had not taken physical chemistry. He had to spend a troublesome year on probation. As usual, his problem had not been his grades or test scores but his "wise-guy personality."

  Asimov obtained his M.A. in 1941 and was working toward his doctorate when the United States entered World War II. A few months later he suspended his studies in order to work as a chemist at the U.S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia, where for the first time he was free of his duties at the candy store and where the steady income gave him the opportunity to marry the woman with whom he had fallen in love, Gertrude Blugerman.

  Asimov's autobiography suggests that he was good at the theory of chemistry but not at the practice. He refers to his poor laboratory technique and his difficulties getting the correct results. His talents were probably not those of a research chemist, nor those of a practicing scientist of any kind. But at the end of the war he returned to his doctoral program at Columbia, earned his degree in 1948, did a year of post-doctoral research at Columbia, and finally was offered a position as instructor in biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine.

  Asimov's discovery of science fiction and his attempts to write it were more important to his final career than his studies. He had come upon Amazing Stories in 1928, its second year of publication, when he was eight years old. His father's candy store carried magazines, but the young Asimov was not allowed to read them because his father considered them a waste of time and a corrupting influence. They would turn him into "a bum," his father said. The boy had been reading library books of all kinds, but he longed for the brightly colored pulp magazines with their cover paintings of futuristic machines and planets and alien menaces. Finally, when Hugo Gernsback lost control of Amazing and brought out a competitor, Science Wonder Stories, the then nine-year-old boy brought the magazine to his father, pointed out the word "Science" in the title, and won his battle. Possibly his father just did not have the spirit to fight, because his mother was about to give birth to Asimov's younger brother, Stanley.

  The science-fiction magazines filled Asimov's imagination with ideas and dreams. They did not consume all his reading time because there weren't enough of them (only two a month at first, and only three a month in 1930). He kept up his omnivorous reading of other books, mostly library borrowings, but science fiction became what he lived for. Oddly enough, Asimov's early writing efforts did not focus on science fiction. "I had the most exalted notion of the intense skills and vast scientific knowledge required of authors in the field, and I dared not aspire to such things," he remembered.

  On his new typewriter, however, he ventured into fantasy and then into science fiction. Like almost every aspiring author, Asimov started many stories and finished none, and what he wrote was derived mostly from what he liked to read. His derivative writing was to persist through several years of his career as a published writer until he finally rid himself of what he called his "pulpishness." He got his inspiration, his plots, even his vocabulary from other science-fiction writers. From them came the blasters and needle guns and force beams that litter his stories and early novels, and even, by an analogous process of invention, such concepts as neuronic whips and psycho-probes, hyperspace and Jumps. When he turned to more unique concepts such as psychohistory and the Foundations, the logical development of robots, a radioactive Earth and the lost origin of man, and particularly human reactions to overcrowded cities, his fiction began to glow with its own fire.

  Not long after he got his typewriter, Asimov wrote a letter to Astounding Stories that was published in 1935. Two years later, when Campbell had become editor of the magazine and had changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov began writing letters again, "commenting on the stories, rating them, and, in general, taking on the airs of a critic." Such letters became a monthly event; usually Campbell published them in a letters-to-the-editor section called then, as now, "Brass Tacks."

  One Tuesday in May when the new Astounding was scheduled to arrive in his father's package of new magazines, it did not show up. The eighteen-year-old Asimov was terrified that it had ceased publication. He called the publisher, Street & Smith, and was assured that the magazine still was being published. But when the new issue had not arrived by the following Tuesday, he ventured off on the subway to the Street & Smith offices in Manhattan, where an executive told him that the publication date had been changed from the second Wednesday to the third Friday of the month. Two days later the magazine arrived.

  His panic at the thought that Astounding might vanish sent Asimov to the typewriter to finish a story he had been working at for some months titled "Cosmic Corkscrew." He completed the story on June 19, 1938, and took it personally to the editor. Campbell was familiar with Asimov's name from his frequent letters and talked for more than an hour with the aspiring author, read the story overnight
, and mailed it back two days later with a polite letter of rejection. That sent Asimov back to his typewriter to work on a story titled "Stowaway." He finished it in eighteen days and took this in person to Campbell. That story came back with a rejection in four days. A pattern had been established. A rejection would come from Campbell but phrased in ways that would encourage Asimov to turn immediately to a new story. "It didn't matter that he rejected you,'' Asimov recalled. "There was an enthusiasm about him and an all-encompassing friendliness that was contagious. I always left him eager to write further." "Stowaway," however, did not end up lost for all time with "Cosmic Corkscrew." It eventually found its way into print, in the April 1940 Astonishing Stories edited by Frederik Pohl (as youthful an editor as Asimov was a writer), as "The Callistan Menace," though Asimov's third story, "Marooned Off Vesta," had appeared first, in the March 1939 Amazing Stories.

  Meanwhile, Asimov had discovered other science-fiction readers, and not just readers but fans, fanatics like himself. This led progressively to fanzines, club meetings, and the organizing of the Futurians, a fan group that included many of the later writers and shapers of science fiction, including Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert W. Lowndes, Richard Wilson, and later Damon Knight and James Blish. Asimov attended monthly meetings, became involved in the debates and schisms to which fandom was so susceptible, began meeting other authors, and talked about his writing ambition and finally getting published. All culminated in the first World Science Fiction Convention held in Manhattan on July 2, 1939. Every Futurian but Asimov was excluded by the organizer, Sam Moskowitz, as disruptive influences.

  Asimov went as an author and felt guilty about it ever after. But as he became more and more an author, he became less and less a fan.

  By the time of the World Convention Asimov was a bona fide author in his own eyes because Astounding had published his tenth story, "Trends," in its issue of July 1939. Almost two years later it published the second of his robot stories (the first, "Robbie," was published in the September 1940 Super Science Stories as "Strange Playfellow''), and within the next fourteen months, two more robot stories, plus "Nightfall," and "Foundation" and its sequel. Though Asimov didn't know it at the time, "Nightfall" alone made him, in his own words, "a major figure in the field." The stories did not earn that much money, but what they brought in was put to good use, paying for his tuition or accumulating in a bank account. He had three stories published in 1939, seven in 1940, eight in 1941, ten in 1941, only one in 1943, three in 1944, four in 1945, one in 1946, one in 1947, two in 1948, three in 1949, and six in 1950.

  It was not a remarkable record of productivity or success; it brought Asimov a total of $7,821.75, which amounted to little more than $710 a year. It was not enough to encourage him to consider a career as a full-time writer, but it did provide a growing feeling of economic security. Finally, Doubleday published his first novel, Pebble in the Sky, in 1950. A specialty house called Gnome Press began publishing his robot stories and then his Foundation stories as books. His income from writing slowly began to equal and then to exceed his income from teaching at Boston University School of Medicine, and, after a disagreement with his superior, he turned to the career that had seemed impossible for all those years.

  The impression even the casual reader may obtain from Asimov's autobiography is that he was shaped by his childhood. He referred continually to the way in which the candy store controlled his early life and the way the habits of those years had carried over into his later life. His industry he still wrote seven days a week and ten hours a day until the poor health of the last two or three years of his life, turning out six to ten thousand words on an average day he traced to the long hours at the candy store, for instance, and to his father's accusations that he was lazy when found in a corner reading.

  In a similar way, Asimov traced his ability to eat anything to his mother's hearty, indigestible cuisine, and his habit of eating swiftly to the fact that he and his mother and sister had to eat in a hurry so that his father could be relieved of his duties in the candy store and eat his supper in a more leisurely fashion. He read while he ate because he loved to read, his father wasn't present, his mother was busy cooking and serving, and in any case reading was a sign of studiousness.

  His uneasiness with strangers Asimov traced to the fact that during his childhood his family visited no one and no one visited them. The fact that he read newspapers and magazines so carefully that no one could tell they had been read started, he believed, when he had to return magazines to his father's rack looking unopened. As a boy he had to awaken at 6 a.m. to deliver newspapers before school. If he wasn't down on time, his father would yell at his window from the street below, and later lecture him about the "deadly spiritual dangers of being a fulyack [sluggard]." To his last years, Asimov awakened without an alarm clock at 6 a.m.

  He described his infatuation with baseball when he was in junior high school: he became a Giants fan, which was odd because Brooklyn had the Dodgers. "By the time I found out there was a Brooklyn team, it was too late; I was imprinted." He was "imprinted" in other ways as well. He blamed his fear of flying on his mother's oversolicitude about his health. ''My parents . . . trembled over my well-being so extremely, especially after my babyhood experience with pneumonia, that I could not help but absorb the fact and gain an exaggerated caution for myself. (That may be why I won't fly, for instance, and why I do very little else that would involve my knowingly putting myself into peril.)"

  His mother's insistence that he keep her informed of his whereabouts meant that when he was out he had to report in at frequent intervals by telephone. "I've kept that habit all my life," he wrote. "It is a bad habit. It ties me to the phone, and if forgetfulness or circumstances get in the way, everyone is sure something terrible has happened." He traces his avoidance of books on how to write and of college-level courses on writing to "the ever-present memory of that horrible course in creative writing in the sixth term of high school."

  It may not be surprising that someone who can find so many habits of the man in the experience of the boy would imagine a science of predicting human behavior, called "psychohistory," in his Foundation stories. On the other hand Asimov could relate anecdotes that seemed to demonstrate just the opposite principle of behavior. He recalled his father struggling to balance the books of the candy store every evening, being a dollar over or a dollar under and staying until he had straightened it out. Later in his life, when money was easier, Asimov remembered handing his father five dollars to make up the difference, and his father commenting, "If you gave me a million dollars, that dollar would still have to be found. The books must balance." Asimov never could understand why the books had to balance. Rather than carrying that trait into his own life, he said, "In later life, when I had occasion to balance accounts, I never bothered over trifling discrepancies. I just made arbitrary corrections and let it go. My father did enough searching for both of us in his lifetime."

  At the same time, Asimov was capable of seeing his explanations for behavior as "probably simple rationalizations designed to resign me to things as they are." After all, what is an autobiography? It is not so much the finding of the truths in one's existence as a rationalization of how one got from one place to another when there were so many different places at which one could have arrived. Asimov had much to explain, and his autobiography was a search for explanations.

  Asimov also was a supreme rationalist, a searcher for explanations in his fiction as well as in his life. The reason for his faith in rationalism and his distrust of emotions may be no easier to come by, however, than any other speculation about his life. Asimov did not rely totally on environment to rationalize his life; some traits were implicit, or genetic, and Asimov simply did not mention them. His intelligence, for instance, and his ability to learn and remember must have been inherited. His habit of counting objects (light bulbs, repeated decorations, holes in soundproofed ceilings) whenever he was bored in public places he traces
to his counting automobiles as they passed on Van Siclen Avenue when he was three. He found no reason for his idiosyncratic fondness for enclosed places. He liked the candy store on Decatur Street because it had a kitchen in the back that had no windows. "Why it should be, I don't know, and psychiatrists may make what they like of it (for I will not ask them, and I will not listen if they try to tell me), but I have always liked enclosed places." He remembered that he thought display rooms in department stores looked better than real rooms and finally realized that it was because they had no windows. He envied the people who ran newsstands in subway stations, "for I imagined that they could board it up whenever they wanted to, put the light on, lie on a cot at the bottom, and read magazines. I used to fantasize doing so, with the warm rumble of the subway trains intermittently passing." Asimov's claustrophilia and agoraphobia will return to the discussion in Chapter 5, on the Robot Novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun.