It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  And it's Marty who makes it possible for me to do so, and who does his further part in hundreds of anthologies in which I am not involved.

  One advantage of being prolific is that it reduces the importance of any one book. By the time a particular book is published, the prolific writer hasn't much time to worry about how it will be received or how it will sell. By then he has already sold several others and is working on still others and it is these that concern him. This intensifies the peace and calm of his life.

  Then, too, once enough books are published, a kind of "evernormal granary" is established. Even if one book doesn't do well, all the books, as a whole, are bringing in money, and one fall-short isn't noticeable. Even the publisher can take that attitude.

  It also makes it easier to experiment. If an experimental short story goes sour-well, what's one story in hundreds?

  An experiment I kept wanting to try was that of writing a funny science-fiction story. I don't really know why but I have this strong drive to make people laugh ...

  I've even written a reasonably successful jokebook, containing not only 640 funny stories but endless advice about how to tell them, what to do, and what not to do. The book is Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (Houghton Mifflin, 1971) ...

  The humor in all three [of the early humorous stories written in the forties] was quite infantile and, in quality, they stand very close to the bottom of the list of my stories.

  The trouble was that I was trying to imitate the slapsticky humor I found in other science-fiction stories and I wasn't good at that. It was not until I realized that my favorite humorist was P. G. Wodehouse and that the proper way for me to be humorous was to imitate him-use my full vocabulary and say silly things with a straight face-that I began to write successful humor.

  My first Wodehousian story was "The Up-to-Date Sorcerer" (F & SF, July 1958). Thereafter, things were easier for me. In the 1980s I began to write a whole series of stories about a tiny demon named Azazel, who was constantly being asked to help people and who did as he was told-but always with disastrous results ... they were just as Wodehousian as I could possibly make them.

  I'm not ashamed of being "derivative" in this respect and I never try to hide the fact that I am. Sam Moskowitz, who has written many historical accounts of science fiction, says, with some bitterness, that I am the onhv science-fiction writer who will admit to being influenced. All the others, he says, imply that their writing is the original production of a mind that owes nothing to anyone.

  I have to allow for Sam's exaggeration in this respect. I'm sure that any writer, if pressed, will admit to being influenced by some other writer whom he admires (usually it's Kafka, Joyce, or Proust, although with someone as humble as I am it's Cliff Simak, P. G. Wodehouse, and Agatha Christie). And why not? Why not take someone worthy as a model'? And no imitation is truly slavish. I'm sure that no matter how Wodehousian a story I write may be, I can't prevent it from being somewhat Asimovian as well. (As an example, my humor is distinctly more cruel than Wodehouse's is.)

  It is, of course, difficult to tell why there should be this strong drive to write humor, not only in myself but in many other writers as well. After all, humor is difficult. Other kinds of stories don't have to hit the bull's-eye. The outer rings have their rewards too. A story can be fairly suspenseful, moderately romantic, somewhat terrifying, and so on.

  This is not the case with humor. A story is either funny or it is not funny. Nothing in between. The humor target contains only a bull'seye.

  Then, too, humor is entirely subjective. Most people will agree on the suspense content of a story, on the romantic nature, on the mystery or horror of it. But over humor there is bound to be violent disagreement. What is howlingly funny to one person is merely stupid to another, so that even my best humorous stories are often skewered by readers who dismiss them as silly. (Of course, they are dull, humorless clods to whom I pay no attention.) ...

  I have said I am a good raconteur, and in this my fiction writing is of great help. I have a fund of a number of complex stories that are actually mini-short stories that have to be told with skill, because I must make sure that humor exists throughout the narrative ... holding audience interest, before exploding the final punch line. I love these stories because the people who listen to them can never repeat them with success ...

  And where do I get such a story from? Why, from someone who told it to me in bald, abbreviated form, which I then elaborate into a short story. I once watched a person listen with delight to a story I was telling, and when I was done, I said to him, "But you told me that joke." And he replied, still laughing, "Not like that."

  Out of a vast number of stories about the Dutch Treat [club], I'll tell you about the time when one of the regulars had missed a luncheon or two on the petty excuse of his wife's being in the hospital. I said, haughtily and with typical male (false) grandiosity, "The only reason I would miss a lunch would be if the gorgeous babe in bed with me simply wouldn't let me leave."

  Whereupon Joe Coggins said, sepulchrally, "Which accounts for Isaac's perfect attendance record."

  I saw that coming as soon as I made the remark, but it was too late to force it back in my mouth. There was nothing left but to join the group in their laughter.

  Despite my prolificity, one thing I never experimented with was vulgarity and sex.

  In the days when I started writing, writers, whether for the printed or the visual media, found it impossible to use vulgar language or even some proper words. It was for this reason that cowboys were always saying, "You go]-darned, dag-nabbed, ding-busted varmint," when undoubtedly no cowboy ever said anything like that. We know what they really said but it was unprintable and unusable.

  Words like "virgin," "breast," and "pregnant" were also unprintable and unsayable. It was even impossible, in some quarters, to say, "He died." One had to say, "He passed away," or "He went to his reward," or "He was gathered unto his fathers."

  This type of prissiness was a great bother to writers, who found themselves unable to present the world as it was, and there was enormous relief in the 1960s when it became possible to use vulgarisms in writing, and even, to an extent, on television. The prissy were horrified, but they live in some never-never land and I am in no mood to worry about them.

  And yet, despite all that, I have not joined the revolution. This is not out of prissiness of my own. I have published five books of naughty limericks that I constructed myself and that are quite satisfactorily obscene.... Those, however, are limericks. In my other writing, sex and vulgarity are absent.

  Despite Susan Calvin [in his robot stories], my early sciencefiction stories were sometimes considered sexist because of the absence of women. A few years ago, a feminist wrote to excoriate me for this. I replied gently, explaining my utter inexperience with women at the time I began to write.

  "That's no excuse," she replied angrily, and I dropped the matter. Clearly, there is no percentage in arguing with fanatics.

  As my writing progressed, I became more successful with women characters. In The Naked Sun, I introduced Gladia Delmarre as a romantic interest, and I think I did her well.

  She appeared again in The Robots of Dawn ... where she was even better, in my opinion. In The Robots of Dawn I even made it clear that the hero and heroine had sex (adulterous sex at that, for the hero was a married man), but I gave no clinical details and the episode was absolutely essential to the plot. It was not included for titillation.

  In fact, in my last few novels, I have made it a practice to exclude not only all vulgarisms but all expletives of any kind. I exclude even "dear me" and "gee whiz." It is difficult to do this, for people use such expressions (and much worse) almost routinely. I do it partly out of deliberate rebellion against the literary freedom of today and partly as an experiment. I was curious to see if any readers would notice. Apparently, they do not.

  All throughout I Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor], I stressed the desirability of not using vulgarisms
unnecessarily. They were likely to embarrass some in the audience and did not add to the humor of the story. In fact, I pointed out, the humor was more effective when the ribaldry was merely hinted at. The listener fills in the lacunae in his mind according to his own tastes, and I give several examples of jokes where the wicked details are left out to the improvement of the joke.

  The last two jokes in the book, however, were examples of cases where the use of vulgarisms was necessary. The last joke, in fact, illustrated the manner in which overuse of a particular vulgarism deprives it of all meaning.

  Somewhere in Tennessee, the Treasury of Humor was violently attacked. An attempt was made to indicate that the last two jokes were typical of the book as a whole, and no mention was made of my strictures against the use of vulgarisms.

  This is not surprising. Bluenose censors, in their attempt to cut off anything they don't like, do not hesitate to distort, deceive, and lie. In fact, I think they would rather. They failed, however. The Treasury of Humor was removed from the junior high school shelf but remained in the town library. I hope the publicity meant that more students read it, though they must have been disappointed if they expected real obscenity.

  (What strikes me in this is that the junior high school kids, if they are like all the junior high school kids I've ever known, know and freely use the wicked word found in those last two jokes. So, I suspect, do the censors themselves, for they are undoubtedly steeped in every possible aspect of hypocrisy.)

  The Robots of Dawn also took its lumps. Parents in some town in the state of Washington found themselves appalled by the book and demanded it be withdrawn from the school library. Some who made this demand admitted they didn't read the book, because they wouldn't read "trash." It was enough to call it trash and burn it.

  One school board member actually had the guts to read the book. He said he didn't like it (having to stay on the side of the angels if he wanted to keep his job) but actually had the surprising courage to say that he found nothing in it that was obscene. So it stayed.

  At a time when obscene books are published without remark and are openly read by young women on buses, the fact that anyone, anywhere, can waste their time over my harmless volumes amazes me. Sometimes, though, I wish that the people who did this weren't the pitiful and petulant pipsqueaks they are and that they made a real stink over some book of mine. How that would improve sales!

  [As a fiction writer] I have never joined the gloom and doom procession. This is not because I don't believe that humanity can destroy itself. I believe this heartily and have written numerous essays on different aspects of the problem (particularly on the subject of overpopulation). It is just that I think there are enough science-fiction writers shrieking, "The day of judgment is at hand!" and I won't be missed if I am not of their number.

  To be sure, in Pebble in the Sky, I described an Earth all but destroyed by radioactivity, but humanity is pictured in that book as existing in a great Galactic Empire, so that the fate of one small world means little to humanity as a whole.

  My books tend to celebrate the triumph of technology rather than its disaster. This is true of other science-fiction writers as well, notably Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. It seems odd, or perhaps significant, that the Big Three are all technological optimists.

  Thirty-Three.

  HEART ATTACK

  [In 1977, to Isaac's dismay, he was told he had to go to the hospital because he'd had a mild heart attack.] "I can't," I said. "I have to give a commencement address at Johns Hopkins day after tomorrow."

  "No, you won't" [said his doctor].

  "Why not? I've lived a week. I can live two days more."

  "What if you die on the platform as you give your talk?"

  "It will be a professional death," I said firmly.

  [He was sent to the hospital.] It was the first time I had ever cancelled speaking engagements and the Johns Hopkins cancellation was intensely embarrassing to me. I eventually wrote them a letter of apology in which I said that I owed them one talk without charge. In 1989, the university called in the debt and, though twelve years had passed, I came through. I went to Baltimore and delivered a talk without charge.

  In 1977 Ben Bova pitched in and gave some of my talks for me, doing a great job. But then the villain had the nerve to ask those in charge of the speaking engagements to send the checks to me. Fortunately, they called me in the hospital to see if they were really supposed to do that, and I was furious. Ben had to keep the checks himself, and serve him right.

  After three hours of ["rest and recuperation"] I was dreadfully bored and said so. -Voluminously.

  [With his doctor's permission, the first draft of his autobiography was photocopied so he could edit it in the hospital.] Day after day, I worked on it, and it was so wonderful to feel that I wasn't wasting time.

  Ben Bova visited me and, noticing the manuscript spread out over the bed, asked what I was doing. I explained. "In this autobiography," I said, "I'm including every stupid thing I can remember having said or done."

  "Oh?" he said, eyeing the pages. "No wonder it's so long."

  Paul [his doctors did insist on my cutting down in one respect. "Isaac," he said, "two things. First, you must cut down on your speaking engagements. They take a lot out of you. Just give fewer talks and raise your fees so you don't lose income, and don't let personal friends talk you into giving talks for nothing. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," I said, "and what's the second thing'?"

  "My group, the New York University Medical School Alumni Association, would like you to give them a talk. Would you?"

  I burst out laughing. It was for nothing, of course, but I accepted the talk instantly, for two reasons. First, because Janet was also an alumna, and second, because Paul [the doctor] seemed completely unaware of the mutual exclusivity of his two points.

  I eventually gave the talk on May 12, 1979, and I told the story of the two points, imitating Paul's distinctive voice, and that evoked gales of laughter. It seems also that all the alumni wore badges that gave the month and year of their graduation. Paul had graduated during World War 11 in an accelerated course and he got out in the month of March, which was unusual. I asked him why he alone seemed to have an M on his badge, and he explained.

  But that's not the way I told it. What I said was this: "I said to Paul, `Why do you have an M on your badge, Paul?' and he answered, it stands for mediocre."' More gales of laughter (especially since he was, in actual fact, an honor student), and I felt I had punished him ade quately for having pushed me into the hospital, making me miss the Johns Hopkins commencement.

  (Paul forever threatens to sue me for something he calls "patient malpractice.")

  Once I got out of the hospital, I lived life normally, except that I took better care of myself. Even so, I would occasionally feel a twinge of angina when I walked too rapidly, and I would stop to let it pass.

  When I wrote up the tale of my heart attack in the second volume of my autobiography, one of the reviewers said that I had described it "with characteristic lack of self-pity."

  I was glad he had noticed ... I detest self-pity, and when I find myself falling into it, I make every possible effort to fight it off.

  And, after all, what reason have I to feel self-pity? What if I had not survived? I had had a reasonably good life, a secure childhood, loving parents, a happy marriage, a delightful daughter, and a successful career. I had had some disappointments and sadness in my life, but, I honestly think, far less than is true for the average human being, and I have had far more success and gladness than most ...

  It seems to me that people who believe in immortality through transmigration of souls have a tendency to think that they were all Julius Caesar or Cleopatra in the past and that they will be equally prominent in the future. Surely, that can't be so. Since some 90 percent of the human race lives (and has always, in time past, lived) in various degrees of poverty and misery, the chances are weighed against any transmigrating persona
lity ending up in happiness. If my personality, on my death, were to transfer into the body of a newborn baby, chosen at random, the chances that I would lead a new life that was far more miserable than the one I had left would be enormous. It's a roulette game that I do not wish to play.

  Many people believe that good people are assured of a better life at death and wicked people a worse one. If that were true I would strongly suspect I must have been a very good person in a past life to have deserved the happy life I have led this time, and if I continue to be noble and virtuous, I will have a still happier life the next time. Arid where will it end? Why, in that happiest state of all-Nirvana, that is, nothingness.

  But it is my opinion that we all achieve Nirvana at once, at the moment of the death that ends a single life. Since I have had a good life, I'll accept death as cheerfully as I can when it comes, although I would be glad to have that death painless. I would also be glad to have my survivors-relatives, friends, and readers-refrain from wasting their time and poisoning their lives in useless mourning and unhappiness. They should be happy instead, on my behalf, that my life has been so good.

  Thirty-Four.

  EXTENDING TWO SERIES

  The two volumes of my autobiography had appeared and done quite well, and went on to be published as trade paperbacks under the Avon label, but Doubleday wasn't satisfied. They still wanted novels.

  Mind you, I hadn't been neglecting Doubleday, with whom I published The Road to Infinity, a new collection of science essays, and Casebook of the Black Widowers, a third collection of Black Widower tales. In press was still another collection of science essays, The Sun Shines Bright, and a collection of essays on science fiction, Asiniov on Science Fiction, and an anthology, The Thirteen Crimes of Science Fiction. I was also working madly on another edition of Asirnov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, so Doubleday couldn't say I was neglecting the firm.