I never minded that. On the contrary, I was flattered. Besides, no one could write a stupid robot story if he used the Three Laws. The story might be bad on other counts, but it wouldn't be stupid.
And yet I heard the Three Laws first from John Campbell and I am always embarrassed to hear myself given the credit. Whenever I tried to tell Campbell himself, however, that he was the originator, he would always shake his head and grin and say, "No, Asimov, I picked
7 1 didn't realize this until many years later, for at the time I first used the word, I thought it was a word actually used by scientists in this connection. It was, after all, analogous to "physics," "hydraulics," "mechanics," "statics," and various other words of this form used to denote a branch of physics-related science.
them out of your stories and your discussions. You didn't state them explicitly, but they were there."
It's true I had a remark that sounded like the First Law even in "Robbie," but I think Campbell was just trying to do what he always did—let the writer have all the credit.
Or perhaps we were both right and, as Randall Garrett said many years later, both of us invented the Laws as a result of our peculiar symbiotic relationship.
On January 2, 1941, I turned twenty-one. I was now, in legal theory, an adult, but nothing changed, of course. I was still in the candy store, still completely under parental control, still quite incapable of supporting myself, even though, as a minor, I had earned a total of $658.50 as a writer.
Irene was thoughtful enough to send me a birthday letter and, more surprising, Mary Byers, the fan with whom I corresponded and with whom I had once visited in her hotel room and engaged in an hour and a half of conversation, came to New York.
She had been promising to do so for quite a while and I know she expected me to socialize—and I was torn. I would have been delighted to converse with her some more, but I knew that she was no wealthier than I was and I had a nervous feeling that she might expect me to put her up for the night or help with the expenses. Well, I would have been pleased to do so, but there was no way to put her up in our place and I had no money with which to help with the expenses.
However, when she arrived in town on that birthday day, there was no way in which I could refuse to see her, and when I did, it turned out, as I noted with great relief in my diary, that "she's got plenty of money—$61."
I devoted the next few days to showing her around the science-fiction world of New York. I took her to visit Campbell and Pohl on the third, to a movie on the fourth, and to a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League on the fifth.
The meeting was an exciting one. Dick Wilson, a Futurian, together with a friend of his, were denied admission by the unforgiving group centered about Moskowitz and Sykora. They nevertheless entered, quietly, when no one was looking, and sat in the back, bothering no one. When they were spotted, however, contentiousness won out over rationality, Moskowitz and others advanced to throw them out
and, in the ensuing fracas, the owner of the building evicted us one and all.
Scott Feldman resigned from the club immediately in embarrassment, and he came home to the store with me in gloomy fashion. We dropped Mary off at her hotel on the way, and then Scott and I talked fairly far into the night.
Scott and I became friends that evening, and we discussed many things. He alluded to an active sex life, even though he was some three years younger than I, and I was very envious of that (though, of course, he might have been unable to resist the opportunity of trading on my obvious innocence and gullibility by exaggerating the situation enormously). He also talked of his plans for becoming an agent someday.
It seemed peculiar to me that he should have this ambition, for he was a very facile and skillful writer. Why should anyone who was a writer want to be anything else?
For instance, he was as fond of Wodehouse as I was, and he could write in the Wodehouse style to perfection. He once showed me a story he had written, and if he had told me Wodehouse had written it, I would have believed it. What gave it away, if anything, was that it was funnier than Wodehouse would have made it.
At that time Wodehouse was in detention, having been captured by the Nazis when they took France. He had consented to do some broadcasts for them in humorous vein in exchange for gentle treatment. It may not have been a very heroic thing to do, but how many heroes are there? He was in his sixties, not a very politically minded person, and was reasonably eager to be well treated. However, there was bitter feeling against this in Great Britain, since Wodehouse gave the impression that he was feeling no pain, while London was being demolished by Nazi bombs.
Scott Feldman, however, wrote letters to Wodehouse, expressing sympathy, and Wodehouse received them, apparently, and was grateful.
But back to these early January days. On January 6, I helped Mary move out of the hotel and into the YWCA and then left her. I didn't know what her plans were, but I had done my bit, introduced her to the science-fiction world as I had promised, and felt I could now retire. Besides, I had to. Classes were beginning again.
On January 12, however, a telegram arrived from her grandmother in Ohio, begging me to send her back. It came in the middle of the night, and there I was with everyone in the family staring at me round-eyed, while I kept saying, in desperate affirmation of innocence, "But I didn't do anything. I just took her places."
That was absolutely true. It had all been perfectly platonic, and I
hadn't seen her at all in a week. I sent a letter to her grandmother to that effect and then called the YWCA and spoke to Mary. She seemed unmoved by the telegram. I had opened the door for her into the science-fiction world and she had stepped through it, and she needed me for nothing more. She had every intention of staying in New York and becoming a Futurian. 8 Well, that was her business, and I stepped out of her life.
Meanwhile, I was spending the month writing two stories. One was rather unusual, for it was my first attempt at collaboration.
Fred Pohl, after all, was not merely an editor. He was, like myself, a budding writer. He has since become a giant in the field, but in those early days he was struggling along with only the same sort of meager success I was having. Alone, and in collaboration with other Futurians, he turned out stories under a variety of pseudonyms. The one he used most frequently was "James MacCreigh," and under this name he appeared in the minor magazines.
Under this pseudonym, Pohl had written a short fantasy called "The Little Man on the Subway/' which he apparently had hopes for, but couldn't seem to get just right. He asked me if I would rewrite it, and the request flattered me. Besides, I still dreamed of getting into Unknown, and if I couldn't do it on my own, maybe I could do it by way of a collaboration.
I took on the task and did it virtually at a sitting on January 18, 1941. Doing it easily didn't help, though. I submitted it to Campbell for Unknown on January 27, and he rejected it promptly.
The trouble with writing for Unknown was that there were virtually no fallback markets. Rejection ended everything, and I handed it back to Pohl with considerable embarrassment.
Meanwhile, though, I was also working on "Liar!," the story over which Campbell had drawn the protective curtain of the Three Laws of Robotics. I took it in to Campbell on January 20, and a check for $70 arrived on the twenty-fourth. At last I had gotten the range. It had taken me 2V2 years to sell him two stories to begin with, and now it had taken me 2 months to sell him two more. I was making progress, and my bank account now stood at $150.
In "Liar!," by the way, I introduced my first successful female character. She was a "robopsychologist," and the story centered about her.
8 And she did, all the way. Eventually, she married Cyril Kornbluth and had two children by him.
She was more intelligent and more capable than any of the men in the story and I was very fond of her and wanted to write more stories about her.
The notion of using a woman scientist did not arise out of Irene, strangely enough, but out of Professor M
ary Caldwell, my gentle and understanding graduate adviser.
The character in "Liar!" was nothing at all like Professor Caldwell in appearance or behavior, but I called her "Susan Caldwell" just the same.
After the story was accepted, I had qualmish second thoughts. It didn't strike me that Professor Caldwell would like the use of her name and I didn't want her annoyed with me.
On my next visit to Campbell on January 27, I found him out with the flu but I talked to his secretary, Katherine Tarrant, 9 and explained the situation to her.
She said, with a sigh, "I suppose you want me to go through the manuscript and change the name wherever it appears."
"Yes," I said, eagerly. "Would you?"
"What name do you want instead?"
Desperately I thought of a change that would involve the fewest letters. "Calvin," I said.
It was done and Susan Calvin has been the heroine of some ten stories of mine so far.
This brings up one of the reasons why I don't take critics seriously. Some critics, in discussing my robot stories, make much of the name "Calvin," assuming that I chose it deliberately for its associations with John Calvin, the predestinarian, and his gloomy, doom-ridden work ethic. Not at all! I was merely trying to introduce a minimal change in Caldwell, for the reasons I explained.
8
More and more I was drifting away from the fan world and entering the writer's world. Sprague de Camp, whom I had met on a number of occasions now, both in Campbell's office and at fan meetings, wrote to invite me to attend a "war game" at Fletcher Pratt's.
9 Katherine, whom I invariably called Miss Tarrant in those days and for years afterward, was usually in the office when I talked to Campbell, sitting quietly and almost unnoticeably in the background, but not missing a thing. Years afterward, she would enjoy herself by describing those early days to younger writers. Invariably she would tell them, in detail, how I sat there in adoring admiration of Campbell, drinking in every word he said. I always thought I listened with a cool self-possession, but perhaps that was not how it appeared to others.
Pratt was well known for his popular historical writings and for his books on naval strategy, as well as for his science fiction. (He had written some excellent Unknown novels in collaboration with de Camp.) De Camp, whose wife had just given birth to their first son, addressed me as "Dear Isaac," which flattered me out of my eyeteeth.
Fletcher Pratt had devised a war game that made use of warship models carefully designed to scale, including everything from destroyers to battleships. The moves were all designed to scale as well, making use of the actual speeds of such ships, with those speeds being progressively reduced after it was hit one or more times. The shells and torpedos had to be aimed in an announced direction and with an announced range, and referees had to mark off the direction and ranges, then announce whether a hit had been made.
The rules were far too complicated for me to play a good game on my first try, on January 24, 1941. The three destroyers they gave me were promptly blown out of the water when I unwarily approached a cruiser, and I sat out the rest of the game on the sidelines perfectly happy. While watching, I had Cokes and peanuts and, in a fit of attempted adulthood, I forced myself to drink two beers as well. I hated the taste, and have almost never repeated that experiment.
At the games was Fletcher Pratt himself, a little gnome of a man who couldn't have been more than five feet four, with a retreating forehead, a bald head, and a commanding personality. There were several writers present also: Sprague himself, L. Ron Hubbard, John D. Clark, and Willy Ley, with all of whom I now talked on terms of easy camaraderie. Ley was particularly friendly.
9
Despite all this, I continued to write letters to the various magazines.
There was, for instance, another new magazine that had come out in late 1939. It was a quarterly named Planet Stories. I wrote them one letter, which appeared over the printed name of "Isaac Asenion." They had undoubtedly gotten that from the written signature, where the i looked to them like an e, the m like an ni, and the v like an n. I can see that and would have sympathized with the typesetter who had made the mistake were it not that my name was also typewritten, and correctly so.
It was a very embarrassing item, since it also indicated that my name was not very well known as yet. I wrote a rather angry letter to Planet over this, which was printed (with my name spelled correctly).
The editor's comment was, "There, there, Mr. Asimov, don't you cry! Things will be better by-and-by." I didn't find that amusing, either.
It gave me the grisly feeling that I was fighting over trivialities, and I began to enjoy less the writing of letters. Yet I did write them, and often quarreled with readers who objected to something or other in one of my stories—until I received a letter from the writer Nelson S. Bond (whom I had met at the World Convention in 1939 briefly, and never again), saying that since I was now a professional, I ought to stop slugging it out in fan columns. I took that seriously and from the moment I received that letter, I stopped writing letters to the magazines, except for very occasional ones that did not involve fannish comments. I have always been grateful to Bond for this word in season.
The whole episode with Planet Stories would now be totally forgotten were it not that my good friend Lester del Rey, who never forgets anything that by any chance is better forgotten, has, for decades, thought it exquisitely humorous to refer to me as "Asenion" even though no one in the world but he and I know what he's talking about.
10
I finished the first semester of the year with an A in each of the three courses I had taken, and in February I went on to the next semester. Among other courses, I signed up for one in thermodynamics, which was to be taught by my old nemesis, Urey.
There was the uncomfortable feeling that before the spring was over I was going to have to take my Qualifying Examinations. This was not to be the somewhat simpler Comprehensives that offered the dead end of a master's degree, which Irene had taken, for instance. They were longer and more detailed examinations, which, brought you the master's degree plus permission to go on for chemical research toward the Ph.D. It was not something I looked forward to.
It was about now that an incident, unrecorded in my diary, took place. In the course of an uproarious cafeteria lunch with the other students, the demand arose that I have cherry pie for dessert along with the others. I demurred because of the expense, but someone at once offered to pay for it—which should have put me on my guard at once, but didn't.
What they were planning was to put a pyridium pellet in the pie, the pyridium's red color to be masked by the cherries. Pyridium is a mild antiseptic that works on the excretory system and colors the urine red until it is washed out.
That evening when I urinated prior to going to bed, my heart bounded in terror, for I was clearly urinating blood. I didn't want to re-
port this fact since it would destroy my mother's sanity in one blow. I therefore stayed awake all night, checking my urine at half-hourly intervals and watching it grow slowly less bloody. By morning it was almost normal, so I forgot about it.
The next day, all my dear friends gathered around to try to elicit from me what had happened, hoping for details of terror and emergency medical treatments. However, I had my mind on other things, and no hints, however broad, managed to bring back the night's events to my mind. Finally, in sheer frustration, they broke down and confessed and asked if anything had happened and I said, "Oh you're right. I thought I was bleeding."
They were very chagrined and there were some harsh comments about my idiotic failure to react sensibly. Apparently there had been a school of thought among my merry friends that I should have been dosed with methylene blue in blueberry pie. That had been vetoed because it had been assumed that blue urine would have given away the show. How wrong they were and how badly they overestimated my practical good sense. Red I at least interpreted as blood—serious but understandable. Had my urine turned blue, I would undoub
tedly have gone into some kind of fit.
11
I was still dying to break into Unknown. On February 3, 1941, I dashed off a fifteen-hundred-word short-short that I called "Masks." I haven't the faintest idea what it was about. My diary tells me it was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's "Markheim," but that doesn't help me.
On February 10, I visited Campbell and handed him the story, and on my next visit, a week later, I got it back.
What I didn't know was that this rejection represented a landmark.
"Masks" was the twenty-ninth story I had written. Of those twenty-nine stories, I had sold sixteen, and four more were going to be sold in the future. That meant that nine stories were never to be sold and no longer exist. "Masks" was the ninth. It was also the last. Since February 1941, I have never written a piece of fiction that has not, in one way or another, seen print.
It took me thirty-two months of submission and rejection to reach that point. And, of course, an ultimate sale doesn't mean that a story doesn't pick up rejections en route.
Later in the month, for instance, I wrote a story called "Hazing" and realized it wasn't good enough to try out on Campbell. I submitted
it to Fred Pohl on February 24, and I had a postcard from him the next day, turning it down. I then sent it to Planet but they turned it down too, taking over a month to do it in. Yet it was eventually sold.
I had better luck with the next story, which I wrote during the last few days of February. I called it "Super-Neutron" and submitted it to Pohl. He took it at once and I made $30 out of that.
A rather peculiar fact is that during the first two months of the year, I was writing a long and complicated outline of a science-fiction novel, at Pohl's request. I discussed it with Pohl when I was done and he approved it with some suggested changes, which, in turn, I approved of. On February 13, 1941, I actually started the novel, calling it Hostile Galaxy.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 36
