It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  [Two stories rejected, he tried writing his third] My old secondhand Underwood No. 5, which had given me good service for three years, was breaking down and ... would have to be repaired. Ordinarily, my father would have seen to it that it was repaired, but he reasoned that the repair would be expensive, that the machine would break down again for an additional expensive repair and that it might, therefore, represent long-term economy to invest in a new machine. The mere fact that I had written and submitted two stories had made me, in my father's eyes, a literary man, and the rejections had not tarnished that image. As a literary man, he felt I deserved the best ...

  We spent four hours comparison shopping before we bought a late-model Smith-Corona portable typewriter, the first new typewriter I ever owned.

  It cost sixty dollars, though from that sum we can deduct seventeen dollars as a trade-in for the Underwood. In other words, after three years of use, we got back seven dollars more on the old typewriter than we had spent for it, which, of course, made us feel good.

  My letters in Astounding had not yet ended their usefulness. On September 1, 1938, I received a letter from Brainerd, Minnesota.

  It was from Clifford D. Simak, who was at that time a minor science-fiction writer. [According to my diary] I had "hated" [Simak's story] "Rule 18," which had appeared in the July 1938 issue. In my letter to Astounding I gave it a very low rating.

  Now Simak was writing to me to ask details so that he might consider my criticisms and perhaps profit from them. (Would that I could react so gently and rationally to adverse criticism-but I grew to know Cliff well in later years, though we rarely met, and I learned that gentle rationality was the hallmark of his character.)

  I reread the story in order to be able to answer properly and found, to my surprise, that there was nothing wrong with it at all. What he had done was to write the story in separate scenes with no explicit transition passages between. I wasn't used to that technique, so the story seemed choppy and incoherent. The second time around I saw what he was doing and realized that not only was the story not in the least incoherent, but also that it moved with a slick speed that would have been impossible if all the dull bread-and-butter transitions had been inserted.

  I wrote to Simak to explain and to apologize, and adopted the same device in my own stories. What's more, I attempted, as far as possible, to made use of something similar to Simak's cool and unadorned style.

  I have sometimes heard science-fiction writers speak of the influence upon their style of such high-prestige literary figures of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. This may well be so for them, but for myself, I make no such claim. I learned how to write science fiction by the attentive reading of science fiction, and among the major influences on my style was Cliff Simak.

  By October 21, 1938, I had completed six stories, five of which I had submitted to Campbell and which he had rejected. The stories had piled up four other rejections among themselves, so that the box score was six stories, nine rejections, no sales.

  I might have been dejected by this were it not for my monthly trips to Campbell ... [and on] October 21, exactly four months after my first visit to Campbell, [I sold] my third story, "Marooned off Vesta," ... [and another] called "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use" to Amazing Stories.

  The first story I sold to John Campbell was called "Trends," and it appeared in the July 1939 Astounding ...

  John Campbell was a great believer in nice simple names for his writers, and I am sure that he would ordinarily have asked me to use a pseudonym on the order of John Smith, and I would have absolutely refused to do so, and perhaps aborted my writing career.

  However, those two early stories in Amazing appeared under my real name-Isaac Asimov.... Perhaps because the deed was done and my name, such as it was, had graced the contents page of a sciencefiction magazine, Campbell uttered not a murmur and my name appeared in Astounding's august pages in its proper form.

  [More about "Trends," originally called "Ad Asti-a"] I was working for Bernhard J. Stern [a sociology professor at Columbia] ... and since he was writing a book on social resistance to technological change, he had me reading a great many books that might conceivably be of use to him. My orders were to take note of any passages that dealt with the subject and to copy them down.

  It was a liberal education for me and I was particularly struck by a whole series of [old] articles by astronomer Simon Newcomb, which I read at Stern's direction. Newcomb advanced arguments that demonstrated the impossibility of heavier-than-air flying machines, and maintained that one could not be built that would carry a man. While these articles were appearing, the Wright brothers flew their plane. Newcomb countered with an article that said, essentially, "Very well, one man, but not two."

  Every significant social advance aroused opposition on the part of many, it seemed. Well, then, shouldn't space flight, which involved technological advances, arouse opposition too?

  Yet I had never read a science-fiction story in which such opposition was described. Either the public role did not enter into the story at all, or if it was there, it was described as wildly approving-rather on the line of the public reaction to Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, eleven years before (which I just barely remembered).

  I determined therefore to write a story about the first attempts to reach the moon, and to have opposition to space flight play an important role. It was because of that that I used "Ad Astra" as the title. This was from the Latin proverb, "Per aspera ad astra" ("through difficulties to the stars").

  [In 1968, at a meeting of the Modern Languages Association] I made the comment in the course of the session that I didn't think I had ever made any successful prediction in my science-fiction stories. From the floor, Phil [Klass, writer William Tenn] said that, on the contrary, in my story "Trends," I had, in 1939 [when it was published], predicted popular opposition to space exploration, an opposition that no one else had foreseen and that had actually developed.

  After that, I frequently gave that as an example of one of my successful predictions and, in fact, have a talk I entitle "The Science-Fiction Writer as Prophet," which virtually always gets a standing ovation from college-student audiences.

  As I look back on those days of the late 1930s, it is clear to me now that science fiction was approaching a fork in the line of its progress. Science-fiction pulp, which I had been reading with such love and avidity, was declining, and a new generation of writers was arising, writers who had some feeling for science.

  Amazing was still slanted toward mad professors with beautiful daughters, toward malevolent monsters and hectic action, and it would even continue to have some commercial success with it.

  Campbell, however, was pushing for quieter, more thoughtful stories, in which the science was realistic, and in which scientists, inventors, and engineers talked and acted like recognizable human beings. That was the direction of progress, and it was the one in which I tended of my own accord to move. Since that was also the direction in which Campbell drew me, my progress was rapid.

  Thanks to Campbell, science fiction was entering what has ever since been called its "Golden Age," and thanks to the accident of my being there at the right time-and in the right place-with the right impulses-I was able to become part of it.

  Nine.

  WRITING PROGRESS

  On April 12 [1940], I visited Campbell again after he had had the third version of "Homo Sol" for over two weeks. I talked about other things for a while, cravenly staying away from the real point of interest, until he finally said, "Oh yes, your story? You haven't got it yet?"

  My heart sank. Was this to be another "Pilgrimage"-three strikes and out? I remained abashed and mute and he said, "It's up in the accounting room now."

  The "it" he was asking me if I had yet got was the check and not the story. He had bought it-my second sale to Campbell in nearly two years of trying. It came just in time, too, for it just covered what I still owed on my tuition in that first year of graduate work [
Columbia University where his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. were in chemistry].

  The clearest thing I remember about that check is an incident that took place that evening in the candy store. I had placed the check on the cash register, so that my father could deposit it when he next went to the bank (after I had endorsed it over to him, of course), and I was engaged in dealing out cigarettes, collecting payment, making change, and so on, as I had done every night for eleven years now.

  One customer took offense at my neglecting to say "Thank you" as I made the change-a crime I frequently committed because, very often, I was working without conscious attention but was concentrating deeply on the plot permutations that were sounding hollowly within the cavern of my skull.

  The customer decided to scold me for my obvious inattention and for my apparent lack of industry.

  "My son," he said, "made fifty dollars through hard work last week. What do you do to earn a living besides standing here?"

  "I write," I said. "And I got this for a story today," and I held up the check for him to see.

  It was a very satisfactory moment.

  [At graduate school] At one time, I remember, I received a fairly low mark on one of my lab reports-one that dealt with the elevation of boiling points in solutions. I was not overly surprised at this, since my expectations in lab courses were never exuberantly high, but I thought I might as well see Professor Joseph Mayer, under whom I was taking the course, and attempt negotiation.

  I took my paper with me and he went over it patiently. I was quite prepared to be told that I had done the experiment sloppily or that I had collected my data thoughtlessly. That wasn't it, however. Professor Mayer looked up at me and said:

  "The trouble with you, Asimov, is that you can't write."

  For a horrified moment, I stared at him. Then, no longer interested in negotiation, I gathered up the report and, before leaving, said to him, as stiffly and as haughtily as I could, "I'll thank you, Professor Mayer, not to repeat that slander to my publishers."

  [In August 1940, after receiving the September Astounding in which "Homo Sol" appeared] I read the story, of course. for my own stories always interest me. In doing so, I am always aware of any changes forced on me by editors that go against my natural predilection, and in this story those changes were particularly noticeable and particularly bothersome.

  For instance, in the story I made certain distinctions between the emotional reactions of Africans and Asians as compared with those of Americans and Europeans. Campbell had suggested the passage rather forcefully and I had included it reluctantly, since I wanted to sell the story.

  Then even after I had made a number of changes to please him, Campbell had, on his own hook, inserted several paragraphs that did not ring true in my ears. They were in his style, not in mine, and even if no one else could tell that, I could. What's more, they emphasized, with approval, Earthman's proficiency at warmaking.

  It was August 1940... Great Britain was standing alone against the victorious Nazis. Everyone was expecting a Nazi invasion attempt daily. I was in no mood to find racist and militaristic remarks in my stories, however mild and innocent they might seem.

  After that, I did my best to wriggle out of such situations. When Campbell suggested bits of business here and there, either in preliminary discussions or during a request for revision, I would agree, but then if I disapproved, I would just forget to include it, or I would twist it into something I found inoffensive. I'm not sure I always succeeded, but I did almost all the time certainly.

  In a way, then, my unhappiness over "Homo Sol" paved the way for my two most popular groups of science-fiction stories ...

  I began work on another story, "History." I wrote it during the first two weeks of September, which was precisely the period during which the great Blitz on London began. For night after night as I wrote, London was bombed, blasted, and burned, and there seemed no way in which it could endure. Great Britain would have to give in, it seemed. Certainly I could see no hope for her.

  Yet, apparently, I still clung to a certainty that Hitler would be defeated. In "History," I made a brief reference to the fact that he died on Madagascar (presumably in exile, as was the case with Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II).

  [1940. The Robot series of stories] 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 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.... 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 each up 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.... 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. 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.

  [December 1940] 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 ...

  Handing in "Christmas on Ganymede" [to Campbell, on December 23, 1940] 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.

  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

  1. 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 protection 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.

  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.

  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 had 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 them out of your stories and your discussions. You didn't state them explicitly, but they were there."

  It's true I had made 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 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.

  [Women in the robot stories ] In "Liar" [ 1941 ] I introduced my first successful female character. She was a "robopsychologist," and the story centered about her. 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.