It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  Nor was I neglecting other publishers, by the way, for in 1980 and 1981, I had published twenty-four books. These included Extraterrestrial Civilizations for Crown; A Choice of Catastrophes for Simon and Schuster; Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts for Grosset and Dunlap; The Annotated Gulliver's Travels for Clarkson Potter; and four How Did We Find Out About ... ? books for Walker and Company.

  So I was certainly working full-time, as I always do.

  [At Doubleday) Betty Prashker wanted to see me. Betty was high up in the editorial scale and a very respected editor in the field. This mild middle-aged woman smiled at me and said, "Isaac, we want you to write a novel for us."

  I said, "But, Betty, I don't know if I can write novels anymore."

  Betty said, in the usual refrain, "Don't be silly, Isaac. Just go home and start thinking up a novel."

  I was shoved out of the office. That evening, Pat LoBrutto, who was in charge of science fiction at Doubleday, phoned me. "Listen, Isaac," he said, "let me make it clear. When Betty said `a novel,' she meant `a science-fiction novel', and when we say `a science-fiction novel,' we mean `a Foundation novel.' That's what we want."

  I heard him, but I couldn't make myself take it seriously. I had written only one science-fiction novel in twenty-two years, and I had not written a word of any Foundation story in thirty-two years. I didn't even remember the content of the Foundation stories in any detail.

  What's more, I had written the Foundation stories, from beginning to end, between the brash ages of twenty-one and thirty, and had done so under John Campbell's whip. Now I was sixty-one years old, and there was no John Campbell any longer, or any present-day equivalent either.

  I had a terrible fear that I would, if I were forced, write a Foundation novel, but that it would be entirely worthless. Doubleday would hesitate to reject it, and would publish it; but it would be lambasted by the critics and the readers; and I would go down in science-fiction history as a writer who was great when he was young, but who then tried to ride the coattails of his youth when he was old and incompetent, and proceeded to make an utter jackass of himself.

  What's more, my income was high as a result of my vast number of nonfiction books, twenty times as high, in fact, as in the days when I was writing novels. I felt that I might badly damage the state of my private economy if I returned to writing novels.

  The only thing I could do was to lie low and hope that Doubleday would forget about it. They didn't, however. . .

  I was given a check for half the advance (the other half to be handed to me on delivery of the manuscript), and after that there was no longer any chance to fool around. As soon as I could complete projects I was then engaged on, I would have to get started.

  And before I got started, I would have to reread The Foundation Trilogy. This I approached with a certain horror. After all, I was convinced it would seem rough and crude to me after all these years. It would surely embarrass me to read the kind of tripe I wrote when I was in my twenties.

  So, wincing, I opened the book on June 1, 1981, and within a few pages I knew I was wrong. To be sure, I recognized the pulpy bits in the early stories, and I knew that I could have done better after I had taken a few more years to learn my craft, but I was seized by the book. It was a page-turner.

  My memory of it was just sufficiently insufficient for me not to be certain how my characters were going to solve their problems and I read it with steady excitement.

  I couldn't help noticing, of course, that there was not very much action in it. The problems and resolutions thereof were expressed primarily in dialogue, in competing rational discussions from different points of view, with no clear indication to the reader which view was right and which was wrong. At the start, there were villains, but as I went along, both heroes and villains faded into shades of gray and the real problem was always: What is best for humanity?

  For that, the answer was never certain. I always supplied an answer, but the whole tone of the series was that, as in history, no answer was final.

  When I finished reading the trilogy on June 9, I experienced exactly what readers had been telling me for decades-a sense of fury that it was over and there was no more. Now I wanted to write a fourth Foundation novel, but that didn't mean I had a plot for it ...

  [He went over the fourteen pages of a fourth Foundation novel started years before.] That gave me the beginning of a novel without an ending. (Always, it's the other way around.) So I sat down to make up an ending, and the next day I forced my quivering fingers to retype those fourteen pages-and then to keep on going.

  It was not an easy job. I tried to stick to the style and the atmosphere of the earlier Foundation stories. I had to resurrect all the paraphernalia of psychohistory, and I had to make references to five hundred years of past history. I had to keep the action low and the dialogue high (the critics often complained about that in my novels, but to perdition with them), and I had to present competing rational outlooks and describe different worlds and societies.

  What's more, I was uneasily conscious that the early Foundation stories had been written by someone who knew only the technology of the 1940s. There were no computers, for instance, though I did presume the existence of very advanced mathematics. I didn't try to explain that. I just put very advanced computers in the new Foundation novel and hoped that nobody would notice the inconsistency. Oddly enough, no one did.

  There were also no robots in the early Foundation novels, and I didn't introduce them in the new one either.

  During the 1940s, you see, I had had two separate series going: the Foundation series and the robot series. I deliberately kept them different, the former set in the far future without robots and the latter in the near future with robots. I wanted the two series to remain as separated as possible so that if I got tired of one of them (or if the readers did), I could continue with the other with a minimum of troubling overlap. And indeed, I did get tired of the Foundation and I wrote no more after 1950, while I continued to write robot stories (and even two robot novels).

  In writing the new Foundation novel in 1981, I felt the absence of robots to be an anomaly, but there was no way I could bring them in suddenly and without warning. Computers I could; they were side issues making only brief appearances. Robots, however, would be bound to be principal characters and I had to continue to leave them out. Nevertheless, the problem remained in my head and I knew that I would have to deal with it someday.

  I called the new novel Lightning Rod, for what seemed to me to be good and sufficient reasons, but Doubleday vetoed that instantly. A Foundation novel had to have "Foundation" in the title so that the readers would know at once that that was what they were waiting for. In this case, Doubleday was right, and I finally settled on Foundation's Edge as the title.

  It took me nine months to write the novel and it was a hard time not only for me but for Janet, for my uncertainty concerning the quality of the novel reflected itself in my mood. When I felt that the novel wasn't going well, I brooded in wretched silence, and Janet admitted that she longed for the days when I wrote only nonfiction, when I had no literary problems, and when my mood was generally sunny.

  [After it was published] Doubleday reported large preliminary orders, but I took that calmly and without excitement. Such large orders might well be followed by large returns and actual sales could be small.

  I was wrong.

  For over thirty years, generation after generation of science-fiction readers had been reading the Foundation novels and had been clamoring for more. All of them, thirty years' worth of them, were now ready to jump at the book the instant it appeared.

  The result was that in the week of its publication, Foundation's Edge appeared in twelfth place on the New York Times Best-Seller List, and I honestly couldn't believe my eyes. I had been a published writer for forty-three years and Foundations Edge was my 262nd book. Having escaped any hint of best-sellerdom for all that time, I scarcely knew what to do with one.

  Incidentally,
when [the editor, Hugh O'Neill] showed me the proof of the cover, I burst into laughter, because it announced Foundation's Edge as the fourth book of the Foundation Trilogy. When Hugh asked me why I laughed, I pointed out that "trilogy" meant "three books," so that introducing a fourth book was a contradiction in terms.

  Hugh was horribly embarrassed and said it would be changed. I said, "No, no Hugh. Leave it. It will create talk and will be good publicity."

  But Doubleday didn't want that kind of publicity. It was changed to a fourth book of the "Foundation Saga."

  There was, of course, one little flaw in all the excitement of a bestseller. My name on the Times Best-Seller List set off a small tocsin of alarm in my brain and I knew I was doomed. Doubleday would never let me stop writing novels again-and they never did.

  Even before Foundation's Edge was published, Doubleday was satisfied on the basis of advance sales and on the sale of foreign rights that it was going to be a big moneymaker. I wasn't, simply because I couldn't believe that one of my books could be a best-seller. Having 261 non-best-sellers in a row rather established the pattern, to my way of thinking.

  [But it was a best-seller, and he was given a contract for a new novel.] Nothing in the contract, or in any verbal communication from Doubleday, however, had said it must be another Foundation novel and I certainly didn't want to do one. Instead, I thought of another series I had never finished.

  I had published the book version of The Caves of Steel in 1954, and its sequel, The Naked Sun, in 1957. In 1958, I had a contract for a third novel about Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw (the detective and his robot assistant), for my intention was to make another trilogy out of it. I began the third volume in 1958 and bogged down after I had done eight chapters. Nothing more would come and what I had written I felt was unsatisfactory. This was the book for which I tried to return the $2,000 advance Doubleday had paid me. They eventually transferred the advance to my first Doubleday nonfiction book, Life and Energy.

  Now, in 1982, twenty-four years after I had failed with the third book of the robot trilogy, my thoughts turned to it once more. If I could successfully add a fourth book to the Foundation saga, then surely I could successfully add a third book to the robot saga.

  What had stopped me in 1958 had been my intention to have a woman fall in love with a humaniform robot like R. Daneel Olivaw. I had seen no way in 1958 of being able to handle it, and as I wrote the eight chapters I grew more and more frightened of the necessity of describing the situation.

  The climate in 1982 has changed, however. Writers were more freely able to discuss sexual situations, and I had become a better writer. I didn't go back to those lost eight chapters (as I had gone back to the fourteen pages of Foundation material). I just didn't want them at all. I decided to start afresh.

  I had been been asked to make Foundation's Edge longer than my early novels, which had been 70,000 words apiece, except for The Gods Themselves, which was 90,000 words. For that reason I had made Foundation 's Edge 140,000 words long. I assumed that my instructions held for later novels and it was my intention to make the third novel 140,000 words long too-that is, as long as the first two robot novels put together. This would give me more room in which to describe the minutiae of the new societies I would deal with, and more leisure to work out the complexities of plot.

  I called the new novel The World of the Dawn, because the chief setting was on a planet named Aurora, who was the Roman goddess of the dawn. However, Doubleday again had the final word. A robot novel would have to have the word "robot" in the title, they said. The novel was therefore named The Robots of Lawn, which turned out to be even more suitable.

  I enjoyed writing the new novel considerably more than I had enjoyed writing Foundation's Edge. Partly this was because, with an actual best-seller under my belt, I had more confidence this time around. Then, too, The Robots of Dawn, like the first two robot novels, was essentially a murder mystery and I am particularly comfortable with mysteries.

  I finished the novel on March 28, 1983, and by that time Foundation's Edge had done so well, and The Robots of Dawn was so well liked by the Doubleday editors, that I resigned myself totally to the writing of novels.

  My pleasure with The Robots of Dawn led me to write a fourth robot novel. In the fourth book, Elijah Baley would be dead, but I had already decided that the robot, Daneel Olivaw, was the real hero of the series, and he would continue to function.

  Still, the fact that my robots were becoming increasingly advanced with each robot book, made it seem stranger and stranger that there were no robots in my Foundation series.

  Carefully, I worked out a reason for it and, in doing so, I could see that it was going to be necessary to tie my robot novels and my Foundation novels together into a single series. I intended to begin that process with the upcoming fourth robot novel, and to give a hint of my intention I was going to call it Robots and Empire.

  [Various friends and editors disapproved of combining the two series, but his new Doubleday editor told him to write what he wanted.]

  I went ahead and wrote Robots and Empire and clearly began the process of fusing the two series ...

  I returned to the Foundation series and wrote Foundation and Earth, which was a sequel to Foundation's Edge, and the fifth book of the series.

  Thirty-Five.

  TRIPLE BYPASS

  Six years had passed since my heart attack, and I had been living a normal life, just as before. My schedule was full of out-of-town lectures, business lunches and dinners, interviews and social engagements. In those six years, I had published about ninety hooks, including two novels that made the best-seller lists.

  Why didn't I take it easier? Surely, a heart attack is a legitimate excuse to slow down.

  First, I didn't want to. I dreaded slowing down.

  Second, I'm a denier. I had known some hypochondriacs who enjoyed ill health, who insisted upon it, who abandoned any doctor who told them nothing was wrong with them, who used the ill health to garner pity and to force others into the position of servants. I was determined not to be like that. I treated any kind of illness as an insult to my masculinity, and so I was a denier-I denied it ever happened. I insist that I am well when I am obviously not well, and if I am forced into illness despite everything I can say or do, I retreat into sullen silence, until I recover-when I promptly deny I was ever sick. As you see, then, my heart attack was a source of serious embarrassment to me and I pretended, as far as I could, that it had never happened and that I could live an uncaring normal life.

  Third, I was in a hurry, for despite everything I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that I was mortal; in fact, a lot more mortal than I had felt earlier. When I was young, I looked forward to living till the science-fictional year of 2000; in other words, till I was eighty years old. I took it for granted I would make it.

  But when both of my parents died in their seventies and I had my first operation on a cancerous thyroid [in 1972], 1 had to admit that eighty was perhaps unrealistic and that perhaps it was safer to hope I lived to be seventy. Then, with a heart attack at fifty-seven, I couldn't help but wonder if I would have to be satisfied with sixty. There was therefore an urge to speed up rather than slow down, in order that I might get as much work done as possible before I was forced-most unwillingly-to abandon my typewriter.

  So put all that together and you can see that my years after the heart attack had to be crammed as tightly with work as I could manage.

  But despite all denials, I had one heritage of the heart attack that I could not ignore. That was my angina. It wasn't very bothersome, but if I walked too far, or too quickly, or up an incline, the pain clamped down upon my chest and I was forced to wait in order to let that pain subside. I raged against that evidence of old age and mortality, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  For years, however, it remained a minor irritation, since I could avoid it by simply walking at a moderate pace and counting on a natural pause at red lights (so that I
could pretend I wasn't forced to stop for internal reasons).

  The trouble was that the situation grew slowly worse and finally in 1983 it reached a point where it couldn't be ignored. I could no longer deny very effectively. My coronary arteries were becoming narrower with accumulating plaque and my heart was being more and more starved for oxygen.-And yet I couldn't bring myself to mention the matter in my diary; I couldn't make myself put the truth down in writing.

  Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to the World Science-Fiction Convention in Baltimore. On September 4, 1983, Foundation's Edge won the Hugo by a narrow margin, despite competition from both Heinlein and Clarke. It was my fifth Hugo.

  What made the convention memorable for me, however, was that it was spread over two adjacent hotels, so that we had to travel from one to another constantly over walkways, and I had the greatest difficulty managing it.

  On September 12, I spent some time with George Abell, the astronomer, whom I had met on earlier occasions through Carl Sagan. He was a very intelligent man and very friendly. He was younger than I and seemed absolutely fit, for he kept up a regime of exercise and he lacked any sign of a potbelly.

  I thought of my own sedentary and flabby life, and of my increasing martyrdom to angina, and I suppose I would have felt envy if it weren't that I was well aware that my condition was my own fault in that it was the result of a lifetime of dietary and sedentary abuse. I had no right to indulge in envy. Nor need I have done so, for on October 7, poor George died of a heart attack and I lived on. He was only fifty-seven, the age of my heart attack.

  On September 18, I attended "New York is Book Country," the annual book-promoting extravaganza along a temporarily closed Fifth Avenue. Robyn showed up with two of her friends and we all went afterward to have dinner. However, I had to beg them all to slow down and creep along, for I could not walk any faster. That was more embarrassment for me, I'm afraid, to say nothing of my concern over the fact that I was clearly frightening Robyn.