Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (5 page)

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Authors: James Gunn

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Most had turned to science fiction out of some kind of youthful frustration with their lives. A profile of new readers would reveal them to be mostly boys; mostly brighter than their schoolmates; mostly social misfits because of personality, appearance, lack of social graces, or inability to find intellectual companionship; unsophisticated about girls (the study of women readers and writers still is in its infancy) and ill at ease in their company. Science fiction was a kind of literature of the outcast that praised the intellectual aspects of life that its readers enjoyed and in which they excelled, and a literature that offered more hope for the future than the present. When those kind of persons discover others like themselves, fan clubs spring up, sometimes fanzines are published, conventions are organized, and writing science fiction becomes a virtually universal ambition. When those kind of persons begin to write, they write science fiction.
Asimov was like that. The Futurians were like that. Damon Knight says that "all we science-fiction writers began as toads." When Robert Silverberg read the first volume of Asimov's autobiography, he wrote for the galley proofs of the second volume because he couldn't wait: there was so much in Asimov's life that paralleled his own that it gave him a sense of déjà vu.
There are certain curious resemblances between the characters and careers of Asimov and H.G. Wells, who is often called the father of modern science fiction. Both spent their early lives in unsuccessful shops, were precocious students, quick to learn with good memories, and began by writing science fiction but turned to popularizations (Wells's biggest financial success was his
Outline of History
). Both were selective in what they liked, Wells with biology and evolution, Asimov with chemistry, and both were fond of history. Both became known as pundits, experts in almost everything, and both were attentive to the ladies. . . . The analogy can be carried too far. Wells, for instance, became a serious novelist of contemporary life; Asimov varied his science fiction and non-fiction with detective stories and novels.
Asimov, in spite of his success at other kinds of writing and public speaking, never thought of himself as anything but a science-fiction writer who sometimes wrote other, often easier, things. He introduced himself as a science-fiction writer. Some writers of science fiction have gone on to other kinds of writing and some, like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., have denied that they ever wrote science fiction. Not Asimov, who always remained true to his boyhood love. In his autobiography he described a fancy
World Book
sales meeting at which the board members were introduced with orchestral motifs: to his chagrin, Asimov was
introduced as a science writer by "How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky?" "No matter how various the subject matter I write on," he added, "I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.''
In an interview in 1979, I said to him that his autobiography revealed a great deal of loyalty to what he was, to the boy he was, and to what science fiction had meant to him when he discovered it. Asimov replied that he had deliberately not abandoned his origins. He had made up his mind when he was quite young, and said it in print, that no matter what happened to him or where he went, he would never deny his origins as a science-fiction writer and never break his connection to science fiction, and he never did.
He considered loyalty a prime virtue. In 1976 when he started
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
he told publisher Joel Davis that he wouldn't give up his
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
science articles.
I probably bore everybody with my endless repetition of how much I owe to John Campbell, because I figure I would rather bore them than be disloyal in my own mind. It is the easiest thing in the world to forget the ladder you climb or to be embarrassed at the thought that there was a time when somebody had to help you. The tendency is to minimize this, minimize that, and I'm normal enough and human enough to do the same thing if it were left to itself, but this is a matter of having once made a vow and sticking to it.
He pointed out that it was inconvenient to always have to tell people that Campbell made up the Three Laws of Robotics, and the more important the Three Laws became the more he wanted to be the originator and take the credit, but he couldn't. "Why this is so I never really thought about. I guess I like to think about it only as a matter of virtue. I don't consider myself a particularly virtuous person, but I like to think I have some virtues, of which loyalty is one."
Possibly, however, his insistence on being considered a science-fiction writer is like his relationship to his racial origins. He says he is not a good Jew. Asimov attended no Jewish religious functions, followed no Jewish rituals, obeyed no Jewish dietary laws, and yet he never, under any circumstances, left any doubt that he was Jewish.
I really dislike Judaism. . . . It's a form of particularly pernicious nationalism. I don't want humanity divided into these little groups that are firmly convinced, each one, that it is better than the others. Judaism is the prototype of the "I'm better than you" group we are the ones who
invented this business of the only God. It's not just that we have our God and you have your God, but we have the only God. I feel a deep and abiding historic guilt about that. And every once in a while, when I'm not careful, I think that the reason Jews have been persecuted as much as they have has been to punish them for having invented this pernicious doctrine.
Asimov suggested that because he felt that in some ways he had been a traitor to Judaism ("which I try to make up for by making sure that everyone knows I'm a Jew, so while I'm deprived of the benefits of being part of a group, I make sure that I don't lose any of the disadvantages, because no one should think that I'm denying my Judaism in order to gain certain advantages"), he made up his mind that he was not going to be disloyal in any other way. "I'm not saying I believe this," he concluded, "but this is the sort of thing that people do work up for reasons, and, after all, I'm imaginative enough to think up such reasons, too. . . . I don't guarantee it's correct."
The characteristic that began to appear in Asimov's science fiction, that gave his writing its unique quality and made it so typically Campbellian as well as Asimovian, was its rationality. Asimov agreed with Randall Garrett's assessment that the relationship between Asimov and Campbell was symbiotic. In the interview Asimov commented that he must have been the perfect foil for Campbell.
On the one hand, I was close to him. I lived right in town and I could see him every week. And, for another, I could endure him. I imagine that a great many other writers found him too rich for their blood at least to sit there and listen to him hour after hour. But I was fortunate in the sense that he was in some ways a lot like my father. I had grown up listening to my father pontificate in much the same way that John did, and so I was quite at home. I suppose if you took all the time that I sat there listening to John and put it all together, it was easily a week's worth of just listening to him talk. Day and night, 168 hours. And I remember everything he said and how he thought and I did my best because I desperately wanted to sell stories to him to incorporate his method of thinking into my stories, which, of course, also had my method of thinking, with the result that somehow I caught the Campbell flavor.
The Campbell flavor was the solution of problems. Much of Asimov's early writing did not quite capture that quality of problem-solving that became characteristic of his later work; those stories were less successful, neither identifiably Asimovian nor distinguished science fiction. His first published story had it, "Marooned Off Vesta," and later it would find its best expression in the robot stories and the Foundation stories, among his early science-fiction successes, and, of course, in the science-
fiction mystery novels that came so naturally just before he switched to writing non-fiction,
The Caves of Steel
and
The Naked Sun.

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