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Isaac Asimov is dead.
I never knew how much pain those words would cause me until I heard them on the radio. They hurt deeply and I am not being light-hearted or disrespectful when I say that they ruined my day. How could the death of a man half a world away upset me so much? Let me tell you why—let me tell you about the time I met Isaac Asimov, and let me share with you the love and respect that I have for the man.
It was at the World Convention in Boston in 1989. Even though Asimov did not like to travel, I was sure that he would be there since Boston is very close to New York and he could easily get there by train. (He didn’t mind trains—it was flying he hated.) I laid my plans carefully. I had bought a beautiful edition of an omnibus volume with the first three Foundation novels in it. It was bound in blue leather with gold tooling and marbled end-papers—a truly beautiful book. I packed it carefully in my suitcase and took it with me all the way to America. If Asimov was at the convention, I was determined to get it autographed.
Boston was lovely. I went whale watching and I saw fourteen whales one of which dived deep into the sea and waved its tail in the air and gave me a cliched photograph which I treasure. They are such wonderful animals. I explored the city and enjoyed the sense of history as well as the modernity. I was eager for the convention to begin.
The programme showed that Isaac Asimov would be giving a talk. There was no title, there were no details, just a bare announcement of the time and place.
The hall was full. Hundreds of people crammed themselves in to hear him talk. He apologised for the fact that no details of the talk had been announced, but said that it was all his fault since he had not told the organising committee what he was going to talk about. He hadn’t told them because he didn’t know himself—he always made these things up as he went along.
And then he talked. I don’t remember what he said—just this and that, whatever occurred to him. I do remember that it was screamingly funny (as his talks often were). If he hadn’t been such a successful writer, he could have made a living as a stand up comic. He was much funnier than many people who do make a living as stand up comics.
Towards the end of his speech he got serious for a moment—and these words I do remember. I do not have them verbatim, but this is the gist of what he said:
I have written more than 400 books and only about 75 of them can truly be considered to be science fiction. That is a very small number; a tiny fraction of the total. And yet I always think of myself as a science fiction writer; I tell people who ask me what sort of books I write that I write science fiction. It was my first love and my last love. I am truly a science fiction writer and I am pleased and proud to be here today and say this to you.
As I said, that is not a quote—but it contains the sense of what he said and I hope it gives you a feeling for the emotion with which he said it. It was perfectly obvious that he meant every word sincerely.
The audience gave him a standing ovation. I clapped and cheered along with everybody else and I had a lump in my throat. Nobody had asked him to say those things, nobody expected him to say them. They came from the heart and like everybody else who heard them I was moved.
At the end of the talk the audience charged en masse to the front, waving books to be autographed. It seemed to take the organisers by surprise—no formal autograph session had been planned for then, and they wanted the room for the next programme item. We were moved out into the corridor. The queue snaked and hummed with conversation as we patiently waited. I have no idea how many hundreds of people were in front of me or how many hundreds more were behind me, but there were a lot, believe me.
The person immediately in front of me in the queue was clutching a very battered and obviously well-thumbed and well-loved paperback. He explained to me that this book was very precious to him. It was the first book he had ever bought for himself with his very own money. As a child, he had saved up a few cents here and a few cents there and then he had bought the book. It was a collection of short stories (I don’t remember which, I’m sorry) and it dated from the 1950s. There was a photograph of Isaac Asimov on the back. He would have been in his thirties then and he looked handsome and distinguished.
The queue moved slowly, but it did move and eventually my friend presented his battered paperback for signature. He explained its origin, and Asimov was obviously touched by it. He looked at the photo on the back.
“Gee,” he said. “Did I really look like that once? I guess I must have. It all seems so long ago.”
He signed the book, and it was my turn.
He looked thin and drawn and his hair was dry and lacklustre. He was obviously very tired, but equally obviously he was thoroughly enjoying himself. Nobody was compelling him to sign autographs. He was there because he wanted to be there, with all his friends. There were many, many people still to go. I presented my book and said “Hello.”
He signed my book and I said, “Thank you very much.”
He said, “You’re welcome.”
That’s it. That is every word I have ever said to Isaac Asimov. It isn’t much of a dialogue, but I treasure it. And I treasure his signature in my book as a memento of that meeting.
Why did I admire and respect him so much? Why was he a boyhood hero and an adult hero as well?
If pushed, I have to admit that I do not think much of his novels, by and large. He never really seemed happy with a large canvas. His most successful works of fiction were short stories and novelettes. It is noteworthy, I think, that his most famous “novels” (The Foundation Trilogy, I Robot, The Gods Themselves) are all fix-ups built from shorter works. The only time I think he really was in control of himself was with The End of Eternity—a very complexly plotted and skilfully rendered novel. Over the years it has consistently been underrated by the critics and currently seems to be out of print, which is a shame.
His shorter works, however, are almost invariably excellent. Whether he was writing a humorous punch line or an excruciating pun (often the same thing as far as he was concerned—I remember fondly his story about an invasion of giant aunts) or whether he was writing something serious and meaningful such as his attempt to define humanity in his story The Bicentennial Man, he always seemed happier working at this shorter length. Certainly I always felt happier reading the shorter works. I will never forget the sheer excitement and spine-tingling wonder when I first read the Foundation stories, or the sheer cleverness of the robot tales. Had he done nothing else, these stories would have assured his literary immortality.
But he found his true home when, in the late 1950s, he began to write non-fiction articles and books. As a communicator, an explainer and a teacher he was second to none. I have done some teaching and I know just how hard it is to communicate understanding, to explain complex ideas in an interesting way. He made it all seem so easy. I remember reading his Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. I was studying the same subjects at school at the time and (theoretically at least) I was supposed to understand them. Certainly I could write down Newton’s equations of motion and solve problems using them. I knew about entropy and latent heat and watt an ohm was (sorry!). But Asimov’s book added greatly to my understanding, both broadening and deepening it.
I loved his journeys down the hidden byways of science. It was Asimov who taught me, for example, that three of the elements are named after an obscure village in Switzerland (Yttrium, Ytterbium and Terbium if you are interested and the village is called Ytterby).
But he did not restrict himself to science alone (though it was always a large part of his output). He took the whole field of human endeavour for his playground. He was a polymath, a renaissance man. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing he was not an expert in; though if you read his autobiography you will find that there were some things which left him cold. He found economics boring and incomprehensible and I couldn’t agree with him more.
He wrote a commentary on the bible and a guide to Shakespeare. He wrote a book of limericks and a history of the telescope. He wrote about the Greeks and the Romans and he wrote The Sensuous Dirty Old Man. And always, no matter what the subject, he was wise and witty. I never read a book of his that didn’t teach me something.
Yes he was a boyhood hero and he never lost my hero worship as both he and I grew older. I admired his knowledge, his skill at imparting that knowledge to others, and his wonderful sense of humour.
Isaac Asimov is dead, but millions of people throughout the world remember him with fondness and admiration. People yet unborn will read his books as I did and he will fire their imaginations as he fired mine. There is immortality, and this is it.
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