Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (6 page)

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Authors: James Gunn

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I made these suggestions to Asimov, and he agreed that they seemed right. "Certainly the stories that really satisfied me and made me feel good about my writing were my robot stories, and the robot stories, of course, virtually every one of them, had a situation in which a robot which couldn't go wrong did go wrong. And we had to find out what had gone wrong, how to correct it, within the absolute limits of the three laws. This was just the sort of thing I loved to do."
At its most typical, in "Nightfall" for example, Asimov's science fiction demonstrates the triumph of reason, or the struggle of reason to triumph, over various kinds of circumstances including irrational or emotional responses to situations. If reason is going to prove superior as an approach to life, the mystery is the natural form in which that superiority will be demonstrated.
Asimov has said that his villains generally are as rational as his heroes. "In other words, it's not even a triumph of rationality over irrationality or over emotion, at least not in my favorite stories. It's generally a conflict between rationalities and the superior winning. If it were a western, where everything depends upon the draw of the gun, it would be very unsatisfactory if the hero shot down a person who didn't know how to shoot."
Growing up as he did, excelling at intellectual pursuits but uneasy in personal relationships in which he found himself ignorant of the proper thing to do or uncertain how the other person would respond, Asimov found himself coping in a variety of ways. One way, which he adopted when he was young, was to distance himself from the rest of the world with wit: to the end he delighted in puns and wordplay, which found their most typical expression in personal banter with his friends but also enlivened his limericks and verse parodies and displayed themselves in the titles of and occasional lines in articles and stories. Another way to cope was to demonstrate his greater knowledge or superior mind. His adoption of these two characteristics gave him a reputation as a smart-aleck and a know-it-all with a mission to enlighten everyone around him.
Asimov gave as an example of his behavior the assignment of Leigh Hunt's "Abou Ben Adhem" in his high-school English class. Anticipating the teacher's question about the last line ("And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest"), his hand shot up, and he answered the inevitable question, "Why did Ben Adhem's name lead all the rest?" with Alpha
"betical order, sir?" He was sent to the principal, but he felt the quip was worth it.
Asimov finally gave up his mission to educate the masses. He traced his decision to a time when he was in the Army in Hawaii, waiting for the H-bomb tests at Bikini. A couple of soldiers in the barracks were listening to a third explain, inaccurately, how the atom bomb worked.
Wearily, I put down my book and began to get to my feet so I could go over and assume the smart man's burden and educate them.
Halfway to my feet. I thought: Who appointed you their educator? Is it going to hurt them to be wrong about the atom bomb?
And I returned, contentedly, to my book.
This does not mean I turned with knife-edge suddenness and became another man. It's just that I was a generally disliked know-it-all earlier in my life, and I am a generally liked person (I believe) who is genial and a nonpusher later in my life. . . .
Why? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps it was my surrender of the child-prodigy status. Perhaps it was my feeling that I had grown up, I had proved myself, and I no longer had to give everyone a headache convincing them that I was, too, smart.
One other way in which Asimov learned to cope socially was his adoption of a flirtatious attitude toward women all women what he called his "all-embracing suavity," by which he meant that he was willing to embrace any female within range and usually did. From a gauche, inexperienced, tentative young man he turned into a good-natured, public Casanova with a "penchant for making gallant suggestions to the ladies." Yet Asimov speculated about his behavior as an adult that "you don't really change much as you get older." The uncertain young man might still have been there inside the "all-embracing" older one.
Asimov denied being anything other than direct and clear in his writing, and that may apply to his personal life as well. Certainly he was open about his life, even on those matters that most people are most closed about: money and sex and, more important to Asimov, his writing. I asked him in our interview if his disclaimer of knowledge about the craft of writing wasn't a pose. Clearly, he had thought about it, I pointed out. He had criticized other people's stories in his teenage letters-to-the-editor days; he had noticed Clifford Simak's way of leaving space to indicate a break between scenes and, after having had it explained, had adopted it himself; he had even attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference a couple of times as a member of the faculty. Asimov responded that he did not deliberately set up a pose. He really thought he did not know much about writing, but, as he pointed out in
an afterword to the collection of essays about his work edited by Martin Greenberg and Joseph Olander titled
Asimov,
"without very much in the way of conscious thinking I manage to learn from what I read and what I hear."
As the young Asimov became the older Asimov (still in his late youth, as he would say), what he had been became what he was, either conditioned by his early experience or in reaction to it. Asimov recognized both processes. In one sense he was a rational man in an irrational world, puzzled at humanity's responses to change, unable to understand humanity's inability to see the clear necessity, if it is to survive, to control population and pollution and eliminate war, still assuming "the smart man's burden" to educate the bewilderingly uneducable, even taken aback at times when the people he dealt with behaved irrationally.
Joseph Patrouch, in his
The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov
(1974), commented that Asimov had not written in his fiction on the subjects about which he was most concerned, the subjects he wrote on in his non-fiction and spoke about in his public talks: pollution, overpopulation, and so forth. I asked Asimov about this, saying that in his talks and articles and books he seemed to exhibit a kind of alarm about our world situation that was not in his fiction a kind of public despair that contrasted with his fictional optimism. In his science writing he tried to persuade by showing the terrible consequences of what would happen if people do not act, and in his science fiction he tried to persuade by showing how the problems could be solved. Asimov agreed.
In my public statements I have to deal with the world as it is which is the world in which irrationality is predominant; whereas in my fiction I create a world and in my world, my created worlds, things are rational. Even the villains, the supposed villains, are villainous for rational reasons. . . .
You can see for yourself in my autobiography that I had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the world when I was young. To a large extent the world was an enemy world. . . . Science fiction in its very nature is intended to appeal a) to people who value reason and b) to people who form a small minority in a world that doesn't value reason. . . . I
am
trying to lead a life of reason in an emotional world.
Asimov, no doubt, still was trying to please his stern father with industry and productivity. Asimov would have been the first to admit it. He also would have said that it didn't matter how the past had shaped him. He was satisfied to be what he was: a claustrophile, an acrophobe, a compulsive writer. When he was a teenager, people
complained about his eccentricities: his walking home from the library with three books, reading one and holding one under each arm; his love of cemeteries; his constant whistling. Their complaints didn't bother him (though he did, when asked, stop whistling in the cemetery). "I had gathered the notion somewhere that my eccentricities belonged to me and to nobody else and that I had every right to keep them." He added, "And I lived long enough to see these eccentricities and others that I have not mentioned come to be described as `colorful' facets of my personality."

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