It's Been a Good Life Page 6

  The notion of using a woman scientist [arose] out of [knowing] Professor Mary Caldwell, my gentle and understanding graduate adviser. The character in "Liar" was nothing at all like Professor Caldwell in appearance and behavior, but I called her "Susan Caldwell" just the same.

  After the story was accepted, I had qualmish second thoughts. It didn't strike me that Professor Caldwell would like the use of her name and I didn't want her annoyed with me.

  On my next visit to Campbell, I found him out with the flu but I talked to his secretary, Katherine Tarrant, and explained the situation to her.

  She said, with a sigh, "I suppose you want me to go through the manuscript and change the name wherever it appears."

  "Yes," I said eagerly. "Would you?"

  "What name do you want instead?"

  Desperately I thought of a change that would involve the fewest letters. "Calvin," I said.

  It was done and Susan Calvin has been the heroine of some ten stories of mine so far.

  This brings up one of the reasons why I don't take critics seriously. Some critics, in discussing my robot stories, make much of the name "Calvin," assuming that I chose it deliberately for its associations with John Calvin, the predestinarian, and his gloomy, doom-ridden work ethic. Not at all! I was merely trying to introduce a minimal change in Caldwell, for the reasons I explained.

  Ten.

  FAMOUS FICTION

  [March 17, 1941] Campbell had an idea of his own. I don't know if he was saving it specifically for me, or if I just happened to be the first author to walk in after the idea had occurred to him.

  He had come across a quotation from an eight-chapter work by Ralph Waldo Emerson called Nature. In the first chapter, Emerson said, "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God...."

  Campbell asked me to read it and said, "What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?"

  I thought, and drew a blank. I said, "I don't know."

  Campbell said, "I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that."

  We talked about various things, thereafter, with Campbell seeming to circle the idea and occasionally asking me questions such as "Why should the stars be invisible at other times?" and listened to me as I tried to improvise answers. Finally, he shooed me out with, "Go home and write the story."

  In my diary for that day I said, "I'll get started on it soon, as I think the idea is swell, and I even envisage making a lead novelette out of it; but I don't delude myself into thinking it will be an easy story to write. It will require hard work."

  [Isaac's footnote] Here and elsewhere I have always spoken with complete candor about the role of others in the genesis and development of my stories-particularly Campbell's role. Nevertheless, I am a little sensitive when people overestimate the importance of such contributions. It is one thing to say, "I think people would go crazy if they see the stars for the first time in a thousand years. Go home and write the story." It is quite another to go home and actually write the story. Campbell might suggest but it was I who then had to go home and face the empty sheet of paper in the typewriter.

  On the evening of March 18, 1941, 1 began the story.

  It was a crucial moment for me. I had as yet, in almost three years of selling, failed to do anything outstanding. [Of my] thirty-one stories, published and unpublished, sold and unsold, only three were what I would now consider as three stars or better on my old zero-to-five star scale, and they were my three positronic robot stories: "Robbie," "Reason," and "Liar."

  I put a piece of paper in the typewriter, typed the title, which Campbell and I had agreed should be "Nightfall," typed the Emerson quotation, then began the story.

  I remember that evening very well, my own room, just next to the living room, my desk facing the southern wall, with the bed behind me and to the right, the window on the other side of the bed, looking out westward on Windsor Place, with the candy store across the street.

  Did I have any notion that . . . I was going to write the best science-fiction story of all time? How could I?

  Yet some people think exactly that of "Nightfall" [which has] come to be considered a classic. [But] My own three favorite short stories are, in order, (1) "The Last Question," (2) "The Bicentennial Man," and (3) "The Ugly Little Boy."

  Still, ["Nightfall"] was a turning point, even if I can't figure out the reason. After "Nightfall" was published, the rejections stopped. I simply wrote and sold, and within a year or two, I had reached the Heinlein/van Vogt level, or almost.

  When, forty years after the story was published, I got around to establishing a corporation, I had no choice. I called that corporation Nightfall, Inc.

  [1941-with the war going badly in Europe-and after a futurehistorical story called "Pilgrimage" had been rejected several times] I still wanted to write a future-historical.

  I love historical novels (if they contain neither too much violence nor too much sleazy sex).... Naturally, just as loving science fiction led me to the desire to write science fiction, the love of historical novels led me to the desire to write historical novels.

  To write a historical novel was, however, impractical for me. It would require an enormous amount of reading and research and I just couldn't spend all that time at it. [He was in graduate school].... It occurred to me that I could write a historical novel if I made up my own history ... a science-fiction story that read like a historical novel.

  Now, I won't pretend that I made up the idea of writing histories of the future. It had been done numerous times, most effectively and startlingly by the British writer Olaf Stapledon, who wrote First and Last Men and The Star Makers. These books, however, read like histories and I wanted to write a historical novel, a story with conversation and action just like any other science-fiction story except that it would deal not only with technology but with political and sociological problems.

  Why shouldn't I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire? I thought I knew how to do it for I had read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from first page to last at least twice, and I had only to make use of that.

  I was bubbling over by the time I got to Campbell's, and my enthusiasm was catching. It was perhaps too catching, for Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do. "That's too large a theme for a short story," he said.

  "I was thinking of a novelette," I said, quickly, adjusting my thoughts.

  "Or a novelette. It will have to be an open-ended series of stories."

  "What?" I said, weakly.

  "Short stories, novelettes, serials, all fitting into a particular future history, involving the fall of the First Galactic Empire, the period of feudalism that follows, and the rise of the Second Galactic Empire."

  "What?" I said, even more weakly.

  "Yes, I want you to write an outline of the future history. Go home and write the outline."

  There Campbell had made a mistake. Robert Heinlein was writing what he called the "Future History Series." He was writing various stories that fitted into one niche or another of the series, and he wasn't writing them in order. Therefore he had prepared a Future History outline that was very detailed and complicated, so that he would keep everything straight. Now Campbell wanted me to do the same.

  I went home, dutifully, and began preparing an outline that got longer and longer and stupider and stupider until I finally tore it up. It was quite plain that I couldn't work with an outline. (To this day I cannot-for any of my stories, articles, or books, whether fiction or nonfiction.) ...

  On August 11, therefore, I started the story I had originally intended to write (with modifications that resulted from my discussions with Campbell), and the heck with possible future stories. I'd worry about them when the time came-and if the
time came.

  Since the First Galactic Empire was breaking down (in my story), certain scientists had set up a Foundation on a world at the rim of the Galaxy, purportedly to prepare a vast encyclopedia of human knowledge, but actually to cut down the period of feudalism and hasten the rise of the Second Empire. I called my story, "Foundation" (and the stories to which it gave rise have been lumped together, consequently, as "the Foundation series").

  The Foundation series proved to be the most popular and successful of all my writings, and my continuation of these stories in the 1980s after a long hiatus proved even more popular and successful. These stories contributed more than any others to making me more nearly rich and famous than I could have imagined. Most of the Foundation series was being written even while I was a complete failure at the NAES [wartime work at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia, in the early years of his first marriage].

  Of course, I had no way of knowing what was to come while I was working as a chemist during World War II, but looking back on it, I note that chemistry, my profession, continued to fail and to do so more drastically with time. Not only didn't I get along with my superiors but I was not a particularly good chemist and never would be.

  But history, which I had discarded [as a profession], made its appearance in the most unlikely form, as a series of science-fiction historical novels of the future, and lifted me to the heights.

  [My addition-he did love chemistry. Here's what he said to his Columbia professor who asked] "Why the hell do you sing in lab, Asimov?" .. .

  I said, earnestly, "Because I'm not in chemistry to make a living, sir. It's not my bread-and-butter. I'm going to make money writing. I'm in chemistry because I love it. It's my cakes-and-ale, and I can't help singing when I'm working. I'll try to stop, sir, but it will be an effort. It's no effort not to sing for those who complain. I don't imagine they like their work."

  It was a little exaggerated, but not really far off. It was also a calculated gamble, and it worked. [Professor] Thomas was impressed, and from that moment on we were buddies ... Just the same, I cut out most of the singing in lab ...

  Eleven.

  DURING THE WAR

  [Summer 1942] The world news continued depressing in the extreme. To be sure ... the United States had won the Battle of Midway, which marked the turning point in the war with Japan, but I didn't know it was the turning point. ... On land, the Nazi armies were pouring toward the Don River and southward toward the Caucasus. (In the fighting in the Caucasus, my Uncle Ephraim was killed in action. He was my father's favorite brother-at least my father mentioned him more than he did the other two.)

  On July 25, 1942 (my brother Stanley's thirteenth birthday), I took the train to New York in order to keep my wedding date.

  The matter of my wedding was heavily distorted by the fact of war. The [NAES] Navy Yard gave me exactly eight days for a honeymoon, from Sunday to Sunday, inclusive. I couldn't exactly complain of this, considering the war crisis, but neither did I want to waste an hour of the period if I could help it. For that reason, I could not have a civil wedding since that would have meant waiting to be married on Monday.

  Since neither my family nor Gertrude's family had any religion, we had no rabbis of our own, and it proved difficult to get one out of the Yellow Pages. I would have settled for a practitioner of any religion, asking only that the marriage be a legal one in the eyes of the government, but the old folks weren't quite that easygoing.

  We found a rabbi. I don't remember his name. I never saw him again.... It was a difficult and embarrassing session. The rabbi chanted Hebrew over us in a cracked voice, which I suffered in resignation, while Gertrude tried hard (and not entirely successfully) not to giggle.

  Nor did it go entirely smoothly. The rabbi demanded a witness and it turned out that it had to be someone who was not a member of either family.

  No such creature existed within the walls of the apartment and Mr. Blugerman was forced to go into the hall and commandeer the first innocent bystander who passed. The bystander was dragged into the apartment, rather confused, and then it turned out that to fulfill his official function he had to wear a hat and he had none on him since it wasn't raining in the hall. The rabbi therefore seized my father's hat, which happened to be resting on some piece of furniture, and planted it firmly on the stranger's head.

  My father, whose ideas on hygiene were complicated and, in some ways, senseless-but very firm-rose in horror to protest, remembered where he was and what was happening, and sank back in frustration. I suspect he never wore that hat again.

  At another point, the rabbi raised a glass from which Gertrude and I had drunk and was going to smash it under his heel for some complicated symbolic reason and Mr. Blugerman snatched it from his hand.

  But eventually, at 5:30 P.M. on July 26, 1942, Gertrude and I were man and wife (or with equal validity, woman and husband). The marriage took place five and a half months after we had met at our St. Valentine's Day blind date, and I was twenty-two and a half years old at the time.

  [During the honeymoon at a Catskill resort] A quiz was held during the afternoon, and guests were invited to volunteer. I raised my hand, of course, and became one of the contestants.... I was third in line, and when I rose to field my question in the first round, spontaneous laughter broke out from the audience. They had laughed at no one else.

  The trouble was that I looked anxious, and when I look anxious I look even more stupid than usual. The reason I was anxious was that I wanted to shine and I feared I would not. I knew that I was neither handsome, self-assured, athletic, wealthy, nor sophisticated. The only thing I had going for me was that I was clever and I wanted to show off to Gertrude. And I was afraid of failing and spelling "weigh" "WIEGH."

  I ignored the laughter as best I could, and tried to concentrate. The master of ceremonies, trying not to grin and failing, said, "Use the word `pitch' in sentences in such a way as to demonstrate five different meanings of the word." (Heaven only knows where he got his questions.)

  More laughter, as I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. I then said, "John pitched the pitch-covered ball as intensely as though he were fighting a pitched battle, while Mary, singing in a highpitched voice, pitched a tent."

  The laughter stopped as though someone had pulled a plug out of the socket. The master of ceremonies had me repeat it, counted the pitches, considered them, and pronounced me correct. Naturally, by the time the quiz was over, I had won.... I noticed, though, that winning the quiz did not make me popular at the resort. Many people resented having wasted their laughter. The thought apparently was that I had no right to look stupid without being stupid; that, by doing so, I had cheated.

  [Life at the Philadelphia Navy Yard] The Jews at the Navy Yard did not feel themselves to be in an enviable position. It seemed to some of us that there were strong feelings among some of the Gentiles that the war was being fought to "save the Jews" and that Pearl Harbor was a put-up job somehow arranged by Roosevelt and his Jewish friends. It seemed reasonable for us Jews to fear that continued reverses in the war would cause a vast increase of anti-Semitism in the United States.

  In fact, some of my fellow Jews spoke to me about my effervescence in the lab. They hinted that I ought to keep a low profile, since if I made myself annoying and unpopular that would reflect on the Jews generally.

  I told them to go to the devil. It was quite clear that anti-Semitism in the world of 1942 could not be blunted by the "good behavior" of individual Jews any more than the lynching of blacks could be stopped if some of them behaved like cringing Uncle Toms. So I stayed myself. Being myself did me no particular good, but I don't think it harmed the Jewish cause particularly.

  A kind of crisis arose in September, however, as the first High Holiday season of post-Pearl Harbor approached. Before Pearl Harbor, Jewish employees at the Navy Yard were routinely given time off for Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). The new rules after Pearl Harbor, howe
ver, made it quite clear that the only day off other than Sundays was to be Christmas. No exceptions.

  Some of the Jewish employees felt very strongly that they oughtn't to work on Yom Kippur, even if they worked on all the other Jewish holidays. It occurred to someone that perhaps a deal could be made. If the Jewish employees were allowed to take Yom Kippur off, they would work on Christmas.

  ... I said, quite flatly, that I never observed [the Jewish holidays] and that I had no objection to working on them. [I was told] what was being planned, the switchover of Christmas for Yom Kippur, and it wouldn't work unless the petition was signed by all Jews without exception. Otherwise the attitude would be that if some Jews could work, all could ...

  So I signed. It was against my principles but I couldn't bring myself to interfere with the concerns of many people for the sake of my principles.

  The next day, Bob Heinlein [who worked at the Navy Yard too] stopped in to see me. "What's this I hear about your not working on Yom Kippur, Isaac?"

  "I signed a petition about working on Christmas instead, " I said.

  "You're not religious, are you?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "You're not going to temple on Yom Kippur, are you?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "Then why are you planning to take off on Yom Kippur?"

  By now I imagine I was flushing with annoyance. "I won't go to church on Christmas, either," I said, "so what difference does it make which day I take for nonreligious purposes?"

  "It doesn't. So why not take off Christmas with everyone else?"

  I said, "Because it would look bad if I didn't go. They explained to me that ..."

  Heinlein said, "Are you telling me that they forced you to sign?"

  It seemed to me that I was going to be used as a stick to beat down the petition.

  "No," I said strenuously, "I was not forced to sign it. I signed it voluntarily because I wanted to. But since I freely admit that I intend no religious observances I will agree to work on Yom Kippur if I am told to, provided that does not prejudice the petition."