by Isaac Asimov
After that, my friendship with Capp was over. I was polite and even friendly on the rare occasions when we met (I’ve never done anything as rude as to cut or snub anyone, whatever my private opinions might be), but I no longer sought him out.
What bothered me most was that his new attitude made itself strongly felt in “Li’l Abner.” His characterization of “Joaney Phoney” as a stereotype of liberal folksingers was vicious. Worse yet, he began a long series of strips that contained what seemed to me to be very thinly veiled attacks on African-Americans.
I grew angrier and angrier at this perversion (in my opinion anyway) of a comic strip I had loved. I was finally sufficiently irritated to write a one-sentence protest to the Boston Globe, which ran the strip. It went: “Am I the only one who’s grown tired of Al Capp’s antiblack propaganda in his comic strip ‘Li’l Abner’?”
On September 9, 1968, the Globe ran the letter inside a ruled rectangle that made it very prominent indeed. I was fatuously pleased, not thinking what the consequences might be.
The next day, at 3 P.M., Al Capp called. He had seen the Globe and he said, “Hello, Isaac, what makes you think I’m anti-black?” I replied, in surprise, “Why, Al, I’ve heard you talk on the subject. I know you are.”
He said, “But can you prove it in court?”
My voice quivered. “You mean you’re going to sue me?”
“Darn right—for libel. Unless you call off the Black Panthers.”
“I have nothing to do with the Black Panthers, Al.”
“Then write a letter of apology to the Globe denying I’m antiblack.” I have rarely been put into such a fever of cowardice. I like to
believe myself staunch in upholding my principles, but I had never been in court, I had no experience with that kind of nastiness, and I simply quailed.
I went into my office to type the letter of apology and to grovel and I discovered an amazing thing. I might be a coward, but my fingers were brave as lions. They would not type the letter. No matter how I ordered them to, they wouldn’t. I stared at the blank sheet of paper and finally I gave up. No letter of apology. Let Al Capp do his worst. I called my lawyer.
He laughed and said Al couldn’t sue me without the paper being sued as well for publishing the letter. I said, “But I sent it there precisely in order to have it published.”
And he said, “But no one forced the paper to publish it. You call them.”
I called the paper, and they laughed. They said that Al Capp was a public figure and what he did was a fair target for comment. He couldn’t sue. The same thing, they said, was true of me. (I thought of all the libelous things critics had said of my writing, and I relaxed.) Besides, they said, they would explain to Al that a trial would only publicize his anti-black feelings and he wouldn’t want that.
Sure enough, the paper called me the next day. Just twenty-four hours after Al had made his threat, he backed down, and I never apologized.
I met him once afterward at some large function. I greeted him amiably and there was no reference on either side to the late unpleasantness.
Poor Al! His ending was not happy. The popularity of “Li’l Abner” was declining rapidly, perhaps as a result of what I considered his misuse of it. After all, he lost his liberal constituency and conservatives don’t read anything but the stock reports.
Then, too, he was overshadowed by the young Charles Schulz and his “Peanuts,” which brought a new sophistication to the comic strip that outmoded Al’s slapstick (and Al was openly resentful of this). Finally, a campus scandal involving a girl undergraduate put an end to Capp’s lecture career. After his death in 1970, no one continued the strip.
How I wish that whatever had happened in the mid-1960s to change Al’s views and personality had not happened. The Al Capp imbroglio had a peculiar result. He had called me with his threat, as I said, at 3 P.M., just at the time the junior high school
youngsters were boiling out of school. I was too preoccupied to hear them. The next afternoon, the newspaper call telling me that all was well also came at 3 P.M. I looked for Gertrude to tell her the good news and found her outside lecturing the kids.
I dashed out, full of joviality and human kindness, sent Gertrude inside, gathered the kids around me, put my arms about the two closest, and asked if any of them had ever read one of my stories. A few had and admitted they liked them. I asked if any of them had ever tried to write a story. One lonely hand went up and he admitted it was hard to do.
I said, “Well, I’m trying to write, and if you guys pass the house quietly, it makes it easier for me. How about it?”
One kid said, “Your wife yells at us.”
I looked back at the house to make sure Gertrude was out of earshot because I was sure she wouldn’t understand my next ploy. I stage-whispered, “I have to live with her. How do you suppose I feel?”
There was a loud laugh and instant male bonding. After that, there was no trouble. I made it my business to be outside every once in a while at the time of passing. I’d wave at them with a grin and they would shout back, “How are the stories coming?” It was a real love feast.
Looking back on it, I feel nothing but shame. How could I have allowed my unreasoning dislike for youngsters to grow into feeling that being nasty would achieve more results than being friendly? Why did I have to wait for pure circumstances to teach me something that I already knew at the very core of my being?
I have tried ever since to avoid this mistake, and sometimes it isn’t easy. One evening, after dark, I was heading for a meeting with some friends in a large rambling building. I had to climb a flight of stairs to reach the doorway, but on the steps there stood a group of young men who regarded me solemnly as I approached.
The cowardice within me clamored, “They’re muggers!” (I have never been mugged so far.) My first impulse was to veer away, but I wasn’t going to let myself be swayed by unreasoning fear and I continued on resolutely. I raised my hand in a general greeting as they stared at me at close quarters in the dim light from the building at the head of the stairs.
“Hi, fellows,” I said.
As though the sound of my voice was what they were waiting for, one of the young men said, “Say, aren’t you Isaac Asimov?”
I stopped dead, in surprise. “Yes, I am.”
“I liked the Foundation books,” said the fine young man, while the others smiled in friendly fashion. I thanked them, we shook hands all around, and I went my way, rejoicing.
Oases
It is perfectly possible to write a book that is a critical and financial success and yet to hate it. That was true, as I explained, of the first two editions of The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science.
A similar situation, on a much smaller scale, existed in connection with “Nightfall.” Before its appearance, Campbell added one paragraph toward the very end. It was very poetic but it was not written in my style, and, in my eyes, it was a sheer lump of “non-Asimov.” Moreover, in the paragraph, Campbell mentioned Earth, which I was careful not to mention in the story, because I didn’t want the reader to think of the planet Lagash as alien. Campbell’s one paragraph spoiled the story for me and helped cause my reaction of firm denial whenever people praise it in my hearing as my “best story.”
The situation was rubbed in hard a few years ago, when the science fiction writer Harry Harrison defended me as someone who could write poetically when he chose. To prove it, he quoted Campbell’s paragraph in “Nightfall.” That all but sent me into a decline.
Which brings me to the fact that although in the 1960s and 1970s I turned to the writing of nonfiction, that did not mean I wrote no science fiction whatever. There were oases in the nonfiction desert.” I wrote a number of science fiction stories in that interval. They included some fairly good ones too. There was “Feminine Intuition,” for instance, appearing in the October 1969 F&SF. Then there was “Light Verse,” a short short I wrote for The Saturday Evening Post at their request. It appeared in the Septe
mber-October 1983 issue, and I liked it very much.
I had previously published stories in The Saturday Evening Post (after its revival as a much-diminished shadow of what had once been), but they had all been reprints. The Post asked for an original story, and in order to stress that that was what “Light Verse” was, I told them in a covering letter that it was fresh from the typewriter and had been written that very day.
They replied in wonder that I could have written the story in just one day. I said nothing to that. I felt it wouldn’t do any good to tell them I had written the story in just one hour. People don’t understand what it means to be prolific.
I even wrote science fiction novels in the interval and the first of these was Fantastic Voyage, concerning which there hangs a tale, for it wasn’t really my novel. At least not in my own heart.
A motion picture had been made, entitled Fantastic Voyage, in which a miniaturized submarine with a miniaturized crew wanders through a dying man’s bloodstream in order to cure him from within. A movie script existed and the plan was to have it novelized. Bantam Books, then under Marc Jaffe, owned the paperback rights and they wanted me to write it.
I hesitated. I had never done anything like that before, and I didn’t think I would enjoy writing a novel that, in a sense, was already written. They persuaded me to read the script, however, and I was intrigued. It was an exciting story, and Marc kept buttering me up to the effect that I was the only writer they could trust with it, and so on. As usual, flattery had its effect on me, and I agreed.
It didn’t take me long to write the story, even though I had to spend time correcting a few of the elementary mistakes in the script. (The authors of the movie script assumed that matter was continuous and didn’t understand that when the human beings were miniaturized to bacterial size, the molecules of unminiaturized air would be too large to breathe. Also, at the end they left the submarine in the body because, they said, it had been eaten by a white cell. I had to point out that, eaten or not, it was composed of miniaturized atoms that would expand and disintegrate the man in whom it had been left.)
Despite losing time over the errors, I finished the novelization in only six weeks.
That was the easy part. Much harder was the implementation of my plans for the book. Paperback novelizations of movies are intended as mere throwaways designed to publicize the picture during the course of its run. They are then never heard of again. I was determined that this was not to happen to one of my books. A book of mine might fail and vanish like The Death Dealers, but never on purpose. I therefore made it a condition of writing the book that there be a hardcover edition.
Bantam was willing but they controlled only the paperback rights. I had to find a hardcover publisher on my own. Doubleday wouldn’t do a hardcover book with the paperback rights already gone. (This was still another mistake for them, especially since the day would come, twenty years later, when Doubleday and Bantam would be part of the same corporate entity.)
I therefore persuaded Houghton Mifflin to do it. Austin was dubious as to whether the hardcover would sell at all since the paperback would come out virtually simultaneously. I assured him that in my case hardcover sales were not affected by the presence of paperbacks. I didn’t really know that, but I took a chance, and I was right. The hardcover is still selling now, a quarter of a century later—not in great numbers, I admit, but it’s still selling.
I worked so fast and the movies worked so slowly that the hardcover Fantastic Voyage was published in early 1966, six months before the picture was released. The result was that everyone was convinced the movie was made from the book. This was terribly annoying because I had to follow the screenplay and I was convinced I could have written a better book on my own. I therefore announced in print and in speech that the book came from the movie and not vice versa. I don’t think that helped much.
It was not a bad movie, by the way. For one thing, Raquel Welch was in it, in her first starring role, and she effectively distracted attention from any minor flaws in the film.
The paperback came out at the time the movie was showing in theaters, and to the amazement of Bantam (and of me), it proved not to be a throwaway. It continued to sell long after the film vanished, and, in fact, it continues to sell today after dozens and dozens of reprints. It has sold several million copies. To this day, it sells better than any of my books except the Foundation series.
That doesn’t help make me rich, of course. Since it was not an original work but followed the screenplay very closely, I was offered a flat sum of $5,000. Eventually, when Marc Jaffe admitted it had done far better than expected, I got an additional $2,500.
I had insisted on a royalty arrangement for the hardcover, one-quarter of tlie usual royalties going to me, three-quarters to Hollywood. What’s more, I insisted on receiving my share directly and not through Hollywood. That was intelligent of me, for I have every reason to think that if Hollywood had received all the royalties, I would never in this world have seen a penny of it.
I do not like Fantastic Voyage and it is one of the few books with my name on it that I wouldn’t dream of rereading. This is not because I got so little money for something that proved a runaway, long-time best-seller. Since the book was not original with me, I don’t feel I deserve more than I got. The point about the book is that it is not mine.
Six years later came The Gods Themselves. It was the greatest oasis in the desert of the 1960s and 1970s, since it was the only science fiction novel I published in that double-decade. It was published by Double-day in 1972, and as I explained earlier, the second part of that novel contained some of the best writing I’ve ever done—I was writing over my head.
It was nominated for the Hugo, and in 1973 I went to Toronto for the World Convention, just in case. It was a worthwhile trip, for it won as the best novel of 1972! It was my third Hugo and the first for a current fiction story. For me it was a wonderful moment.
By then, the Science Fiction Writers of America were handing out an annual award called the Nebula, and The Gods Themselves won that also.
Then, in 1975, a young woman talked me into writing a science fiction short story. The bicentennial of American independence was coming the next year, and she was proposing an anthology of original stories all entitled “The Bicentennial Man.” I asked her what the significance of the title was, and she answered, “Nothing. Make whatever you wish of it.”
So, intrigued by the notion, I wrote a story about a robot who wanted to be a man and who worked at it for two hundred years before being accepted as one. It intrigued me to the point where I made it twice as long as I had planned to make it.
Again, I was writing over my head. As it happened, the anthology never came to pass. The young woman who proposed it had financial and social problems, and I was the only person who produced a publishable story.
I got the story back from her, therefore, and returned her advance, because (a) she needed the money and (b) I had another outlet for it, obtained in a way which I will shortly describe. It was published in 1976 in Stellar 2, another anthology of original stories, and in the end it won both the Hugo and the Nebula as the best novelette of the year. It was my fourth Hugo and my second Nebula.
On this Nebula, by the way, both my names were misspelled. I came out as “Issac Asmimov.” Now, I don’t expect the ignorant engraver who handled the incision to know how to spell my name, or even to have ever heard of me, but I do think the Science Fiction Writers of America ought to have checked the initial design and noted the misspelling. The SFWA was very embarrassed and offered to redo the Nebula, but I wasn’t going to wait the five years or so it would take those jokers to do the job. I simply told them, haughtily, that I would keep it as it was so that it might serve as evidence of the brainpower of the organization.
And, of course, it was at about this time that I wrote my successful mystery novel Murder at the ABA.
You would think that with all these successes, I would see my way clear to returni
ng to the mass production of fiction. Actually, I did not. The joys of nonfktion still held me in thrall.
Judy-Lynn del Rey
Judy-Lynn Benjamin (to use her maiden name) was born on January 26, 1943, the daughter of a doctor. Most of her life was marked out for her at the instant of conception, for she was born with a genetic deficiency and was an achondroplastic dwarf. This involved a congenital inability to form cartilage normally, so that her arms and legs were always short and, even in adulthood, she was only about four feet tall.
I met her first at a local science fiction convention in New York on April 20, 1968. When I first saw her, I winced and turned away. (I’m sorry about that, but I do tend to turn away from an unpleasant sight, to hold my hands over my ears when people begin talking about an unpleasant subject, and to leave the room when things get too bad. I might try to explain that is because I’ve got such a sensitive nature, but I suspect it is because I simply want everything to be “nice” so that I don’t have to be made to feel bad or unhappy. It is not one of my more endearing characteristics.)
However, Judy-Lynn was working at the time as an associate editor at Galaxy and it was her business to get to know science fiction writers, so she struck up a conversation with me, one in which I was obliged to participate, no matter how reluctantly.
And then, the strangest thing happened. I was not talking to Judy-Lynn long before I forgot she was a dwarf. Her luminous intelligence (I can think of no more appropriate adjective) totally obscured her physical appearance. It was only a matter of minutes before I was thoroughly enjoying myself.
No matter how others reacted to her appearance, Judy-Lynn never acted as though she were handicapped. (Lester del Rey said to me one time, “I don’t think she knows she’s a dwarf”) She had a sense of humor, she was lighthearted, found life a source of merriment, and, in short, became a cherished friend of mine and my companion of choice when we attended conventions together.
