It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  Perhaps the most surprising honor I got was to have my name inscribed on a slab of rock on a pathway in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. I was not the only one, of course. As one went along that path, there was rock after rock with the names of Brooklyn-born people who had become famous. (Mae West's name was there, for instance.)

  When I was told my name was being added, I said I hadn't been born in Brooklyn. They told me that since I had been brought up in Brooklyn from the age of three and had been educated in Brooklyn public schools, that was enough ...

  On June 8, 1986 ... I was asked to say a few words, but the real star present was Danny Kaye, whom I had always admired, and whom I now met for the first and only time. He called me pcivess (Yiddish for "sideburns") and then gave a charming talk.

  However, he looked ill and, as a matter of fact, he died on March 3. 1987, only nine months later, at the age of seventy-four.

  By the time I was sixty-seven years old, it might have seemed I had everything I could possibly want as far as the science-fiction world was concerned. I had Hugos, Nebulas, and best-sellers. I was one of the Big Three. I was treated as a monument at science-fiction conven tions, and young newcomers to the game of science-fiction writing viewed me with awe. Thanks to my prominent white sideburns I was routinely recognized on the street and I was sure that, if I traveled, I would find myself recognized all over the world. I was as popular in places like Japan, Spain, and the Soviet Union as I was in the United States, and my books have been translated into over forty languages.

  What remained?

  One thing! In 1975, the Science Fiction Writers of America instituted a very special Nebula to be called the Grand Master Award. This was to go to some science-fiction superstar at a Nebula Awards banquet for his life's work, rather than for any single production.

  The first one went, inevitably, to Robert Heinlein. There was no argument about that. He was the general favorite among sciencefiction readers and he had pioneered the advance of our kind of science fiction into the slicks and the motion pictures. He was respected outside science fiction as well as inside ...

  Other Grand Master Awards were handed out in later years ... all were well deserved ... what's more, all were well stricken in years but had fortunately survived to receive the honor. In fact, I can only think of two people in magazine science fiction who would surely have deserved the honor but who had died before 1975. They were E. E. Smith and John W. Campbell himself ...

  The awards were not given every year. In the eleven years from 1975 to 1986 inclusive, only seven awards had been handed out. All seven Grand Masters were older than I was, and all had begun publishing in the 1930s or 1940s, so I had no quarrel with their getting the awards. Of the writers that remained, two worthy candidates I could think of that were older than I were Lester del Rey and Frederik Pohl, and that might delay my turn anywhere from two to four years.

  I was nervous about that. I was having a rash of medical problems that did not fill me with much confidence as to my chance of surviving three or four years, and I certainly didn't want people to go about saying, "We should have given him a Grand Master Award before he died." A fat lot of good that would have done me.

  It may sound rather greedy of me to hunger for the award, but I'm human too. I wanted it. I honestly thought I deserved it. However, I kept my hunger entirely within myself. In no way did I campaign for it, and by no word or deed did I ever indicate openly that I was interested.

  But the time came at last, and I was still alive. On May 2, 1987, at the Nebula Awards banquet, I received my Grand Master Award. I was the eighth Grand Master and all of us were still alive, a point I made gleefully in my acceptance speech. (It was the last opportunity to say that, alas, for in the next year two of the Grand Masters, Robert Heinlein and Clifford Simak, died ...)

  In my acceptance speech, incidentally, I said we all looked for special distinction. Thus, though Robert Heinlein was the first Grand Master, Arthur Clarke was the first British Grand Master, and Andre Norton was the first woman Grand Master. I, although the eighth all told, was the first Jewish Grand Master.

  After the banquet, Robert Silverberg ... said, "Now that you're the first Jewish Grand Master, where does that leave me?" . . .

  I said to him, "Bob, you will be the first handsome Jewish Grand Master," and he broke into a smile and was pleased.

  Thirty-Eight.

  WORKING ON

  IN GATHERING SHADOWS

  Harper & Row asked me to write a history of science, year by year ... [including] in each year something of what was going on in the world outside science. That filled me with excitement. It would be a kind of history book, a general one, and not just one about science.

  With my novels going at a hot pace, I couldn't start it, but I kept thinking about it, and dreaming about it.

  I was going up in my apartment elevator one day when a young man said to me that he had read the Foundation series and he always wanted to know what had happened to Hari Seldon when he was young and how he had come to invent psychohistory (the fictional science that underlies the series).

  I seized on that, and when the time came to sign contracts for new novels, I suggested that I go back in time and write Prelude to Foundation, which would deal with events that took place fifty years before the first book in the series and with Hari Seldon and the establishment of psychohistory.... It was published in 1988.

  [In the meantime] I cast aside caution and began the book I called Science Timeline. Eventually Harper & Row gave it the ungainly, but descriptive name of Asimov's Chronology of Science and Technology. I have rarely had so much fun in my life.

  I tried to write it along with Nemesis when it came time to do that novel, alternating the two. I used Nemesis as a bribe and the Chronology as a reward. If I managed to do ten pages of Nemesis, I felt free to do twenty of the Chronology, and so on. The advantage was all on the side of the Chronology. I knew that Nemesis would make ten times as much money as the Chronology, but my heart was with nonfiction ...

  [Nemesis] was placed closer to our time than was true of either the robot novels or the Foundation novels. It dealt with the colonization of a satellite that circled a Jovian-type planet that, in turn, circled a reddwarf star. My protagonist was a teenaged girl and I also had two strong adult women characters. I placed considerably more emotion in the novel than was customary for me.

  [Since the publication of Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology in 19721 1 developed the habit of keeping my eye on the New York Times obituary page ... I had to know when one of the still-living scientists dealt with in the final pages of the book died. I would then enter the exact day and place of death in a special copy of the book I used for that purpose. This kept me ready for future editions, and I have followed the system ever since.

  I began reading the obituaries with a sense of detachment, for death, of course, was something for old people. I was only fifty-two years old when I began any obituary reading and death still seemed far away. However, as I grew older, the obituary page slowly became at once more important to me and more threatening. It has become morbidly obsessive with me now.

  I suspect this happens to a great many people. Ogden Nash wrote a line that I have always remembered: "The old men know when an old man dies."

  With the years, that line has become ever more poignant to me. After all, an old person to one who has known him for a long time is not an "old person" but is much more likely to be thought of as the younger person who inhabits our memory, vigorous and vibrant. When an old person dies who has been a part of your life, it is part of your youth that dies. And though you survive yourself, you must watch death take away the world of your youth, little by little.

  There may be some morbid satisfaction in being a last survivor, but is it so much better than death to be the last leaf on the tree, to find yourself alone in a strange and hostile world where no one remembers you as a boy, and where no one can share with you the memory of that long-gone
world that glowed all about you when you were young?

  Thoughts like that would beset me, now and then, after I passed my sixty-ninth birthday on January 2, 1989, and knew myself to be within a year of the biblical threescore years and ten.

  Mind you, I hadn't turned completely morbid. For the most part, I maintained my cheery and ebullient outlook on the world. I kept up my busy schedule of social get-togethers, speaking engagements, editorial conferences, and endless writing, writing, writing. But in the dead of night sometimes, when sleep wouldn't come, I might think of how few there remained who remembered, with me, how it all was in the beginning ...

  I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever.-Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after their death.

  This, as you see, verges dangerously on what is to me the most hated of sins-self-pity-and I fight it.

  [Janet's note: Isaac always fought self-pity and fears of death. When much younger, he wrote in a letter] Of the five heaps of snow in my driveway, one is almost gone and two more are pretty sickly. That always makes me feel sad. I'm delighted to see the snow go, you understand, but I can't help empathizing with the heaps. I tend to personify them ever since I was a little kid. The snow (in my mind) was always fighting and eventually losing the fight with the sun. Occasionally it would receive reinforcements from the heaven, but as March wore on, the retreats would be farther than the one before. The army would break into separate contingents and I would imagine them exhorting each other and keeping each other's courage up. I would even imagine the largest heap to be rather scornful of the others as faint-hearts giving in to the enemy and coming down in its pride to humiliating defeat ...

  Even now, mature and rational as I am, each morning I make a little round of inspection to view the army and feel the pang of sympathy for the defeated ...

  [I answered: "All things change-every thing trying to remain immutable is fighting a losing fight. All of which sounds very wise and doesn't explain why I get annoyed when things wear out, and walls need repainting, etc."]

  [Isaac's reply to my letter] Fighting to stay alive is fighting the inevitable. The good fight has its own values. That it must end in irrevocable defeat is irrelevant.

  [By 1989, Isaac was beginning to feel that irrevocable defeat was coming closer.]

  [It was] difficult to bear up under the increasingly rapid drumfire of deaths that come with the passing years. [He lists many] And so it went. I held more and more passionately to the dwindling group of old friends who survived ...

  Unquestionably, twilight was drawing on and the shadows were gathering-and deepening.

  These gloomy ruminations of mine; these sad thoughts of death and dissolution and of an approaching end; were not entirely the result of philosophic thought and of the bitter experience that came to me with the years. There was something more concrete than that. My physical health was deteriorating.

  I would not be a good "denier" if I had admitted that deterioration and you can be sure I didn't admit it. Through the summer and fall of 1989, I stubbornly continued my accustomed course, pretending that I did not feel my years ...

  Of course, I kept up my writing ... I also started Forward the Foundation, and helped with the novelization of "Nightfall." In addition I worked endlessly on my huge history book.

  Yet all through that summer and autumn, I felt an unaccountable and increasing tendency to weariness. I walked slowly and with an effort. People commented on my loss of ebullience now and then, and, in embarrassment, I tried to be more lively, but only with an everincreasing effort.

  Indeed, I caught myself thinking, now and then, that it would be so pleasant simply to lie down and drift quietly off to sleep and not waken again. Such a thought was so alien to me that, whenever it occurred to me, I shoved it away in horror. I did so with a kind of double horror, in fact, for I could not help but think how Janet and Robyn would react, for one thing, and for another I realized, with complete consternation, that I would be leaving behind unfinished work.

  But the thought kept returning.

  Yet not a word of the gathering weariness managed to find its way into my diary. I refused to admit openly that it existed. Just the same, there was something wrong that I could not deny because [there were physical manifestations].

  [He experienced more and more sickness and "wipeouts."I

  All through that unhappy December [1989] I kept thinking "I'm so close, so close, but I won't make it to seventy." ... What is so magic about seventy? The trouble is that Psalm 90:10 reads: "The years of our life are threescore and ten."

  This has been taken, on biblical authority, to be the normal span of human life. Actually, it's not so. The average life span of human beings did not reach seventy over a large section of the population till well into the twentieth century. It took modern medicine and science to see to it that seventy is really the years of our life. But the Bible says seventy, and that figure became magic.

  Comparatively early in life, I managed to have it ground into my brain that there was no disgrace in dying after seventy, but that dying before seventy was "premature" and was a reflection on a person's intelligence and character.

  It was unreasonable, of course; quite irrational.

  Still, I had reached sixty when, after my heart attack, I thought I might not. Then I reached sixty-five when, before my triple bypass. I thought I might not. And now seventy was within reach and I thought, "I won't make it." (It reminded me of the days in 1945 when I was racing to reach twenty-six before I could be drafted-and failed.)

  January 2, 1990, finally dawned and I was seventy years old after all-officially. Janet, Robyn, and I had a celebration dinner at our Chinese restaurant and we had Peking duck.... I ate a small quantity only, for it had salt in it, so it was not exactly a happy birthday even though I was greatly relieved at having reached it.

  I had come to a momentous decision. On January 11, 1990, I went to see Paul [his doctor, and], almost in tears, I made a rather long and eloquent speech, the tenor of which was that I didn't want to take tests, didn't want hospitalization, I didn't want anything. I just wanted to be allowed to die in peace, and not be made a football to be bounced from doctor to doctor while all of them experimented with me and began to employ more and more heroic measures to keep me alive.

  I had reached seventy, I said, and it was no longer a disgrace to die.

  [He was sent to the hospital anyway.]

  My big problem came on January 16, which was the sixth day of my hospital stay. For months, Doubleday had been planning a party on that day to celebrate both my seventieth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of my first book, Pebble in the Sky. It was to be held at Tavern on the Green and it was, to my horror, to be black tie.

  [He and I and his doctor conspired to get him out of the hospital for that evening. At Tavern on the Green] all my buddies from various publishing houses, all my pals from the Dutch Treat Club and the Trap Door Spiders, all my friends and neighbors, near and far, were waiting ...

  I launched into my talk. I discussed my earlier near-scrapes with death, going into full detail about my fantasy involving the Baker Street Irregulars at the time of my bypass and what a flash of disappointment I experienced on realizing that I had survived and would not get the applause a dead man would have gotten.

  There was wild laughter and applause from everyone, of course, and the only negative comment I got was from Robyn [who said] "You may think it's funny to talk about dying, because you're crazy, but 1 don't think it is."

  Well, everyone else laughed!

  By 9 P.M., I was back in my room, feeling I had handled everything perfectly and no one in the hospital would know.

  However, the New York Times knew about the party. It appeared in the paper the next day and everyone in the hospital apparently read it, so that I was lectured by the nurses. Leste
r del Rey (whose own condition wouldn't allow him to attend) called up and raved at me for doing it and endangering my life. All I could say was, "Lester! I didn't know you cared!" and that didn't seem to soothe him.

  What bothered me most, though, was a matter involving my syndicated column. It was time to do it and the only way I could manage it was to choose a topic that required no reference material, write it out longhand, and then call the Los Angeles Times and read it into their recording machine.

  I did exactly that, but when I called, I got a young woman at the paper who said to me, as soon as I announced my name, "Oh, you bad boy! Why did you sneak out of the hospital?"

  It just about broke my heart. I couldn't even carry out an innocent little deception without the whole world knowing.

  [He started the third volume of his autobiography while in the hospital.] By the time I was ready to leave the hospital I had written over 250 long pages in reasonably small printing. Not only did this keep me from going mad but it actually put me into a jovial and good-natured mood.

  [Nevertheless] It was one miserable winter. They had to continue the intravenous drip for four weeks. Twice each day, material was dribbled through a heplock into my veins for an hour or two at a time.

  Then, on February 15, the doctors came to me with further news. In view of the fact that no infection could be found [in the mitral valve], they did not think it wise to subject me to the operation and take a chance on further kidney damage with the heart-lung machine. Therefore, I would not have the operation to replace the leaking mitral valve. They said I could live with mitral regurgitation, that there was no chance that it would suddenly give way and kill me. At the most it would weaken further, my symptoms would get worse, and they would bring me in again for surgery.

  On March 3, then, I was back at home and ready to renew my life-with a leaking valve and faulty kidneys. The doctors warned me against involvement in anything beyond my strength, but they agreed that writing (even to the extent that I wrote) was not physically strenuous and that I could continue.