by Isaac Asimov
One final point must be made about Biochemistry. It was only my eighth book (and my first nonfiction book, which is a point in its favor where I am concerned) and it had not yet occurred to me that the actual number of my books was a matter of concern or interest.
Consequently, the second and third editions, although each required more work than the average fiction book, were not added to my list as separate books. Later in my career I always considered a substantially revised book to be a new book on the basis of the work it required. This failure to count the two later editions means that if I should feel myself to be unable to work further and if I knew it meant that I would end with, say, 498 books, I would be annoyed at having
not counted those two editions and having in that way deprived myself of the full count of 500. However, this is an incredibly trivial point which can seem important to me, but, I’m sure, can only amuse others.
Novels
Despite all this bother about research, scientific papers, and textbooks, the chief labors that involved me during my teaching years remained the writing of science fiction. Even before Pebble in the S&jy was published, Walter Bradbury asked me to do another novel. I did and sent in two sample chapters. The trouble was that now that I was a published writer, I tried to be literary, as I had in that never-to-be-forgotten writing class in high school. Not nearly as badly, of course, but badly enough. Brad gentiy sent those two chapters back and put me on the right track.
“Do you know,” he said, “how Hemingway would say, ‘The sun rose the next morning’?” “No,” I said, anxiously (I had never read Hemingway). “How
would he say it, Brad?”
Brad said, “He would say, ‘The sun rose the next morning.’ “
That was enough. It was the best literary lesson I ever had and it took just ten seconds. I did my second novel, which was The Stars, Like Dust—, writing it plainly, and Brad took it. This is the list of my Doubleday novels in the 1950s:
Pebble in the Sky, 1950 The Stars, Like Dust—, 1951 The Currents of Space, 1952 The Caves of Steel, 1954 The End of Eternity, 1955 The Naked Sun, 1957
Of these six novels, the first three made up what were eventually to be lumped together as “the Empire novels.” The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun were the first two of my “robot novels,” which introduced the detective team of Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw. (Daneel was a humaniform robot and possibly the most popular character in all my writings.) As for The End of Eternity, that was an independent novel with no connections.
In addition to this, Brad asked me in 1951 to write a short science fiction novel for youngsters, one that could be adapted to the television scene. It was to be about a Space Ranger and was to be for television what the Lone Ranger had been for radio. No one quite understood the new medium, and it was taken for granted that programs on TV would be as long-lived as those on radio had been. It seemed that, if it worked out, a Space Ranger character would serve as a long-term annuity for both Doubleday and me. (Of course, we didn’t know how few programs would run for even one season, let alone for twenty, but we also didn’t know about reruns.)
I was less than enthusiastic. I feared that television would ruin any stories of mine they used and that my literary reputation would suffer. Brad had the answer. “Use a pseudonym.”
At the time I was a great Cornell Woolrich fan, and I knew he had adopted William Irish as a pseudonym. I thought I would use a nationality too, and so I used the name of Paul French. It was a terrible mistake. Of course, nothing happened as far as television adaptation was concerned. Another program, Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, beat us to it and was just as terrible as I feared television would make such things. And besides this, people took to saying that “Isaac Asimov writes science fiction under the name of Paul French,” as though I were trying to protect my respectable persona as a scientist by hiding the fact that I was also writing cheap thrillers. You have no idea how that bothered me.
In any case, I was relieved that television left us alone, and since my first juvenile did fairly well simply as a book, I did five others before stopping. I began by calling my hero David Starr. Something more glamorous was asked for, so I substituted his nickname and made him Lucky Starr. I began by having him a semi-mystical Space Ranger with a mask of radiation, but I dropped that quickly and instead made use of elements associated with my stories—such as positronic robots. I
wanted to make no secret of my authorship and in later editions I
insisted on having my name on it to bury the hated Paul French forever.
Here are my six Lucky Starr books:
David Starr: Space Ranger, 1952
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, 1953
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, 1954
Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury, 1956
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, 1957
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn, 1958
Writing the novels, whether adult or juvenile, did not keep me from writing shorter pieces for the magazines. My own favorite among all my magazine stories, “The Last Question,” appeared in 1956, and my third favorite, “The Ugly Little Boy,” appeared (under the horrible title of “Last-Born”) in 1958. (My second favorite was not written till the 1970s and I’ll get to it later on.)
By this time, Doubleday no longer objected to collections of my shorter pieces, and in the 1950s they published three such collections:
The Martian Way and Other Stories, 1955
Earth Is Room Enough, 1957
Nine Tomorrows, 1959
Add to these the four Gnome Press books, I, Robot and the three Foundation novels, which Doubleday was soon to take over, and it turns out that during the 1950s I wrote 32 books, of which 19, all science fiction, were Doubleday’s. The remaining books were not.
What startled me most from almost the very start of the 1950s was the effect of these books on my income. For the eleven years in which I had been writing exclusively for the magazines, I was accustomed to single payments and then nothing (except for tiny sums for anthologization—something I’ll come to later).
Books, however, earned royalties and continued to earn royalties. Not only did the books continue to sell for a few years but there was a constant drizzle of subsidiary rights—second serial, paperback, foreign. By the time The Stars, Like Dust— was published and began earning royalties, I was still getting some money for Pebble in the Sky. By the time my third novel began earning royalties, there was still money coming in from the first two, and so on. As a matter of fact,
since Pebble was published I have received eighty semiannual statements from Doubleday, and Pebble has earned a respectable amount of money on every one without exception.
The result was that my royalty statements from Doubleday tended to climb steadily (as they did from other publishing houses too, but less steeply). In no time at all, I realized that I could make a living writing. In fact, by 1958 (a crucial year at the school), I was making three times as much money from my writing as I did from the school. You can well imagine that that increased my feeling of independence.
It also gave me something to think about. Had I gambled on the first book, broken my word to the medical school, and stayed in New York, I now realized, I would indeed have been able to support myself by writing alone. I had had no need of a job. (In fact, I never again had the need of a job.)
By the middle 1950s, I was wondering if I ought not to quit my job and return to New York. Prudence still won the day. What if Double-day for some reason abandoned its science fiction line? What if I suddenly got writer’s block? I felt the psychological need, if not the financial need, of a secure base, of a salary, even a small one, that was not subject to the insecure fluctuations of writing. (Besides, I still didn’t want to give up my lecturing or my professorial title.)
However, I felt strong enough to threaten to resign if I was not taken out of Lemon’s clutches and put on a salary paid out by the school. I had my way, and t
hat meant that I could put an end altogether to my research, and that my school income was independent of the vicissitudes of grants.
Nonfiction
All the time I was at the medical school, I wrote my science fiction evenings, weekends, and holidays. I never wrote science fiction during school hours, however pressing my deadlines, for that would have been unethical. I wasn’t being paid for writing science fiction.
I was, however, paid for scholarly activities, and it struck me that when I wasn’t teaching, I could do either research or scientific writing. Either would redound to the benefit of the school. That was the reasoning that made it possible for me to work on the two textbooks on school time without any pangs of conscience.
But what could I do when I was neither teaching nor working on the texts? I didn’t want to do research. I wanted to write and that meant nonfiction. I felt free to do so once I had gotten out from under Lemon (who had been livid, and with some justification, over my work on the textbook).
The question was: What could I write?
The idea that occurred to me was to write the type of article I wrote for The Journal of Chemical Education, but to make it longer, more informal, more jovial, if I may use the term, and yet keep it strictly scientific. Thus, I had written a brief article for The Journal of Chemical Education on the number of different ways a protein molecule could be built out of hundreds of different amino acids of twenty different types. (The number of ways is more than astronomical. It is inconceivable.)
I proceeded to write another article on the subject, much longer and more informal, and called it “Hemoglobin and the Universe.” My intention was to sell it to ASF, which printed science articles that were imaginative enough to appeal to science fiction readers. Camp
bell took it and it appeared in the February 1955 issue of the magazine. “Hemoglobin and the Universe” was the first science essay I wrote and published for which I received payment. I discovered, to my surprise, that writing such an article took less time, was easier, and was much more fun to boot than writing a science fiction piece of equal length. (And I didn’t have to plot anything. The material was factual.) It opened the floodgates, for from then on, I was eager to write essays on science or, occasionally, on nonscientific topics, and, indeed, by the present time I have written, quite literally, thousands of such pieces. A peculiar advantage to writing nonfiction was this: When I was working on fiction, I could deal with only one story or novel at a time. To try to write two of them simultaneously would surely lead to a confusion of characters and events. Nonfiction pieces, however, were sharply different. If I were writing on vitamins in one essay and on stellar evolution in the other, there was no chance of confusing the two. I discovered I could work on many nonfiction pieces at once, switching from one to the other as it suited my convenience. Nor were essays the only form of nonfiction that I could write. Boyd, who had stumbled me into the textbook disaster, now made up for it. A small publisher wanted him to write a book for teenagers on biochemistry. Boyd didn’t feel up to it, and suggested that I do it instead. I accepted eagerly. I wanted to write for youngsters and had actually made stabs at this sort of thing, but had aimed too high and had not been able to persuade Little, Brown to publish such a book. Now I had a publisher and I realized that I was going to write it at
the level of the bright junior high school youngster. I produced a book called The Chemicals of Life, published by Abelard-Schuman in 1954.
It was the first nonfiction book I published for the general public and it too opened the floodgates, for I wrote many more books of this type thereafter. Although my novels take me seven to nine months to write, The Chemicals of Life took me only six weeks. I could only ask myself, “Hey, how long has this been going on.”
During the 1950s, I wrote eight such books for Abelard-Schuman. They were:
The Chemicals of Life, 1954 (biochemistry)
Races and People, 1955 (genetics)
Inside the Atom, 1956 (nuclear physics)
Building Blocks of the Universe, 1957 (chemistry)
Only a Trillion, 1957 (science essays)
The World of Carbon, 1958 (organic chemistry)
The World of Nitrogen, 1958 (organic chemistry)
The Clock We Live On, 1959 (astronomy)
As you see, I was beginning to exercise my range.
Children
Despite the fact that the 1950s seemed filled with medical school affairs, textbooks, popular science books, and enormous quantities of science fiction, I still had a private life, a marriage, and even (to my astonishment) children.
I might as well be frank and explain that I don’t like children. When I was quite young, my mother got the idea into her head somehow that I loved babies and children. Perhaps she thought she was subtly training me to supply her with grandchildren someday. In any case, whenever a customer brought a child under five into the candy store, my mother would ululate, “Oh, Isaac loves children,” and I would be pushed forward in order to be visibly gratified.
It was a terrible ordeal for me. One glance gives me all I want to know about a baby. Additional glances are unprofitable. If the children are old enough to be freely mobile, I am anxious to keep my distance. Such children are overactive, overnoisy, and invariably undercontrolled. They are also likely to have sticky fingers and unsettled stomachs. I want to have nothing to do with them.
It is not surprising, then, that when I married I had no specific plans for having children. Nor did Gertrude. We might very well have settled down to a childless existence, and why not? The greatest single
problem facing humanity today is the multiplicity of people. No environmental problem can possibly be solved till the population is stabilized and brought under control. Under these circumstances, it would seem that any young couple who were indifferent to children and showed no disposition to add to Earth’s burden ought to be encouraged and made much of.
The truth, however, is quite the contrary. The world would not let us be childless. People who met us invariably asked if we had children, and when we said we didn’t, they would look at us with disapproval or with sorrow. Our fellow young marrieds, one by one, had children and then would talk of nothing else but the joys of parenthood. (In my more cynical moments, I wondered if they were so appalled by the expense, the work, and the responsibility of parenthood that they were infuriated at our having escaped it, and therefore did their best to inveigle us into the trap.)
Since we were only human, we were not proof against the propaganda and the pressure, and we began to try for children. For some years, we failed, and, apparently, with good cause. Gertrude’s periods were radically irregular, and when I visited the doctor, it turned out I had a low sperm count. We could still have children, but the chances for doing so were less than normal.
As a result, we resigned ourselves (without too much difficulty) to continuing to lead child-free lives. I bought a primitive recording device so that I could dictate my stories, with the thought that Gertrude would then type them up and we could, in this way, have a collaborative career.
I often wonder what would have happened if that had indeed come to pass. Would we have grown closer? Would the marriage have been a happier one? There’s no way of telling, for we had no chance to try it out. I had dictated three stories, which she typed up (all of them sold; all of them were successful), and then, as you can probably guess, she became pregnant, and the possibility of a child-free, collaborative career vanished.
It took a doctor’s test to convince us that Gertrude was pregnant and even after that we went about in a land of daze of disbelief until Gertrude began to display obvious physical signs of the condition.
And, in the due course of time, I found myself the amazed and not entirely gratified father of a son, David.
David
David was born on August 20, 1951. It was a difficult delivery and he weighed less than six pounds. (I think it is a well-established fact that the children of smoking mothers, especially if
they smoke during pregnancy, which Gertrude certainly did, tend to be underweight at birth.)
It early became apparent that David could not play with other children on a give-and-take basis and could not make friends. As he grew older, we found that school was an unhappy period for him because he tended to be scapegoated. Still later in life, it appeared he could not keep a job because he could not get along with his fellow employees.
All this I accepted with a certain resignation, for I recognized the condition. I had been exactly like that. In fact, even at the time David was a child and I was teaching at the medical school, I couldn’t get along with people, so that my job was constantly at risk.
What David didn’t have, however, was my quick intelligence. He was perfectiy normal in mental capacity, you understand, and not retarded in any way. (We didn’t take chances. We had him tested neurologically and consulted psychiatrists.) But normality is not enough when one is socially inept. I got away with my ineptness only through my display of brilliance and even so I barely made it.
Mind you, he is a good and loving person, ordinarily gentle and understanding. He does have a tendency to become mulish when crossed (so do I) and does not display good judgment at such times.
When he was still in his teens, it was apparent to me that he was not going to be able to support himself in mature life and so I took measures to take care of him by setting up a trust fund for him, so that he is free of economic worries.
