Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  My parents, both of whom spoke Russian fluently, made no effort to teach me Russian, but insisted on my learning English as rapidly and as well as possible. They even set about learning English themselves, with reasonable, but limited, success.

  In a way, I am sorry. It would have been good to know the language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski. On the other hand, I would not have been willing to let anything get in the way of the complete mastery of English. Allow me my prejudice: surely there is no language more majestic than that of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible, and if I am to have one language that I know as only a native can know it, I consider myself unbelievably fortunate that it is English.

  * * * *

  Now my memory starts. I remember, quite distinctly, the first place we lived in after having arrived in the United States. I even remember the address. It was 425 Van Siclen Avenue, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. [I feel a little silly giving statistics of this sort. I mean, who could possibly care what the exact address is? However, these are among the questions I am sometimes asked: “Exactly where did you live when you first came to the United States?” I hope that no one is thinking of making a pilgrimage to the site. It was a slum when I lived there and it has gone downhill steadily ever since.] I lived in Brooklyn for nineteen years after my arrival in the United States, and my Brooklyn accent is with me to this day.

  The Van Siclen Avenue abode was nothing lavish. There was no electricity; we used gas jets. There was no central heating; we had a cast-iron stove, which my mother started with paper and kindling.

  Fortunately, I didn’t know that this represented slum living. It was home to me, and I was happy. I was particularly fascinated by the stove, and I was always on hand to watch the fire start and my mother knead dough and make noodles. In 1925, when we moved to more advanced quarters, at 434 Miller Avenue, one block away, I cried bitterly.

  In February 1925, shortly after my fifth birthday, I began school: kindergarten. If you want further statistics, the school was P.S. 182.

  In the ordinary course of events, I would have entered first grade a year later, shortly after my sixth birthday. My mother, however, could not wait.

  You see, I had already taught myself to read by hounding the older boys to write out the alphabet for me (which I had learned from a rope-skipping game) and identify each letter and tell me what it “sounds like.” I then practiced on street signs and newspaper headlines, sounding the letters till words made sense. To this day, I remember the sudden surge of triumph when I realized there must be such things as silent letters and that the word I was trying to pronounce, ISland, which meant nothing to me, was really EYEland. That made “Coney Island” luminously clear all of a sudden. On the other hand, I remember being completely defeated by “ought.” I could not pronounce it, nor could any of the other boys tell me what it meant when they pronounced it.

  My parents, of course, couldn’t read English and so couldn’t help me, and the fact that I learned to read without their help seemed to impress them the more. (My sister was much luckier. When she was five years old, I was seven and a past master at the art. Considerably against her will, I taught her to read quite efficiently, so that when it came time for her to enter school, they put her into the second grade directly.)

  In September 1925, I remember, my mother took me to school. My mother’s half brother came along, too, as interpreter. (He was my “Uncle joe.”) At the time, I did not know what they were doing, but in later years it dawned on me that they must have been altering my birth date. My mother, backed by Uncle Joe, assured the school authorities that I was born on September 7, 1919. (Considering the uncertainty of my birth date, it was less of a lie than it looked, but it was a little of a lie, because, allowing for all uncertainties, I could not possibly have been born earlier than October at the outside.)

  With a September 7, 1919 birthday, that made me six years old the day before the fall term started in 1925, and I was allowed to enter the first grade.

  The reason I know that this is what must have happened is that when I was in the third grade, the teacher (for some reason) had the children recite their birth dates. In all innocence, I said January 2, 1920, and she frowned and told me it was September 7, 1919.

  Well! I have always been quite certain of knowing what I know, and I became very emphatic about having been born on January 2, 1920. So energetic did I become in the matter, in fact, that the school records were changed accordingly. If that had not been done, my official birthday would have been September 7, 1919, to this day.

  Oddly enough, that turned out to have an important influence on my life. During World War II, I was working at the U. S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia as a chemist and was periodically deferred from the draft because of the war-related importance of my labors. After V-E day, May 8, 1945, the upper age for those liable to the draft was lowered to twenty-six, and those who were still under that age and had thus far escaped being drafted were scrutinized with special care.

  On September 7, 1945, I received my notice of induction, and, two months later, was taken into the warm bosom of the Army of the United States as a private. It was no great tragedy, as it turned out, since by that time the war was over, and I remained in the Army only nine months. However, had I kept my little third-grade yap shut, my birthday would have stayed September 7, 1919, and that notice of induction would have arrived on my twenty-sixth birthday and I would have been ineligible for the draft.

  * * * *

  My stay in grade school was hectic. On two different occasions, my despairing teachers got rid of me by shoving me ahead a semester. This had its elements of trauma, for on each occasion I lost the friends I had made in the old class and was forced to associate with the strangers of the new one.

  Besides that, there was always that panic-laden moment when I realized the class had learned things I didn’t yet know and that it would take me days of frightened activity to catch up and move ahead again. On the first occasion on which I was “skipped,” I found myself in a class that was solving problems in multiplication, something I had never heard of.

  I went home crying. My mother, unable to tell what it was that I did not know, called in a neighboring girl, aged twelve. (I found out in later years that she had been aged twelve; at the time, I thought she was a grownup.) The girl began drilling me in 2X1=2, 2X2=4, 2X3=6, and so on.

  After a while it began to seem very familiar. I asked her to wait a moment and got my five-cent copybook. On the back were reference tables telling me that there were 12 inches to a foot, 16 ounces to a pound, and so on. There was also a large square array of mysterious numbers.

  ‘What is this?” I asked.

  “That,” she said, “is the multiplication table.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I know how to multiply,” and I sent her home. Having nothing better to do, I had memorized the numbers long before, and from what she told me, I saw how the multiplication table worked.

  The other time when I was pushed ahead, I found the class was studying geography, something of which I was utterly innocent. I remember the teacher had asked me where Yucatan was, and I drew a complete blank and the class laughed. (The less advanced a student was, the louder he laughed at someone else’s ignorance.)

  Quite humiliated, I asked the teacher after class if we had a book on the subject, and she pointed out the largest of the new books I had been given and said it was the geography book. That night, I went over every map in the book, and you can bet I was never caught again.

  It turned out quite early, you see, that I was a child prodigy. My parents apparently knew it, but never told me so, because they didn’t believe in giving children swelled heads. I wish they had, though, since then I wouldn’t have thought it so unreasonable that every time I came back with less than 100 in any test I took, it would be interpreted as an unsatisfactory performance deserving of punishment. (And my mother, who knew nothing about modern child psychology, always punished by means of a physi
cal assault.)

  But then I didn’t really need the information from them, since I gathered it by myself when I made the astonishing discovery that other people didn’t understand something till it was explained and then didn’t remember it after it was explained.

  I don’t know how it is with other prodigies, for I have never gone into the subject. Perhaps many of them have had a sense of unhappiness, of isolation, of drudgery, and may have wanted to be like other people.

  Not so in my case, however. I enjoyed every minute of my prodigiousness, because, nasty little devil that I was, I enjoyed knowing more than the other kids and being far quicker on the uptake.

  Of course, it had its difficulties. By the time I entered the fourth grade, I was a year and a half younger than anyone else in the class, and small for my age at that. And since I was still the smartest kid in the class and very self-appreciative about it, there were many of my schoolmates who lusted for my life. I found, however, that if I picked out the biggest and dumbest kid in the class and did his homework for him, he constituted himself my protector.

  Another point that may have helped save my life was that I was never a teacher’s pet. Never! I was a loudmouthed extrovert then, as I am now, and I could never resist the chance of upsetting the class with a funny remark. I was forever being disciplined, and when that was insufficient I was sent to the principal’s office. (Believe it or not, I was evicted from class as a disruptive influence even as late as my college days.) So, of course, the other kids decided that anyone as badly behaved as I couldn’t be all bad, and they resisted the impulse to eradicate me.

  * * * *

  During our first years in the United States, my father worked in a knitting factory for a while, and then tried his hand at being a door-to-door salesman. Finally, in 1926, in a search for some sort of security, he put what money he had been able to accumulate into a candy store that existed on Sutter Avenue (good Heavens, I’ve forgotten the street number), right around the corner from our apartment.

  A candy store is a good thing in some ways. You work for yourself and the work is steady. The profits are small but they’re there, and we went through the entire period of the Great Depression without missing a meal and without ever having to spend one moment’s anxiety that my father might lose his job and that we might all be on the bread lines. To those of you who know nothing of the Great Depression firsthand, let me assure you as earnestly as I can that we were very lucky.

  On the other hand, a candy store is a rotten thing in some ways. Back before World War II, candy stores stayed open from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. seven days a week, with no holidays. It meant that from the age of six I never had any but an occasional, fugitive hour of leisure with either parent. Furthermore, a candy store can be operated only by an entire family, which meant that I had to pitch in. Each year, I did a larger share of the chores.

  The work wasn’t hard, but it kept me behind the counter for much of my spare time, dishing out candy and cigarettes, making change, delivering papers, running a block and a half to call someone to the telephone, and so on. It kept me from the gay social life of my peers, eliminating punchball and ring-a-levio and many other things of the sort.

  Not entirely, of course. In those days (and maybe in ours, too, for all I know) there were “seasons.” One day, everyone was playing complicated games with marbles. The next day, all the marbles had disappeared and everyone was out with tops, or checkers (with which to play a marvelous game called “skelly”). I could play all the games with moderate ability, but I was considerably hampered by the fact that I was under strict instructions not to play “for keeps,” because my father disapproved of gambling and it was difficult to get other kids to play me “for fun.” (“There’s no fun in playing for fun,” they would say.)

  Life was not all work, of course. There was a movie immediately across the street from the candy store. Every Saturday afternoon, my mother gave me a dime and supervised my crossing of the street. For that dime I saw two (silent) movies, a comedy, a cartoon, and, best of all, “an episode,” which is what we called the movie serials of those days.

  Then, too, I read a good deal. We had no books in the house (they were one of the very many luxuries we could not afford), but my father wangled a library card for me before I was seven. My very first taste of independence was that of going to the library alone by bus in order to pick out books.

  I could go to the library only at certain times, however, and I could take out only two books at a time when I did go, and I generally finished them both before it was time to go to the library again, no matter how slowly I tried to make myself read. As a result, I constantly felt myself gravitating toward the magazine rack in my father’s candy store. It was filled with apparently fascinating reading material.

  Along a string stretched across the window, there were draped a dozen paper-backed novels featuring Frank Merriwell and Nick Carter, which I yearned for. There were other paper-backed objects with pictures on the cover, which I learned were called magazines, and some were particularly fascinating; there were pictures of people shooting other people with guns, and that looked great. There were even magazines with names like Paris Nights, whose purpose I didn’t quite understand but with color illustrations that roused the most intense curiosity in me.

  But, standing in the way of all this was my father. He simply would not let me read any of the magazines he sold, for he considered every one of them cheap and sensational trash that would only blunt and ruin my razor-sharp mind. I disagreed, of course, but my father was a remarkably stubborn man and he still had the European notion that Papa was boss.

  My fate, however, all unknown to me, was approaching.

  * * * *

  In the spring of 1926, the first magazine ever to be devoted to science fiction exclusively was placed on the newsstands for sale. It was entitled Amazing Stories, the first issue was dated April, and the publisher was Hugo Gernsback.

  To fill the magazine, Gernsback was at first compelled to make heavy use of reprints of the works of European writers. It wasn’t till the August 1928 issue that a new world really opened. In that issue there appeared the first installment of a three-part serial entitled The Skylark of Space, by Edward E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby.

  As literature, it was a total flop (may the shade of good old Doc Smith forgive me!), but it had something more than good writing, much more. It had adventure of an unprecedented kind. There was the first introduction of interstellar travel. There were mind-boggling distances and encounters; a kind of never-slowing action centered about indestructible heroes.

  The readers whom Amazing Stories had been attracting went wild. It became the first great “classic” of American magazine science fiction, and it was the forerunner of native American science fiction, which ever since has dominated world literature in that field.

  But, alas, The Skylark of Space came and went and I knew nothing of it. I don’t even recall seeing Amazing Stories on my father’s newsstand during the years 1926 to 1928. I must have, but no trace of it is left in my memory.

  Yet 1928, the year of The Skylark of Space, was notable for me in a number of ways.

  For one thing, I briefly made the acquaintance of a remarkable youngster, who influenced me far more strongly than I could possibly have realized at the time.

  He was roughly my age, rather smaller than I was, and rather darker in complexion. Somehow I discovered he had the ability to tell stories that held me enthralled, and he discovered simultaneously that I was an audience most willing to be enthralled.

  For some months, we sought each other out so that we could play the roles of storyteller and audience. He would rattle on eagerly while we walked to the library and back, or when we just sat on someone’s front steps.

  The importance of it was just this: for the first time, I realized stories could be “made up.” Until then, I had naturally assumed that stories existed only in books and had probably been there unchanged, from the beginning of time, witho
ut human creators.

  Of the tales my friend told me, I have only the dimmest of recollections. I seem to remember that they involved the adventures of a group of men who were forever facing and overcoming dangerous villains. The leader of the group, an expert in the use of all conceivable weapons, was named Dodo “Weapons” Windrows, and his lieutenant was one Jack Winslow.

  Whether my friend actually made up the stories or retold me material he had read, with adaptations, I don’t know. At the time, I had no doubt whatever that he was inventing it as he went along. And looking back on it now, his enthusiasm seems to me to have been that of creation and not of adaptation.

  Both of us were careful never to let anyone overhear us in our enjoyment of the process. My friend once explained that the other kids would “laugh at us.” I suppose he felt his stories weren’t first class and that while I seemed to appreciate them, others might not. Like any true artist, he did not care to expose himself needlessly to the possibility of adverse criticism.