It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  He continued to describe the manner in which "Nightfall" reversed or distorted common views and, in general, built up an interpretation of the story that had me gasping.

  When the lecture was over, members of the audience flocked around him, and I waited patiently. When I was the only one left, I said, "Dr. Guenther, your analysis of `Nightfall' is all wrong."

  "Well, that is a matter of opinion," said Dr. Guenther, smiling gently.

  "No, it is not," I said, forcefully. "I am certain you are wrong. Nothing of what you said was in the author's mind."

  "And how can you know that?"

  That was when I let the guillotine blade fall. "Because, Dr. Guenther, I am the author."

  His face lit up, "You are Isaac Asimov?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "How pleased I am to meet you." Then he said, "But tell me, what makes you think, just because you are the author of `Nightfall,' that you have the slightest inkling of what is in it?"

  And of course I couldn't answer that question because it suddenly became clear to me that there might well be more in a story than an author was aware of.

  Dr. Guenther and I became good friends after that, and on October 17, I gave a guest lecture to his class.

  By the end of the year [1950], my earnings had just topped the $4,700 mark ... almost as much as the $5,000 stipend I earned at Boston University.... For the first time, the thought flickered across my mind that I might conceivably make a living as a writer if I chose to.

  In a way it was exceedingly fortunate that this had happened when it did and not two years sooner. Had I reason to think the thought at the end of 1948, rather than at the end of 1950, 1 would never have been persuaded to move to Boston in search of a livelihood. I would have been content to remain in New York and take a job there, anywhere.

  And that would have been bad, I think. My academic position at Boston University School of Medicine was valuable to me; the prestige it brought was useful; the background it supplied for writing other than science fiction was indispensible. No, my literary poverty lasted just exactly long enough. It served to deposit me in the medical school, and then it rose sharply so that I would not be stranded there for life.

  [Isaac worked on a textbook with two colleagues, and then] the galleys of Biochemistry and Human Metabolism began to come in in three copies plus a master.... Each of us-[Burnham] Walker, [Bill] Boyd, and I-searched our own copies for mistakes. We then foregathered. The author of that chapter would list the corrections and they would be entered in the master. Each of the other two would then add any other corrections he had found ... on a surprising number of occasions, there were mistakes none of us found.

  The publisher's proofreader himself searched for mistakes and would point out inconsistencies in capitalization, hyphenation, and so on. It was a dreadful chore to try to decide on consistency, especially when the three of us never agreed. Finally Bill Boyd said, "According to Emerson, `A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' "

  After that, whenever we came to a trivial inconsistency, we would chorus "Emerson!" and let it stand.

  [The Asimov's had a new baby, son David, born in 1951. Their customary movie-going diminished in frequency.] I can't say my taste in movies testified to any deeply intellectual instincts, by the way. I liked adventure movies and would see, with pleasure, almost anything with swordplay or with a chase sequence. And I liked comedy, the more slapstick the better, and musical comedies, too ...

  Oddly enough, or not so oddly perhaps, I didn't like what were called "science-fiction" movies, with rare exceptions, such as The Shape of Things to Come.

  For the most part, science-fiction movies seemed to be innocent of science and, for that matter, of acting, and I found them acutely embarrassing. The Thing, for example, was unbearably bad, and I was disgusted at the fact that it was made, and ruined, from Campbell's classic story "Who Goes There?"

  [Writing began to conflict with research.] I found the feeling of being a research chemist (or biochemist) fading away. I had worked so hard for it, I had achieved a doctorate and even, finally, professorial status, and now, suddenly, it was leaving me-because I had found something else, something I had been doing for years before I started my research, yet which till 1952, I had never clearly thought of as my life's work.

  I was beginning to think of myself as a writer and that was crucial. ... As research steadily lost its glamour for me, writing grew steadily more attractive. And as writing grew more attractive, research steadily lost its glamour. Either tendency reinforced the other in a spiral that .made me, with each month that passed, more of a writer and less of a researcher.

  [He got into trouble with the school over not doing research.] Let ime make it clear that I was turning against research and not against teaching. I loved teaching, and the textbook was a form of teaching. I particularly loved lecturing.

  There could be no question but that my teaching was satisfactory. I had improved steadily in the organization, drama, and interest in my lecture presentations. (This would seem to be my own estimate of the situation, but I know the students agreed with me.)

  On April 15, 1952, 1 gave my final lecture of the third teaching semester in which I had been involved. It was "Heat and Work," and somewhere in the middle, I delivered a ringing sentence on the concept of the "heat death" of the universe, and there followed a wild and enthusiastic peal of applause that did not allow me to continue for quite a while.

  A story reached me once that on another floor, a member of the Physiology Department said, "What was that?" at the sound of distant laughter and applause.

  Another member said, "Probably Asimov lecturing."

  And it was.

  [On a visit to science-fiction editor Horace Gold] He suggested a robot novel and I demurred. I had only written robot short stories and didn't know if I could carry a whole novel based on the robot idea.

  "Sure you can," he said. "How about an overpopulated world in which robots are taking over human jobs?"

  "Too depressing," I said. "I'm not sure I want to handle a heavy sociological story."

  "Do it your way. You like mysteries. Put a murder in such a world and have a detective solve it with a robot partner. If the detective doesn't solve it, the robot will replace him."

  That was the germ of a new novel I called The Caves of Steel. When I wrote it, I did my best to ignore this business of robots replacing human beings. That was typically Gold and not at all Asimov-but Horace kept pushing, and in the end, some of it was forced in, though not nearly as much as Horace wanted.

  What pleased me most about The Caves of Steel when I came to write it was that it was a pure mystery story set against a science-fiction background. As far as I was concerned it was a perfect fusion of the two genre, and the first such perfect fusion. A number of people agree with me in this.

  The year 1952 saw McCarthyism at its peak in the United States. At no time did it affect me directly in any way, but the spectacle sick ened me. My liberal friends and I denounced Senator Joseph R. McCarthy to each other and if we were representative samples of American public opinion he wouldn't have lasted five minutes. The fact is we weren't. The average American was all for McCarthy and his simple-minded and destructive "patriotism."

  I remembered what Ted Sturgeon had once said at a [sciencefiction] convention-that science fiction was the last bastion of freedom of speech. The censor minds did not read science fiction, could not understand science fiction, and would not know what to suppress if they did read it. If censorship ever got so sophisticated that even science fiction fell prey to it, then all was over. Every vestige of democracy would be gone.

  So I set about giving my opinion of McCarthyism in a science-fiction story. I called it "A Piece of Ocean" at first, then changed the name to "The Martian Way." It dealt with Martian colonists with a problem, who were victimized out of a solution by a McCarthy-style politician and who were in this way forced to find a still better solution. I finished it on June 10. I
did the 18,000 words in four weeks.

  In this story, by the way, I described a "space walk" in euphoric terms, over a decade before space walks actually took place and apparently did induce euphoria.

  The November 1952 Galaxy included "The Martian Way," which got the cover-with my name misspelled.

  Somehow I thought that the story would elicit a mass of mail denouncing my own portrayal of McCarthyism, or supporting it, but I got nothing either one way or the other. It may be that my satire of McCarthy was so subtle that everyone missed it.

  [Jumping ahead to 1954] Every once in a while the television set proved to be more than a medium of entertainment and also became a method for involving one's self with the world in a way that would have been impossible before television.

  In 1954, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who was all-powerful because so many Americans were dupes and so many others were cowards (and who had easily survived my own satire of him in "The Martian Way"), tangled with the army. The army, backed up against the wall and trembling with fear, had no choice, at last, but to fight back, accusing McCarthy of attacking the army out of revenge for their having inducted a protege of his.

  Considering that McCarthy was destroying the United States (and one can easily argue that it was his legacy that led to a number of wrongheaded decisions on the part of the American government, including those that involved us in the disastrous Vietnam War), it was in the highest degree ironic that the point at which the line was drawn was over whether McCarthy was trying to pull strings to get some pampered youngster out of the army or not. That, however, was the point over which the army dared fight.

  The hearings that resulted were on every day, and there were sum- mmaries every night. I watched them during the day when I could and I never missed the summaries at night. It seemed to me that surely there was no way on earth that any sane person could fail to see McCarthy's gangsterism, and I trembled over the possibility that Americans would prove obstinately irrational and cling to the monster. Fortunately, McCarthy was, unwittingly, on my side. Through his own persistent and unbelievable display of unpalatability and the smooth work of Attorney Joseph Welch, McCarthy was destroyed.

  January 2, 1953, saw me thirty-three years old, and I had a pleasant birthday present ... a Doubleday contract for The Caves of Steel, a contract which called for a $1,000 advance. Still, if Doubleday's stock was going up with me, Campbell's was going down. Now that he had broken with dianetics, he grew increasingly interested in parapsychology or, as it is also called, psionics, or, simply, psi. Increasingly, the stories in Astounding involved telepathy, precognition, and other wild talents.

  It bothered me that Campbell's predilections should be so reflected in the magazine. It bothered me that I should see so many of his edito rial comments so quickly translated into stories by overcooperative authors. What's more, Campbell's editorials, which had grown to be four thousand to six thousand words long in each issue, began to infuriate me with their ultraconservative and antiscientific standpoint.

  I was having a stronger and stronger impulse to stay away from him, but the ties of love, and the memory of all he had done for me, kept me from ever breaking with him. On my visit to New York toward the end of 1952, Campbell talked to me about a story idea he was thinking of. It was about someone who could levitate (a wild talent, see) but could not get anyone to believe him. Campbell wanted to call it "Upsy-daisy."

  I hesitated, decided I could do it my way, and wrote it during the first half of January. I called it "Belief." I mailed it off to Campbell on January 12 and when I hadn't heard from him in ten days, I called and found there was a three-page letter on its way to me. As might have been predicted, I didn't have enough psi in the story; I had made it too rational.

  I changed it as much as I could bring myself to, but not as much as Campbell would have liked and, in the end, he took it.

  Science fiction was becoming important enough to have books written about it. One of the first of these was Sprague de Camp's Science Fiction Handbook ... a marvelous book ... in Sprague's gentle and courteous style. He included a brief biography of me, which contained no mistakes, and in it he had this to say: "Asimov is a stoutish, ;youngish-looking man with wavy brown hair, blue eyes, and a 'bouncing, jovial, effervescent manner, much esteemed among his friends for his generous warm-hearted nature. Extremely sociable, articulate, and witty, he is a perfect toastmaster."

  Well, I could argue with that, but I certainly don't intend to.... He also said, "Asimov writes a brisk, smooth, straightforward style with keen logic and human understanding." I don't intend to quarrel with that, either.

  Later in the book he said, "Simak's stories may be compared with Asimov's," which is perceptive of Sprague, since I consciously tried to imitate Cliff's style....

  [Isaac wrote an introduction to a collection of de Camp's stories.] I was at least as complimentary to him as he was to me. We always had a real love feast going-but then we each meant it.... [It was] the first Introduction I ever wrote to someone else's book. (It wasn't the last. Indeed, I have by now written so many that I honestly think it is possible that if all of them were counted it might turn out I have written more introductions to other people's books than anyone else in history.) ...

  My writing became ever more direct and spare, and I think it was The Caves of Steel that lifted me a notch higher in my own estimation. I used it as a model for myself thereafter, and it was to be decades before I surpassed that book in my own eyes.

  Yet even as The Caves of Steel was raising my science fiction to a new level of expertise, something new was beginning.

  A certain publisher, Henry Schuman, was interested in putting out a line of science books.... [He] was talking not of textbooks, not of books for the general public even, but of books for teenagers. That was a new wrinkle. I agreed to give it serious thought, but I kept my enthusiasm low ... yet I thought about it ...

  On June 12, I had dinner with him and he introduced me to a Dr. Washton, who was his science advisor ... [and who] gave me a short lecture on how to write for the early teenage audience. He told me, for instance, that no sentence must be longer than twenty-five words. (I followed instructions very carefully in this book [on the chemicals of life], with the result that I didn't like it very well when it was completed. It was the only book in which I accepted supervision of this kind. Afterward, I put the lecture out of my mind and just let the words flow naturally. Things went much better that way.)

  [Years later, Isaac did many books for children and for teenagers.] It is not very difficult to write for teenagers if you avoid thinking of them as children. I do not simplify my vocabulary for them, though I often add the pronunciations of the technical terms, merely to reduce the terror they inspire visually. I do avoid sentences that are too long and complex and I do not indulge in obscure allusions. What is lacking in a teenager is not intelligence or reasoning ability, but merely experience.

  [At the 1953 World Science-Fiction Convention in Philadelphia he met Randall Garrett, James Gunn, Philip Farmer, and] another personage, not a professional author yet, but destined to become one, and a more colorful one, perhaps, than anyone else in science fiction, even myself. He was just a boy then, perhaps no more than eighteen ... [with] the livest eyes I ever saw, filled with an explosive concentration of intelligence.

  Those live eyes were now focused on me with something that I can only describe as worship.

  He said, "Are you Isaac Asimov?" And in his voice was awe and wonder and amazement.

  I was rather pleased, but I struggled hard to retain a modest demeanor. "Yes, I am," I said.

  "You're not kidding? You're really Isaac Asimov?" The words have not yet been invented that would describe the ardor and reverence with which his tongue caressed the syllables of my name.

  I felt as though the least I could do would be to rest my hand upon his head and bless him, but I controlled myself. "Yes, I am," I said, and by now my smile was a fatuous thing, nauseating to behold. "Really,
I am."

  "Well, I think you're . . ." he began, still in the same tone of voice, and for a split second he paused, while I listened and everyone within earshot held his breath. The youngster's face shifted in that split second into an expression of utter contempt and he finished the sentence with supreme indifference "-nothing!"

  The effect, for me, was that of tumbling over a cliff I had not known was there, and landing flat on my back. I could only blink foolishly while everyone present roared with laughter.

  The youngster was Harlan Ellison, you see, and I had never met him before and didn't know his utter irreverence. (Harlan insists he said, "You aren't so much," but I think well of my memory and I'll stand by my version.) ...

  It was all good clean fun, and ever since then Harlan and I have loved each other deeply and truly.... The fan world tends to think there's a deadly feud between us, but they're quite wrong. It's just our way of honing our wise-guyishness against each other's sensibilities.

  [Harlan came to New York City to speak at Isaac's memorial service. He was wonderful.]

  [Recounting many sales] One sale I made, which pleased me enormously, was a parody of a poem by William S. Gilbert. In Patience, the poet, Bunthorne, sings a very effective solo that begins, "If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line ..

  I parodied this with a poem I called "the Foundation of S.F. Success," which began, "If you ask me how to shine in the science-fiction line ..."

  It was a parody of myself and of the Foundation series, in which I openly admitted my debt to Roman history in the second verse, which goes:

  F & SF [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction I occasionally published poetry, and it was Tony Boucher who bought the parody. He was delighted and wrote to tell me he thought it the cleverest bit of self-parody since Swinburne. He paid me $15 for itnot much, but it was the first poetry I'd ever sold.

  To be sure, it was not really poetry, but only comic verse; but then, comic verse is the limit of my poetic muse. Fortunate is the man who knows his own limitations.