Frankly, I was furious. Any two-bit writer who did not write science fiction would have been memorialized. Any musician, serious, popular, or jazz, would have made it. Any vice-president of any obscure business firm would have been favored with a headline. Upon what meat does a great science fiction writer feed that he is grown so ignorable?
It is a source of great satisfaction to me that the Science Fiction Writers of America (we guys!) did not ignore him. He was chosen to receive the Grand Master Award in 1988 (the ninth), and he knew about it. He was told. Nor will his death abrogate the decision, for it makes him no less worthy. At the next Nebula Awards banquet, the Grand Master Award will be given him posthumously.
And it means, sadly, that in the dozen-year history (so far) of the awards, he will have been the first Grand Master to break ranks and pass on to the Grand Perpetual Convention in the Sky.
Alf a was always a cheerful and amazingly extroverted fellow. He made me seem shy and bashful. Of course, he used to take an occasional drink, whereas I remained a teetotaling sobersides. That may well have made a difference.
In any case, he always gave me the biggest hello it was possible to hand out. I use the term figuratively, because what he gave me more than once (lots more than once, especially if he saw me before I saw him) was more than a verbal greeting. He enclosed me in a bear hug and kissed me on the cheek. And, occasionally, if I had my back to him, he did not hesitate to goose me.
This discomfited me in two ways. First, it was a direct physical discomfiture. I am not used to being immobilized by a hug and then kissed, and I am certainly not used to being goosed.
A more indirect discomfiture and a much worse one was my realization that just as I approached Alfie very warily when I saw him before he saw me, it might be possible that young women approached me just as warily, for I will not deny to you that I have long acted on the supposition that hugging, kissing, and goosing was a male prerogative, provided young women (not aging males) were the target. You have no idea how it spoiled things to me when I couldn't manage to forget that the young women might be edging away.
I wonder if Alfie did it on purpose in order to widen my understanding of human nature and to reform me. No, I don't think so. It was just his natural ebullience.
He was a lot more serious when he called me up. Of all my friends, he and Harlan were most likely to call me up to ask me questions for which they needed answers they couldn't readily find in what reference books were available. I must say that Alfie's questions were hard ones and I could rarely come up with satisfactory answers. Generally, I would be reduced to saying, "Just make something up, Alfie. That's what I do." However, whereas a prolific writer such as myself is forced to make something up as otherwise the steady patter of the typewriter keys is interrupted, Alfie, whose hallmark was quality, could not manage that escape. He had to keep worrying the Universe till he got his answer.
Alfie had a queer and highly lopsided view of the Universe even when he wasn't writing science fiction. He interviewed me for Publishers Weekly about fifteen years ago. We spent a couple of hours together, while he managed to maneuver me into odd corners of my life. It finally turned out that I was very fond of soppy old ballads I had heard when I was quite young and that I would occasionally sing them. He encouraged me (I am quite a naive fellow) and so I sang for him, with a wealth of emotion, "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams."
The interview was published, and there on the printed page of the super respectable Publishers Weekly was a description of me singing:
I walk along the street of sorrow,
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,
Where gigolo and gigolette
Wake up to find their cheeks are wet
With tears that come of shattered schemes
(and so on)
It's the only place and the only time where this foul secret addiction of mine was uncovered.
Farewell, Alfie, my friend, with your gaiety and your gooses, your madness and your genius, until I come to join you in that Grand Perpetual Convention—if they let me in.
—Isaac Asimov
Nebula Awards #23, 1987
RICHARD RAUCCI is the author of Personal Robotics: Real Robots to Construct, Program and Explore the World (1999). A former editor for McGraw-Hill and IDG computer technology magazines, Richard also was a Chesterfield Writers Project semi-finalist in 1998.
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