What Makes Isaac Write?

By Peter Stoler

OPUS 200 by Isaac Asimov; Houghton Mifflin; 329pages; $10.95

IN MEMORY YET GREEN: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ISAAC ASIMOV, 1920-1954 Doubleday; 732 pages; $15.95

Other writers may sit white-knuckled at their desks, grinding out a few pages a day, a book every couple of years. Not Isaac Asimov. Back in 1938, the teenage author sold his first tale to Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine. Encouraged, he branched out from sci-fi to fields as varied as his interests: literary criticism, psychology, mathematics, mystery, poetry, humor, American history. Simenon may have written more thrillers, Chesterton more poetry and philosophy, Pulp Romance Writer Barbara Cartland more novels. But no single author has ever written more books about more subjects than Isaac Asimov.

This month he extends that record with the publication of his 200th book. Leave it to Asimov to complicate things by passing the milestone twice. With rival publishers equally eager to bring out the landmark work, the author has satisfied both by assigning the same number to two offerings.

Both are remarkable works. Opus 200 is a cornucopia: for sci-fi buffs there are excerpts from the 1972 novel The Gods Themselves and the award-winning robot story The Bicentennial Man. For those who prefer Asimov's other talents, there are such tours de force as an introduction to binary numbers; an explanation, in language that even Dick and Jane can follow, of why it is possible (but not practical) to reverse the basic nuclear reaction and convert energy into matter; some witty Asimovian annotations on Shakespeare, the Bible and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Byron; as lagniappe, he throws in a few limericks of the type An ability to dramatize. that family magazines do not reprint.

The other Opus 200, In Memory Yet Green, is a guide to Asimov himself: a detailed, candid account of his early days in Brooklyn, in the developing field of science fiction, in the worlds of college teaching and book publishing. In Memory, which follows its central character to his 34th year (he is now 59), may not fall into the same class as Rousseau's Confessions. But like the author, it is ceaselessly informative and entertaining.

Asimov skips quickly over his birth and early life in the tiny Russian town of Petrovichi, which he left at the age of three and does not fully remember. But he writes with total recall of his sister Marcia and brother Stanley (now assistant publisher of the Garden City, N.Y., daily Newsday) and of their early days in Brooklyn, where Papa Asimov serially owned five candy stores.

"A candy store is open every day of the week," writes Asimov of those early days. "In some respects, it made me an orphan." The demands of the store cut him off from his parents; Isaac's behavior severed him from his contemporaries. For he was not only brighter than his older classmates, he was eager to make them aware of his stratospheric IQ.

The lonely, insufferable kid was father of the gifted man. Forbidden to read the lurid pulp magazines sold in the store, Isaac pored over science-fiction monthlies. He soon began to send them short stories. At an age when many fellow students were struggling to express themselves, Asimov, who entered Columbia University's Seth Low Junior College at age 15, helped pay for his college and graduate school with fiction that sold for a penny a word. At a time when many young men were looking for their first postcollege jobs, Asimov published what became one of the most anthologized sci-fi stories in history, Nightfall, a speculation about how man would view the stars if they appeared only once every thousand years.

On the ascent from novice to Grand Master of true and fictive science, the autobiographer omits few details of his daily life, recollecting conversations with editors, wrangles with professors and later, when he was a professor himself (he taught biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine for two decades), with his employers. Nor does he skimp on such intimate details as the site and sound of his introduction to extra marital sex. "What it amounts to is that she seduced me," writes Asimov in apparent amazement. "I just followed along, with my teeth more or less chattering, and not out of passion."

Whether he made other amatory conquests remains to be revealed in Vol. II of Asimov's autobiography, now under fevered construction. For the normally imperturbable author is nervous for the first time in his literary life. "It's kind of frightening," he confesses. "If people don't like your novel, they don't like your novel. But if they don't like your autobiography, it means they don't like you." The anxiety is unnecessary. As William Blake once proclaimed, energy is eternal delight. Not everyone may like every one of Asimov's other volumes. But it is hard to see how anyone could finish this vigorous autobiography and not be delighted with the dynamo that produced it.

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He describes himself, on dust jackets and in introductions, as "devilishly handsome." The description is as fantastic as his novels. Isaac Asimov is a stocky man with a shock of unruly, graying hair, twinkling blue eyes and a grin that turns into a satyr's leer at the sight of an attractive woman. He is a self-acknowledged and thus thoroughly affable egotist. But then, he has a lot to be egotistical about.

Asimov is a genius according to any of the tests by which intelligence is measured, a prodigy who manifests his abilities in a tsunami of words. In the four decades since he published his first story, Asimov has written more science fiction than Kurt Vonnegut's legendary Kilgore Trout. A compilation of Asimov's other works includes several volumes of detective fiction (Tales of the Black Widowers, Murder at the ABA); books on chemistry, astronomy and religion; The Intelligent Man 's Guide to Science ("The title refers to the author, not the reader"); the novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage, which helped propel Raquel Welch through the bloodstream; and a book of instructions on how to be a dirty old man. "A lot of people can write," says the author. "I have to."

He has had to since he looked up from a laboratory bench at Boston University and decided that his future was at the typewriter, not the microscope. "I realized that I would never be a first-rate scientist," recalls Asimov. "But I could be a first-rate writer. The choice was an easy one: I just decided to do what I did best."

What he does best is simplify science for those who have little or no scientific training. But he also does well with specialists. Astronomer-Author Carl Sagan considers Asimov "the greatest explainer of the age." Says a Harvard research physicist: "Frankly, I read the man so that I can explain my own work to friends." Martin Gardner, an editor of Scientific American, calls Asimov "one of the top science writers in the business simply because, like all good novelists, he knows how to dramatize."

The dramatist correctly analyzes himself as "not a speed reader but a speed understander, and a natural-born explainer." He is also a natural-born worker. He never has fewer than three projects going simultaneously, sits down seven days a week at a cluttered desk in his Manhattan apartment and writes at least eight hours a day, banging out manuscripts at a phenomenal 90 words a minute. Unconcerned with literary style, Asimov concentrates instead on clarity. The result is a manuscript that can usually be taken from the typewriter to the typesetter. His publishers, who know a good thing when they see it, welcome his work, from which they have made millions over the years.

Financial security has meant a great deal to the candy-store owner's son. But what Isaac Asimov enjoys even more than comfort is that festival of contradictions known as Isaac Asimov. The man who talks like a randy bachelor is, in fact, the proud father of a son and a daughter, both in their 20s, and the husband of Psychiatrist Janet Jeppson (his first marriage ended in divorce in 1973). The robust and prodigious eater is the survivor of a 1977 heart attack as well as a thyroid cancer operation. The inveterate partygoer and dazzling conversationalist never drinks anything stronger than ginger ale. The carefree author cannot shake a persistent fear -certainly not of writer's block, or of ill health, or even of nuclear catastrophe. The man whose fiction has sent men and machines across whole galaxies, and through time in perhaps his most memorable single novel, The End of Eternity, refuses to board a plane. "Everybody has to worry about something," he muses. "Some people worry about sex. With me, it's jets." Which seems fair. After 200 books on every conceivable subject, it would be surprising to see Isaac Asimov up in the air about anything. As proof, an Asimov sampler:

The Foundation Trilogy (Avon, $5.95 paperback). A long time ahead in a galaxy far, far away, an old, decadent empire crumbles into barbarism as a farsighted few struggle, at the risk of their lives, to preserve enough fragments to lay the foundations for a new empire. The plot is familiar to anyone who has waded his way through Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But it was brought up to date and carried forward into a frightening future in this Asimov trilogy. A collection of pieces originally published serially in the monthly science-fiction magazine Astounding, the trilogy has been honored with the Science Fiction Writers of America's Hugo Award as the best alltime series and read by millions in the quarter-century since it was first published in book form. The appeal is understandable for, like Gibbon's, Asimov's message is universal: ideas may outlive the men who think them, but empires, Roman or galactic, are ephemeral. It is only historians that last.

Asimov's Guide to Science (Basic Books, $17.95 hard-cover). One of the byproducts of scientific advance is the widening chasm between specialists and laymen. Indeed, even those who live in the research laboratory are likely to get lost when they leave their own rooms. This work is a flashlight that can help keep everyone from stumbling around in the dark. The author knows his way around the physical and biological sciences, and he manages to set a pace that will neither intimidate beginners nor cause those with a little knowledge to yawn. Science Authority Asimov's no-nonsense prose style is rarely a thing of beauty, but it conveys facts with a minimum of obfuscation; what is more, his curiosity and enthusiasm are infectious. The term popularizer has attracted some shady connotations, but the Asimov of this book deserves none of them. He is a popularizer in the best sense: someone who brings knowledge to people.

Murder at the ABA (Doubleday, $7.95 hardcover; Fawcett, $1.75 paperback). At a convention of the American Booksellers Association, a bestselling young novelist named Giles Devore is found dead in his hotel room. The only one who suspects foul play is Author Darius Just, and he must work his way through a healthy number of suspects to prove his case. The formula is familiar, and Asimov, wearing his mystery writer's hat, works it out with ease. He also introduces himself as a character and manages to dominate long passages of the novel; when Asimov is not onstage, other characters are talking about him. This amiable megalomania often shoves suspense well into the background. Murder at the ABA, published in 1976, will not keep readers on the edge of their seats; it is a well-worn armchair, overstuffed, shaky at the joints, but a comfortable place to be.

Asimov's Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament and The New Testament (each: Doubleday, $12.95 hardcover; Avon, $4.95 paperback). It was the omissions in the Old and New Testaments that begat Asimov's Guide to the Bible (1968 and 1969). "It happens," writes the author, "that millions of people today know of Nebuchadnezzar, and have never heard of Pericles, simply because Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned prominently in the Bible and Pericles is never mentioned at all." Biblical Scholar Asimov characteristically mentions all: history, biography, geography, archaeology and cross-culture myths that are the roots if not the artistic and spiritual blossoms of the Good Book. The result is another testament to the author's Jovian powers of assimilation and explication.

Limericks: Too Gross (Norton, $7.95 hardcover). Asimov the poetaster and John Ciardi the poet might seem like an odd couple. But the two, who first met at a writers' conference, are close friends. They are also competitors and over the past several years have tried, with limited success, to top each other at composing limericks. The result of their 1978 Shootout is a book in which each offers 144 of the five-liners. One of Ciardi's milder offerings reads: "Said a voice from the back of the car,/ 'Young man, I don't know who you are./ But allow me to state,/ Though it may come too late,/ I had not meant to go quite this far.' " An Asimovian retort goes: "There is something about satyriasis/ That arouses psychiatrists' biases,/ But we're both very pleased/ We're in this way diseased/ As the damsel who's waiting to try us is." Thus: Though their poetry centers on mating,/ Both men show very few signs of dating./ Still their comedy's salty/ And their taste somewhat faulty,/ So their book gets a solid X rating. qed

Excerpts

"Can cars have ideas? The motor designers say no. But they mean under ordinary conditions. Have they foreseen everything?

Cars get ill-used, you know.

Some of them enter the Farm and observe ... They find out that cars exist whose motors are never stopped, whom no one ever drives, whose every need is supplied.

Then maybe they go out and tell others. Maybe the word is spreading quickly...

There are millions of automatobiles on Earth, tens of millions. If the thought gets rooted in them that they're slaves; that they should do something about it...

Maybe it won't be till after my time. And then they'll have to keep a few of us to take care of them, won't they? They wouldn't kill us all.

And maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't understand about how someone would have to care for them. Maybe they won't wait. [Nightfall and Other Stories, 1969]

The propensity for judging matters with a variable measure shows up in the game of Conjugation, which expresses the differing manner in which we treat ourselves, present company, and absent unfortunates:

I am firm; you are stubborn; he's an obstinate mule.

I am liberal; you are radical; he's a Communist.

I am farseeing; you are a visionary; he's a fuzzy-minded dreamer. [Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, 1971]

Idle curiosity, we may call it. Yet, though we may sneer at it, we judge intelligence by it. The dog, in moments of leisure, will sniff idly here and there, pricking up its ears at sounds we cannot hear; and so we judge it to be more intelligent than the cat, which in its moments of leisure grooms itself or quietly and luxuriously stretches out and falls asleep. The more advanced the brain, the greater the drive to explore, the greater the 'curiosity surplus.' The monkey is a byword for curiosity. Its busy little brain must and will be kept going on whatever is handy. And in this respect, as in many others, man is but a supermonkey. [Asimov's Guide to Science, 1972]"

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