by Isaac Asimov
Apparently, he had never gotten over the habit, because I found,
when I received the galleys, that he had cut, pruned, and wrenched my book into what he thought was “shape.” I objected strenuously. Since I was still working on the last part of the book when I received the galleys of the first part (that was one reason the book was published so quickly), I threatened to stop work on the book unless he stopped his shenanigans.
He did, to an extent, but even so, when the book came out it was
sufficiently different from what I had written to make it impossible for me to look it in the face. Despite its huge financial success, I hated the book and to this day have a feeling of nausea when I see it on my shelf.
A second villainy that Svirsky committed was to get George Beadle to write a foreword. Beadle was a great geneticist and a Nobel laureate, but I didn’t want anyone to introduce any of my books. In time to come, I introduced a hundred books, at least, for other people, but I feel no need to have anyone introduce one of mine. Svirsky started the second volume by saying that scientific advance had all but wiped out the distinction between life and nonlife. It was his statement, not mine, and of course it was vulnerable to denunciation.
Barry Commoner denounced it, for instance. He attacked the book in a totally overreactive way in a major article in Science. I was caught by the headline, glanced over the first few paragraphs, and was almost knocked over when I realized he was denouncing my book. His most stupid remark was to ask what would happen to biology as a science if the distinction between life and nonlife was wiped out.
I wrote a brief and reasoned response (which Science dutifully printed) in which I pointed out that Copernicus, over four centuries ago, had wiped out the distinction between Earth and the other planets—and what had happened to geology as a result? Nothing.
Years later, I met Commoner, or at least sat at the opposite end of a long table from him. The discussion was on atmospheric pollution (Commoner being an environmentalist of note) and I endured the cigarettes as best I could. But when Commoner pulled out a large cigar and lit it, I was out the door.
I then wrote a letter to the people who had arranged the meeting and expressed my contempt for environmentalists who talked in high-flown terms about a clean atmosphere even as they polluted it with tobacco smoke. I received no answer.
But I digress. The subject is Svirsky. I had agreed to do another book for him even while I was working on the Guide to Science. This was to be a short one on the discovery of the various elements. It was called The Search for the Elements and was published by Basic Books in 1962. I wrote this second book before I had quite realized Svirsky’s lust to rewrite. The result was that he also manhandled the second book and that was that. I steadfastly refused to write any other books for him. He yelled at me on the phone, but that didn’t move me.
Indexes
The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science reintroduced me to the difficulty of index preparation.
A nonfiction book that is a systematic study of one topic is useless without an index, and the first index I ever prepared was that for Biochemistry and Human Metabolism, our ill-fated textbook. No one ever taught me how to do indexes, nor did I ever seek instruction. I did it according to my own system, which is probably close enough to what people are supposed to do.
I take an incredible number of blank 3x 5 cards and go through the page proofs of the book, writing down each topic in the fashion that people might conceivably look it up, limiting myself to not more than one subheading, and noting the page on which it appeared. Then I alphabetize all the cards, consolidating all those with the same item into one card with all the different pages on it. Then I type up the whole thing.
In recent years I’ve been urged to use a computer for the purpose, but I resist. I like fooling around with the cards, alphabetizing and consolidating them. That kind of nitpicky sort of thing amuses me. Besides, as I sometimes say, “Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.”
With The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, it was clear the indexing would take days. It was not nearly as bad as the later volumes of the textbook, but there was a difference. The textbook index I did at school, and the family was unaware of the work. By the time I was working on the Guide to Science there was no school and I worked at home. The easiest way of doing it was to spread out the page proofs and the cards in the living room in the evening, while we were watching television, so that I didn’t waste too much writing time. The television only required half a brain, as did the index, so I could do both together comfortably. The only trouble, however, was that I was converting a time of recreation into a time of business and I suspect the family resented that.
One problem with a book that deals with contemporary science is that in a very few years it becomes ludicrously out of date, and the pressure to prepare a new edition starts rising. The actual preparation was not too odious a task, for it didn’t catch me completely by surprise, and in the case of the Guide to Science I kept notes on scientific advances I would have to include in a new edition.
When it was clear that the second edition could not be delayed, I found out that Svirsky had retired to Florida.
I agreed to do a second edition, adding new data to the book, putting back all the good stuff Svirsky had taken out, and cutting out all the felicities he had put in. What’s more, I managed to imply to the new editor that I would not welcome any changes but the merely cosmetic. The second edition was published by Basic Books as The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science in 1965.
Happy ending? Not quite. Even though the bulk of the second edition was more or less identical with the first, the new material had to be indexed, and the page numbers of all the old material had been changed. In short, a new index, even more elaborate than that of the first edition, had to be prepared. The editor talked me into using an index specialist to do the index. It cost me $500, for Basic Books did not pay the indexer themselves but took it out of my royalties, and it was a rotten index. It wasn’t even successfully alphabetized. The result was that I could never bear the second edition any more than the first. It was not till a third edition was published by Basic Books in 1972 that I finally had one that was both written my way and indexed my way and that I could look at and use pleasurably.
In 1984, I prepared still another index for the fourth edition. I don’t know if there will ever be a fifth. I think I’ve gotten too old for the task. Of course, I don’t want the book to die. I want a fifth edition and a sixth and so on indefinitely, but it will have to be done by others, and (pardon my conceit) I doubt they will ever again find a single person to do it. It will take a consortium.
Titles
I’m pretty careful about titles. I always believe that a short title is better than a long title and I like (when possible) to have one-word titles such as “Nightfall” or Foundation. What’s more, I like to have a title that describes the content of the story without giving it away, but which, when the story is finished, is seen by the reader to take on an added significance.
For that reason, I dislike the manner in which editors sometimes change the title to suit their personal tastes. For instance, my first robot story was called “Robbie”; that was the name given to the robot nursemaid by the little girl he took care of. Its use emphasized the emotional content of the story. Fred Pohl changed it to “Strange Playfellow,” which contributed nothing. The story has appeared dozens of times since in dozens of places and always under my title of “Robbie.”
A more egregious example is that of “The Ugly Little Boy.” Horace Gold thought the word “Ugly” was a downer and changed it to “Last-Born,” which was ridiculous. “Ugly” is essential. The little hero of the story is an ugly little boy because he is a Neanderthal child, yet in the end, he receives the kind of love that means more than life and the reader sympathizes. The story would have no meaning if the boy had been pretty. But go explain subtle points to Horace!
I can live with title changes in storie
s, because I can almost always change them back when I place them in one of my collections. Sometimes, however, I do accept editors’ titles when I consider them an improvement. I wrote a story for Fred Pohl once which I called “The Last Tool.” This was a significant title, but Fred changed it to “Founding Father,” which was so much better that I was chagrined at
not having thought of it myself. It appeared in the October 1965 Galaxy and it has kept that title ever since.
Book titles are more important, for they tend to be permanent. Even there I managed to change The Death Dealers into A Whiff of Death. This is inconvenient, though. I sometimes have to explain the situation to readers who think they are two different books and want a copy of each.
The subject of book titles came up after T. O’Conor Sloane of Doubleday (who was the grandson of the man who succeeded Hugo Gernsback as editor of Amazing) suggested I prepare a book of short biographies of about 250 important scientists to fit a series of books they were doing on musicians, artists, philosophers, and other intellectual groupings.
I was willing, but the book grew in my hands (as books often do). I did the biographies, not of 250, but of 1,000 scientists, explorers, and inventors, and the biographies were longer than they should have been. Furthermore, instead of listing them in alphabetical order I listed them in chronological order of birth. After all, science is a cumulative subject, while music, art, and philosophy are not.
It ended as a book much longer than Doubleday had counted on, but they took it without a murmur and did it my way.
It proved to be a book that required a pair of enormous indexes (one of names and one of subjects discussed), but I had numbered the biographies and keyed the indexes to the number of the biography rather than to the number of the page. That meant I could prepare the index from the manuscript while I was hot and hand it in with the manuscript. I did not have to wait months for the page proofs.
I wanted to call the book A Biographical History of Science, which was the shortest way of describing the book accurately. Sloane, however, insisted on adding “and technology” to the title, though I thought that was unnecessary. Furthermore, Sloane maintained that “history” was a bad word that would slow sales. He insisted on substituting “encyclopedia,” though I objected to it as a misrepresentation. Finally, he appended “Asimov’s” to the whole.
The title of the book was therefore Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (Doubleday, 1964). Two more editions have been prepared since, each time with a completely new index.
I must admit I swallowed the clumsiness of the title because of the first word. Sloane said that the salesmen insisted it would sell better if my name was in the title and that flattered me past imagining. It turns out that this conception of my name as something magic has becomeprevalent. There are over sixty of my books that have my name somewhere in the title.
Well, come on, how can I not be pleased? It shows that the publishers expect people to accept me as a name that can be attached to any kind of book—science fiction, mysteries, science books, humanities books, anthologies—as a guarantee of quality.
Essay Collections
I continued to gather various short stories into collections. During the 1960s, Doubleday published three of them: The Rest of the Robots (1964), Asimov’s Mysteries (1968), and Nightfall and Other Stories (1969).
The New English Library also published a collection of four of my stories, a collection not for sale in the United States. This was Through a Glass, Clearly in 1967.
Since then I have continued to publish story collections in rather large numbers and they tend to overlap. I have individual stories that appear, so far, in as many as five different collections. This does not seem to be fair, really. One can imagine readers buying a collection and finding that they have read all, or almost all, the individual stories in it. My conscience did pang a litde over the matter, especially when one important science fiction writer (admittedly not one with a sunny disposition) remarked, more or less sarcastically, that I was a master at recirculating my products.
However, there is a rationale behind it.
Books are mortal. A hardcover is likely to go out of print after a couple of years. A paperback can be buried in the crowds of other paperbacks that are continually inundating the stands. It happens, then, that when a reader writes to ask where he can find a particular story of mine that he wants to read (or reread), I am in a quandary. I can’t refer him to the original issue of the magazine in which it appeared. Except in a few private collections and in a few specialty back-number shops, such issues are simply unavailable.
If I give him the name of a collection in which the story appeared, that, too, may be unobtainable. Yes, there are secondhand bookstores, but if I may say so without being instantly pilloried as a monster of vanity, my books rarely appear there. People who own my books tend to keep them. A new collection, then, containing some recent stories, plus some of the old reliables for those who can’t find them elsewhere, would seem to be in order.
Then, too, they say that among science fiction readers, a generation is three years long. In other words, after three years, there are a large number of new readers who have never read, and may never even have heard of, the old stories. To them a collection of my stories is new even if some of them, to veterans, would seem like old chestnuts.
The most important reason for preparing endless overlapping collections, however, is that they sell. Publishers are willing to do them for that reason and I have no objection to that.
But if my stories can be collected and re-collected to the profit of readers, publishers, and me, what about my nonfiction essays, which I was producing in quantities even greater than my fiction?
I had actually produced such an essay collection rather early on. This was Only a Trillion (Abelard-Schuman, 1957). This contained a number of the science essays I had published in ASF, but I was not entirely satisfied with them. My ASF essays were tailored for John Campbell and they seemed to me to be rather stiff and formal.
The essays I was writing for F&SF, on the other hand, I wrote without any editorial interference at all, and they existed solely to please me. They were informal and, for the most part, lighthearted. I felt that they would be much better examples of what I could do than the ASF essays had been. What’s more, I wanted a major publisher to do them.
In 1957, I had met Austin Olney, editor of the juvenile division of Houghton Mifflin, Boston’s most important publishing house. He was my age, slim, good-looking, with deep-set eyes, and although a true Boston Brahmin, he had absolutely none of the superciliousness and arrogance supposedly associated with them. He was a sweet, amiable person, and we have remained friends ever since.
Many’s the time I was to have lunch with him at the fabled Locke-Ober’s restaurant in Boston. I love tripe, something few people do, apparently, and I always ordered tripe with mustard sauce. But the time came when I was to leave Boston and after nineteen years I returned with Janet and we were put up in a hotel near Locke-Ober’s. Jubilantly, I took her there and ordered my tripe with mustard sauce, and although it was still on the menu, they no longer made it. I could have broken down and cried. I suppose that with me gone, no one ever ordered it.
In any case, Houghton Mifflin was soon publishing several science books of mine, the first being Realm of Numbers in 1959, a book which dealt with arithmetic, from addition to transfinite numbers, for junior high school students. Austin was kind enough to send me a proof of the cover and to ask me for my opinion. I phoned him and I said I approved highly, except for one thing.
Austin didn’t know me thoroughly as yet and he decided that I must be one of those author’s (of whom editors are very wary) who feel like art critics and try to dictate the nature of the cover. Actually, I couldn’t care less. My only interest is the inside of a book.
At hearing that I had a point of disapproval, the temperature dropped fifty degrees instantly. Austin said, coldly, “What don’t you like
about it?”
I said, “Well, I hate to mention it and, undoubtedly, it’s a small thing I shouldn’t worry about, but you spelled my name wrong.”
Of course, they had to redo the cover. Austin was very apologetic.
In any case, in 1961 I came to him with a bunch of F&SF essays. Since they were intended for adults, Austin passed them on to the adult division, which rejected them. Austin, embarrassed, offered to publish them as a juvenile book, if I would consent to simplify them. Not in a million years, I said, but no hard feelings, and took them to Doubleday.
Tim Seldes was not exactly enthusiastic, but neither did he want to turn me down, so that my first book of F&SF essays was published by Doubleday in 1962 as Fact and Fancy.
Tim knew me quite well by this time, so he warned me not to compile another collection of science essays until he had a chance to see how well Fact and Fancy sold. I could see the justice in this, so although I was eager to go on, I held back.
However, Fact and Fancy earned back its advance with startling speed and a somewhat amazed Tim said, “All right, Asimov, I’ll take
another.” As a matter of fact, before the 1960s were over, Doubleday had published seven of my essay collections, and they’ve been continuing to do so ever since. All my F&SF essays eventually find their way into one collection or another, except for seven very early ones, and some find their way into more than one collection. (Yes, I recycle my essays also.) Many of my essays from sources other than F&SF have also been collected. All told, I have nearly forty books of science essays.
