by James Gunn
A psychiatrist (one of that group to whom Asimov will not listen) might suggest that Asimov's distrust of emotions and faith in rationalism are his responses to "being orphaned" by the candy store at the age of six. Being deprived of his parents' companionship ("never again, after I was six, could I be with him [his father] on a Sunday morning,
while he told me stories") came at a difficult time: he was in the middle of second grade. Moreover, his father had admired his son's abilities from an early age. When Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five, his father asked him how he had done it, and Asimov replied that he just figured it out. "That gave my father the idea that there was something strange and remarkable about me; something he clung to for the rest of his life." But the high regard in which Asimov's father held his son's abilities meant that when the schoolboy brought home less than perfect marks from school, he could expect his father's disapproval for not living up to his potential. In his autobiography Asimov recalled many instances of his father's disapproval, few of his approval.
His mother also spent much of her time in the candy store with customers, or with her two younger children. She had a terrible temper, Asimov recalled, and unlike his father "raised her hand to me any time she felt she needed a little exercise. . . ." He also recalled, seemingly without rancor, being beaten with a rope his mother kept in her closet. When he mentioned it to his mother in later life, she did not remember it. His parents, though a devoted couple, were not demonstrative. There were few if any expressions of affection between them, and Asimov presents the births of three children as the only proof that there was. Certainly Asimov had reason to distrust emotion and to seek rational explanations for why he was deprived of parental closeness, perhaps even love.
Asimov, nevertheless, always knew that he was his parents' favorite, and his brother knew it as well, apparently without resentment. Asimov spoke bitterly about the series of candy stores but remembered his father and mother with great fondness. The family was always in close touch until the death first of his father (in 1969, at the age of 72) and then of his mother (in 1973, at the age of nearly 78), even though, because of his fear of flying, Asimov did not go to see his parents after they moved to Florida a year before his father's death.
In his typical rational way, he looked back upon his childhood as a generally happy period: "I know perfectly well it was a deprived one in many ways, but the thing was, you see, I never knew it at the time. No one is deprived unless and until he thinks he is."
A more general mystery than the origin of Asimov's traits and neuroses is why certain young people turn to reading, and sometimes writing, science fiction. Asimov is a case study. When he began reading science fiction, the number of readers was small Damon Knight has called science fiction the mass medium for the few but intensely involved.
Most had turned to science fiction out of some kind of youthful frustration with their lives. A profile of new readers would reveal them to be mostly boys; mostly brighter than their schoolmates; mostly social misfits because of personality, appearance, lack of social graces, or inability to find intellectual companionship; unsophisticated about girls (the study of women readers and writers still is in its infancy) and ill at ease in their company. Science fiction was a kind of literature of the outcast that praised the intellectual aspects of life that its readers enjoyed and in which they excelled, and a literature that offered more hope for the future than the present. When those kind of persons discover others like themselves, fan clubs spring up, sometimes fanzines are published, conventions are organized, and writing science fiction becomes a virtually universal ambition. When those kind of persons begin to write, they write science fiction.
Asimov was like that. The Futurians were like that. Damon Knight says that "all we science-fiction writers began as toads." When Robert Silverberg read the first volume of Asimov's autobiography, he wrote for the galley proofs of the second volume because he couldn't wait: there was so much in Asimov's life that paralleled his own that it gave him a sense of déjà vu.
There are certain curious resemblances between the characters and careers of Asimov and H.G. Wells, who is often called the father of modern science fiction. Both spent their early lives in unsuccessful shops, were precocious students, quick to learn with good memories, and began by writing science fiction but turned to popularizations (Wells's biggest financial success was his Outline of History). Both were selective in what they liked, Wells with biology and evolution, Asimov with chemistry, and both were fond of history. Both became known as pundits, experts in almost everything, and both were attentive to the ladies. . . . The analogy can be carried too far. Wells, for instance, became a serious novelist of contemporary life; Asimov varied his science fiction and non-fiction with detective stories and novels.
Asimov, in spite of his success at other kinds of writing and public speaking, never thought of himself as anything but a science-fiction writer who sometimes wrote other, often easier, things. He introduced himself as a science-fiction writer. Some writers of science fiction have gone on to other kinds of writing and some, like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., have denied that they ever wrote science fiction. Not Asimov, who always remained true to his boyhood love. In his autobiography he described a fancy World Book sales meeting at which the board members were introduced with orchestral motifs: to his chagrin, Asimov was introduced as a science writer by "How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky?" "No matter how various the subject matter I write on," he added, "I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.''
In an interview in 1979, I said to him that his autobiography revealed a great deal of loyalty to what he was, to the boy he was, and to what science fiction had meant to him when he discovered it. Asimov replied that he had deliberately not abandoned his origins. He had made up his mind when he was quite young, and said it in print, that no matter what happened to him or where he went, he would never deny his origins as a science-fiction writer and never break his connection to science fiction, and he never did.
He considered loyalty a prime virtue. In 1976 when he started Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, he told publisher Joel Davis that he wouldn't give up his Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction science articles.
I probably bore everybody with my endless repetition of how much I owe to John Campbell, because I figure I would rather bore them than be disloyal in my own mind. It is the easiest thing in the world to forget the ladder you climb or to be embarrassed at the thought that there was a time when somebody had to help you. The tendency is to minimize this, minimize that, and I'm normal enough and human enough to do the same thing if it were left to itself, but this is a matter of having once made a vow and sticking to it.
He pointed out that it was inconvenient to always have to tell people that Campbell made up the Three Laws of Robotics, and the more important the Three Laws became the more he wanted to be the originator and take the credit, but he couldn't. "Why this is so I never really thought about. I guess I like to think about it only as a matter of virtue. I don't consider myself a particularly virtuous person, but I like to think I have some virtues, of which loyalty is one."
Possibly, however, his insistence on being considered a science-fiction writer is like his relationship to his racial origins. He says he is not a good Jew. Asimov attended no Jewish religious functions, followed no Jewish rituals, obeyed no Jewish dietary laws, and yet he never, under any circumstances, left any doubt that he was Jewish.
I really dislike Judaism. . . . It's a form of particularly pernicious nationalism. I don't want humanity divided into these little groups that are firmly convinced, each one, that it is better than the others. Judaism is the prototype of the "I'm better than you" group we are the ones who invented this business of the only God. It's not just that we have our God and you have your God, but we have the only God. I feel a deep and abiding historic guilt about that. And every once in a while, when I'm not careful, I think that
the reason Jews have been persecuted as much as they have has been to punish them for having invented this pernicious doctrine.
Asimov suggested that because he felt that in some ways he had been a traitor to Judaism ("which I try to make up for by making sure that everyone knows I'm a Jew, so while I'm deprived of the benefits of being part of a group, I make sure that I don't lose any of the disadvantages, because no one should think that I'm denying my Judaism in order to gain certain advantages"), he made up his mind that he was not going to be disloyal in any other way. "I'm not saying I believe this," he concluded, "but this is the sort of thing that people do work up for reasons, and, after all, I'm imaginative enough to think up such reasons, too. . . . I don't guarantee it's correct."
The characteristic that began to appear in Asimov's science fiction, that gave his writing its unique quality and made it so typically Campbellian as well as Asimovian, was its rationality. Asimov agreed with Randall Garrett's assessment that the relationship between Asimov and Campbell was symbiotic. In the interview Asimov commented that he must have been the perfect foil for Campbell.
On the one hand, I was close to him. I lived right in town and I could see him every week. And, for another, I could endure him. I imagine that a great many other writers found him too rich for their blood at least to sit there and listen to him hour after hour. But I was fortunate in the sense that he was in some ways a lot like my father. I had grown up listening to my father pontificate in much the same way that John did, and so I was quite at home. I suppose if you took all the time that I sat there listening to John and put it all together, it was easily a week's worth of just listening to him talk. Day and night, 168 hours. And I remember everything he said and how he thought and I did my best because I desperately wanted to sell stories to him to incorporate his method of thinking into my stories, which, of course, also had my method of thinking, with the result that somehow I caught the Campbell flavor.
The Campbell flavor was the solution of problems. Much of Asimov's early writing did not quite capture that quality of problem-solving that became characteristic of his later work; those stories were less successful, neither identifiably Asimovian nor distinguished science fiction. His first published story had it, "Marooned Off Vesta," and later it would find its best expression in the robot stories and the Foundation stories, among his early science-fiction successes, and, of course, in the science-fiction mystery novels that came so naturally just before he switched to writing non-fiction, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun.
I made these suggestions to Asimov, and he agreed that they seemed right. "Certainly the stories that really satisfied me and made me feel good about my writing were my robot stories, and the robot stories, of course, virtually every one of them, had a situation in which a robot which couldn't go wrong did go wrong. And we had to find out what had gone wrong, how to correct it, within the absolute limits of the three laws. This was just the sort of thing I loved to do."
At its most typical, in "Nightfall" for example, Asimov's science fiction demonstrates the triumph of reason, or the struggle of reason to triumph, over various kinds of circumstances including irrational or emotional responses to situations. If reason is going to prove superior as an approach to life, the mystery is the natural form in which that superiority will be demonstrated.
Asimov has said that his villains generally are as rational as his heroes. "In other words, it's not even a triumph of rationality over irrationality or over emotion, at least not in my favorite stories. It's generally a conflict between rationalities and the superior winning. If it were a western, where everything depends upon the draw of the gun, it would be very unsatisfactory if the hero shot down a person who didn't know how to shoot."
Growing up as he did, excelling at intellectual pursuits but uneasy in personal relationships in which he found himself ignorant of the proper thing to do or uncertain how the other person would respond, Asimov found himself coping in a variety of ways. One way, which he adopted when he was young, was to distance himself from the rest of the world with wit: to the end he delighted in puns and wordplay, which found their most typical expression in personal banter with his friends but also enlivened his limericks and verse parodies and displayed themselves in the titles of and occasional lines in articles and stories. Another way to cope was to demonstrate his greater knowledge or superior mind. His adoption of these two characteristics gave him a reputation as a smart-aleck and a know-it-all with a mission to enlighten everyone around him.
Asimov gave as an example of his behavior the assignment of Leigh Hunt's "Abou Ben Adhem" in his high-school English class. Anticipating the teacher's question about the last line ("And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest"), his hand shot up, and he answered the inevitable question, "Why did Ben Adhem's name lead all the rest?" with Alpha"betical order, sir?" He was sent to the principal, but he felt the quip was worth it.
Asimov finally gave up his mission to educate the masses. He traced his decision to a time when he was in the Army in Hawaii, waiting for the H-bomb tests at Bikini. A couple of soldiers in the barracks were listening to a third explain, inaccurately, how the atom bomb worked.
Wearily, I put down my book and began to get to my feet so I could go over and assume the smart man's burden and educate them.
Halfway to my feet. I thought: Who appointed you their educator? Is it going to hurt them to be wrong about the atom bomb?
And I returned, contentedly, to my book.
This does not mean I turned with knife-edge suddenness and became another man. It's just that I was a generally disliked know-it-all earlier in my life, and I am a generally liked person (I believe) who is genial and a nonpusher later in my life. . . .
Why? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps it was my surrender of the child-prodigy status. Perhaps it was my feeling that I had grown up, I had proved myself, and I no longer had to give everyone a headache convincing them that I was, too, smart.
One other way in which Asimov learned to cope socially was his adoption of a flirtatious attitude toward women all women what he called his "all-embracing suavity," by which he meant that he was willing to embrace any female within range and usually did. From a gauche, inexperienced, tentative young man he turned into a good-natured, public Casanova with a "penchant for making gallant suggestions to the ladies." Yet Asimov speculated about his behavior as an adult that "you don't really change much as you get older." The uncertain young man might still have been there inside the "all-embracing" older one.
Asimov denied being anything other than direct and clear in his writing, and that may apply to his personal life as well. Certainly he was open about his life, even on those matters that most people are most closed about: money and sex and, more important to Asimov, his writing. I asked him in our interview if his disclaimer of knowledge about the craft of writing wasn't a pose. Clearly, he had thought about it, I pointed out. He had criticized other people's stories in his teenage letters-to-the-editor days; he had noticed Clifford Simak's way of leaving space to indicate a break between scenes and, after having had it explained, had adopted it himself; he had even attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference a couple of times as a member of the faculty. Asimov responded that he did not deliberately set up a pose. He really thought he did not know much about writing, but, as he pointed out in an afterword to the collection of essays about his work edited by Martin Greenberg and Joseph Olander titled Asimov, "without very much in the way of conscious thinking I manage to learn from what I read and what I hear."
As the young Asimov became the older Asimov (still in his late youth, as he would say), what he had been became what he was, either conditioned by his early experience or in reaction to it. Asimov recognized both processes. In one sense he was a rational man in an irrational world, puzzled at humanity's responses to change, unable to understand humanity's inability to see the clear necessity, if it is to survive, to control population and pollution and eliminate war, still assuming "the smart man's burden" t
o educate the bewilderingly uneducable, even taken aback at times when the people he dealt with behaved irrationally.
Joseph Patrouch, in his The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1974), commented that Asimov had not written in his fiction on the subjects about which he was most concerned, the subjects he wrote on in his non-fiction and spoke about in his public talks: pollution, overpopulation, and so forth. I asked Asimov about this, saying that in his talks and articles and books he seemed to exhibit a kind of alarm about our world situation that was not in his fiction a kind of public despair that contrasted with his fictional optimism. In his science writing he tried to persuade by showing the terrible consequences of what would happen if people do not act, and in his science fiction he tried to persuade by showing how the problems could be solved. Asimov agreed.
