In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  One had to take a certain minimum number of courses to qualify

  for the Comprehensives, and it was quite possible to do so after one year of graduate work—if one were bright enough and had worked hard enough.

  Irene, for instance, came in from Wilmington to take her Compre-hensives at the end of September. After they were over, I met her on October 5 (as had been arranged on my July trip to Wilmington) and we went to the movies. That was our last date.

  Irene passed her exams, of course, and went back to Wilmington having qualified for her M.A. As for myself, I wasn't ready. I decided to take another semester's work before chancing it.

  And at just about the time I was registering and getting set to renew my course work, the candy store was the object of crime again. This time it wasn't a break-in, but a stick-up. Just before midnight, when my father was alone in the store, two men came in with guns. My father didn't argue at all. He emptied the register for them and they walked off with thirty-two dollars.

  My father, and the rest of us, were very relieved that they had not hurt him in any way, and also that there was seventy dollars elsewhere in the store that they did not know about and that they left behind. The rest of us were more relieved about my father, but I think he was more relieved at having retained the other seventy.

  8

  London was holding out, but there seemed no end to the bombing, and I kept expecting every day to read that an exhausted Britain was offering peace terms.

  And in the United States, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term.

  I was in a continuing state of terror. I was afraid that Roosevelt might not be able to overcome the third-term tradition and that Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate, might become President. Willkie sounded pro-British and anti-Nazi, but if he were elected, he would surely be a prisoner of the Republican Party, which was isolationist and committed to neutrality. At least that was my opinion.

  I managed to vote in that election, in a way. I was still two months short of the minimum voting age of twenty-one, but Milton Silverman, who was a couple of years older than I and whose voting residence was in another state, received an absentee ballot. He had it spread open, ready to mark it, when I suddenly asked if I could mark the presidential vote for him.

  "Certainly," he said, and handed me the pencil.

  I placed a dark X against Roosevelt's name (which suited Silverman, whose voting intentions were identical with mine). I was very pleased with that, and infinitely more pleased when Roosevelt won the election.

  And then, on October 16, 1940, the United States initiated the machinery for its first peacetime draft. Registration was confined to those who were over twenty-one, however, and, temporarily, I was not affected. On October 28, Italy invaded Greece.

  Making My Literary Mark

  There were touches of brightness in that generally gloomy literary autumn.

  In the September 1940 Super Science Stories, my story "Robbie" appeared. 1 Fred Pohl had once again displayed his penchant for changing titles. He called it "Strange Playfellow." I had accepted "The Callistan Menace," but this one I rejected. My title "Robbie" made the robot-nursemaid the center of the story, whereas "Strange Playfellow" made him merely an oddity. When the time came that the story was introduced into one of my collections and was anthologized several times, I insisted on the use of "Robbie" as the title. Except for that one first appearance in the magazine, it has never been called anything else.

  Better yet was the appearance of the December 1940 Astonishing, which reached the stands on October 24. It contained "Half-Breeds on Venus" 2 as the lead novelette, that is, as the first story in the magazine —the position of pride. It was my tenth published story and the first time I had taken the lead.

  What's more, I had the cover. I don't mean that I had my name on the cover—that much had happened twice before. I had both the title of the story and my full name on the cover; and what's more, the cover illustration depicted a scene from the story. That was the first time that, in that sense, I had made the cover.

  It was a very satisfactory forward step.

  I took others. After reading "Robbie" in cold print in the magazine, I decided I liked it more than any other story I had written yet. It also occurred to me that robot stories would not involve me in any superiority/inferiority hassle with Campbell. Why not, then, write another?

  Furthermore, clever devil that I was, I remembered Campbell's penchant for introducing religious motifs into stories where nothing of the sort had originally existed (I had had that trouble with "Pilgrim-

  3 See I, Robot (Gnome Press, 1950; later Doubleday). 2 See The Early Asimov.

  age"). I decided to push his buttons, therefore, by putting in a bit of religion to begin with.

  My notion was to have a robot refuse to believe he had been created mechanically in a factory, but to insist that men were only his servants and that robots were the peak of creation, having been created by some godlike entity. What's more, he would prove his case by reason, and ''Reason" was the title of the story.

  On October 23, I presented the idea to Campbell, and he was immediately enthusiastic (as I had judged he would be). We talked it over and I went home to begin the story. His last words to me as I went through the door were, "Remember, I want to see that story."

  He didn't see it right away. In this case, pushing Campbell's buttons was easier than pushing the typewriter keys. I made four starts in the course of the following week, and tore up each one after a couple of pages. Ordinarily, when I had this kind of trouble with a story, I took it as a sign that the idea was not one I could handle and I would drop it. There were several stories that soured on me in those early years, stories I quickly abandoned as soon as I caught the taste of the souring.

  This time, though, I dared not quit—not after having sold Campbell on the idea so effectively. On October 31, therefore, I crawled back to him with my troubles.

  He listened carefully and then gave me one of those pieces of advice that were worth untold gold. 3 What he said was, "Asimov, when you have trouble with the beginning of a story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story and begin again."

  For me, that was good advice. I started later in the story and had no trouble thereafter. Ever since then, I have always started my stories as late in the game as I thought I could manage, and if I had trouble getting off the ground, I would make myself start still later. And what about the portion of the story that comes before the beginning? That can be made clear in the course of dialog or, if necessary, in a flashback.

  I submitted "Reason" to Campbell on November 18, and he took it at once, for on November 22, a check for $67 arrived.

  It was my third sale to Campbell and it was the first time he had taken a story without asking for a revision. He told me later, in fact, that he had liked it so well that he had almost decided to pay me a bonus.

  3 I try never to give literary advice myself, for the simple reason that every writer has a different technique and that what works for one may not work for another. Fortunately, Campbell's advice always just happened to match my way of working. That was his talent. It certainly isn't mine.

  Increasingly, science-fiction fans were beginning to recognize my more-than-fan status. On November 28, 1940, I received a letter from one Scott Feldman, who invited me to a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League on December 1. He asked me, rather apologetically, to come alone, and it was quite obvious that he feared I would bring the dreaded Futurians with me.

  I was far too eager to go to the meeting to make an issue of such a thing and I went without any of the Futurians.

  I enjoyed myself. L. Sprague de Camp was there, Malcolm Jameson, Arthur J. Burks, Harry Walton—all authors whose works I had read and admired. It did strike me that the Queens Science Fiction League attracted more important people than the Futurians did, and I found that I was not entirely without the sin of
snobbery. Therefore, while not abandoning the Futurians, I signed up for membership in the QSFL also.

  Scott Feldman was, at the time, an officer of the club, a thin young fellow with a dark mustache. He said he had met me before, at the World Science Fiction Convention in July 1939.

  "I congratulated you on your stories," he said, "and you said, 'What's there to congratulate? I've only published three/ "

  That was embarrassing, for I am not usually that ungracious, but although I didn't remember the incident, it had to be true, since three was the correct number at that time.

  I tried to make up for it by being very gracious this time and when Scott showed signs of wanting to talk about the art of writing, I at once began to give him several paragraphs of good advice. He had trouble interrupting my blaze of condescension, but he finally managed to explain to me that although he was only eighteen he had published many nonfiction articles in various magazines that were not science fiction; that, in fact, he was making his living that way. That gave me another reason for adopting a life policy of never offering advice on writing.

  Making up for that double embarrassment, however, was the fact that I won a science-fiction quiz given to the membership, the prize being Thorne Smith's "Turnabout." One of the questions was: "What is the name of the youngest well-established science-fiction author?" (By "well-established," it was carefully explained, it meant someone who had published more than five stories in the professional magazines.)

  The answer was "Isaac Asimov" and I was happy, for I was the youngest in a new category. Still a child prodigy!

  3

  Just about this time, another Futurian was becoming an editor. Donald Wollheim was planning to edit two magazines, Stirring Science Fiction and Cosmic Stories. 4 His magazines were starting on a micro-budget, unfortunately, and the only way they could come into being was for Wollheim to obtain at least some of the included items from his fellow Futurians for nothing.

  I was one of those he approached. Since I was a wild fan of the P. G. Wodehouse stories (I still am), I knew and believed in "the code of the Woosters" as enunciated by Bertie Wooster, surely the most lovable of all Wodehouse's creations. It was, "Never let a pal down."

  If Wollheim wanted a story for nothing, I would give him a story for nothing. I didn't want to be an utter fool, however, so I offered him "The Secret Sense," which I had written a year and a half before.

  It seemed to me to be a clearly nonsalable story. After Campbell had turned it down, I hadn't even bothered offering it to anyone else (though Pohl, then my agent, sent it to England, and got it rejected at a distance of three thousand miles).

  Wollheim, however, took it, and told me it would appear in the first issue of Cosmic. That, I thought, was that.

  But, as it happened, in that same fall of 1940, a new magazine called Comet Stories came into the world. It was going to pay a full $.01 a word, and its editor would be F. Orlin Tremaine, who had preceded Campbell as editor of Astounding.

  That was good news, for I had liked the Tremaine Astounding and I approved of any new magazine that would pay top rates. I therefore visited Tremaine one or two times and offered him stories. Unfortunately, he rejected them all.

  When I visited him on December 23, 1940, however, shortly before Cosmic Stories was to appear, Tremaine spoke with some heat concerning WollheinVs magazines. While he himself was paying top rates, he said, Wollheim was getting stories for nothing and, with these, could put out magazines that would siphon readership from those magazines that paid. Any author who donated stories to Wollheim, and

  4 Wollheim was the most forceful and articulate of the Futurians. He was rather plain and, at that time, acne-ridden, but there were few who could stand up against his dour wit.

  thus contributed to the destruction of competing magazines who paid, should be blacklisted in the field.

  I listened with horror, knowing that any day now Cosmic Stories would appear, with "The Secret Sense" in it. It was a story, to be sure, that I had felt to be worth nothing, but it had never occurred to me that I was undercutting other authors by setting up unfair competition. Was I going to be blacklisted?

  I could see no other course of action but to own up to what would soon be quite evident anyway, and to plead ignorance. In addition, I stressed very strongly that I had not given the story to Wollheim for nothing. I had been paid. And so I had been, but I did not volunteer to tell Tremaine how much I had been paid, and he did not ask. I of course said I would never do such a thing again now that the economics of the matter had been explained to me, and he seemed mollified.

  What had happened was this. Shortly after I had given the story to Wollheim, I discovered that some of my fellow Futurians would have their stories appearing under pseudonyms. I had made no such stipulation, and it suddenly occurred to me that even though the story might be worth nothing, my name was worth something.

  On December 5, therefore, I had written to Wollheim asking him to run my story under a pseudonym. If he insisted on using my name, on the other hand, would he make me a token payment of $5.00?

  Wollheim chose to use my name, and on December 12 I received a check for $5.00 from him, but he accompanied it with a remarkably ungracious letter. He told me that I was being paid an enormous word rate because it was only my name that had value and that I was receiving $2.50 a word. That was only what I myself had suspected, but considering that he had come to me asking for a story and that he had accepted it freely, he might have spared me the snarl. 5

  After the unpleasantness with Tremaine, I couldn't help but feel that Campbell might take the same annoyed attitude toward the new magazines and those who contributed. I therefore told him the whole story before he had a chance to bring it up. Nor did I conceal from him the amount I had been paid. Campbell shrugged it all off and didn't seem in the least perturbed. I presume he felt quite secure and didn't think Astounding could be in any way hurt by a magazine that could

  5 Wollheim was not, in those days, noted for the suavity of his temperament. Together with his biting wit, he had a terrible temper. I doubt that anyone was involved in so many controversies, and such voluble ones, with other fans. When one of his letters appeared in a fan magazine, the paper on which it was printed invariably scorched.

  only print stories that were unsalable in any professional market. (What other stories would be given without payment?)

  The first issue of Cosmic, dated March 1941, reached the newsstands on January 7, 1941. At least nine items in it (including mine) were by Futurians. "The Secret Sense" was my twelfth story to see print, 6 but, understandably, I got no pleasure out of it.

  Even the sale of "Reason" did not guarantee future sales to Campbell. In December, I wrote "Christmas on Ganymede/' which dealt with a comic Christmas celebration involving Ganymedan natives who didn't understand what it was all about. I was trying to be funny, of course.

  I had this terrible urge to be funny, you see, and had already indulged in humor in more than one story. Writing humor, however, is harder than digging ditches. Something can be moderately well written, or moderately suspenseful, or moderately ingenious, and get by in every case. Nothing, however, can be moderately humorous. Something is either funny, or it is not funny at all. There is nothing in between. The target for humor is nothing but a bull's-eye.

  I submitted "Christmas on Ganymede" to Campbell on December 23, but he didn't want it. It had missed the bull's-eye. I then tried it on Fred Pohl and he seemed interested, but not until he was preparing his Christmas issues, which meant acceptance (and payment) the following July. I was patient, since there was nothing else I could do, and for half a year it remained in limbo.

  4

  Although 1940 was, on the whole, a disappointing year, I did surprisingly well financially. I had received checks for nine stories, for a total payment of $384. In this, my third year as a professional writer, I had earned considerably more than in my first two years combined and, indeed, had earned just about enough to pay my
tuition, all of it.

  5

  My meeting with Campbell on December 23, 1940, was of extreme importance to me. Handing in "Christmas on Ganymede" was of small account. It was rejected, and it deserved to be. What was far more important was that I wanted to write another robot story. This time I wanted to write a story about a robot that, through some mistake on the assembly line, turned out to be capable of reading minds.

  6 See The Early Asimov.

  Again, Campbell became interested and we talked it over at length —what complications would arise out of robotic telepathy, what a robot would be forced to lie about, how the matter could be resolved, and so on. At one point, Campbell said:

  "Look, Asimov, in working this out, you have to realize that there are three rules that robots have to follow. In the first place, they can't do any harm to human beings; in the second place, they have to obey orders without doing harm; in the third, they have to protect themselves, without doing harm or proving disobedient. Well . . ."

  That was it. Those were the Three Laws of Robotics. Eventually I phrased them like this:

  THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS

  i. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except

  where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protec-

  tion does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

  These Three Laws of Robotics have been used by me as the basis for over two dozen short stories and three novels (one a juvenile) about robots. I am probably more famous for them than for anything else I have written, and they are quoted even outside the science-fiction world. The very word "robotics" was coined by me. 7

  The Three Laws revolutionized science fiction. Once they were well established in a series of stories, they made so much sense and proved so popular with the readers that other writers began to use them. They couldn't quote them directly, of course, but they could simply assume their existence, knowing well that the readers would be acquainted with the Laws and would understand the assumption.