FFB: Isaac Asimov, autobiographical works

Of all the writers perhaps best known for their science fiction writing, the most thoroughly autobiographied has been Isaac Asimov. There the anecdotes that introduced nearly all his 399 monthly columns, most about science or mathematics, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) (and perhaps a few in his similar work for Venture Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction/Analog, Science Digest and his editorials for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine/Asimov's Science Fiction, among many others), and a slew of interviews throughout his life, he provided running autobiographical commentary in his collection The Early Asimov, the anthology Before the Golden Age, and much of the other relatively casual writing he contributed to such projects as The Hugo Winners volumes he introduced and wrote individual story introductions for. And there are the one essay and three volumes of explicit autobiography he wrote in his latter decades, as well as his collected letters (edited by his brother, Newsday editor Stanley Asimov), three retrospective collections of the range of his published work (one each to commemorate his 10oth, 200th and 300th published book, with the first volume of his autobiography Officially tied for 200th) and a final (so far) volume devoted to excerpts from his autobiographical writing with additional reminiscence by his widow, Janet Jeppson/Asimov. 

His earliest example of formal autobiography I'll deal with here is the essay he wrote for the Isaac Asimov issue of F&SF, the third in their irregular series devoting a portion of an issue to celebration of one or another major writer in the field who also has contributed notably to the magazine itself (the first two were devoted to Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury; since the Asimov, writers have ranged from Fritz Leiber through Kate Wilhelm to, most recently, David Gerrold, who might be the least F&SF-heavy of the honorees so far). Asimov's essay for that issue was "Portrait of the Writer as a Boy", and it served as a template for the Early Asimov and Before the Golden Age reminiscences cited above, as well as the seeds of the eventual book-length works. Like most of his F&SF essays, it was collected in a series of volumes for Doubleday,  this one Science, Numbers and

I (1968); my father picked up the 1969 Ace paperback reprint, and it was the first bit of science-fiction writer autobiography I remember reading. 

Asimov was soon being nudged, if not too hard, into considering writing a full-length autobiography; he reports that his usual response to such a suggestion is that his life had been exceedingly dull; he wrote. He had other jobs, most of them academic aside from his World War 2 work as a civilian and soldier, but otherwise he wrote. And it's true that relatively little of his life was devoted to much else beside his compulsion to write, and his desire to explain, and to have a reasonably good time when not writing or doing such similar activities as giving lectures or talks to audiences, and socializing in various circumstances, both among lifelong friends and acquaintances in sf/fantasy fandom, fellow writers, his academic and scientific peers, and the eventual wider circle of people who knew him to one degree or another, due to his work with the American Humanist Society or simply through the publicity attendant on his productivity and sustained popularity as a writer. 

His first near-bestseller, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, helped free him from any financial dependence on anything but further writing for the rest of his career, and the branching out he was able to do (into projects such as Asimov's Guide to the Bible and Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, joke and limerick collections, other sorts of pop-history and eventually even bestselling sf novels). What he was doing throughout this period was also keeping a meticulous daily journal, a task he began as a youth and continued apparently till he could no longer, in his last months of life, as he was dying of AIDS in 1992, he apparently being one of those so unfortunate as to receive a contaminated blood transfusion. One of his last projects was to produce a third volume of autobiography, eventually published as I. Asimov, which was a somewhat more anecdotal, slightly less guarded roll through some of the same territory as his first two fat volumes, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt, which also, of course, dealt with his life since the 1979-80 publication of the first two volumes, if not in as great detail as those had...he was writing and revising some of the third volume, and his non-fiction collaboration with Frederik Pohl, Our Angry Earth, from his hospital beds. 

As fellow F&SF columnist Algis Budrys noted in reviewing the books for the magazine, Asimov only occasionally draws great thematic lessons from the wealth of detail he provides, and doesn't dwell too obviously on some of his opinions of those closest to him...he makes no bones, in the first two volumes, about how much more he appreciated his daughter Robyn than his son David throughout their lives together, and how much happier he was with Jeppson than with his first wife, nee Gertrude Blugerman. Much of his early adulthood, and the accounts of if in all the volumes, was consumed by his fights with administrators and other sorts of boss at Columbia University, where he took his degrees, and Boston University, where he was for most of his life officially an associate professor at the medical school...one of the small notes of triumph at the end of the second volume is that his old antagonists at the medical school had all passed from the scene, as he went from strength to strength in the outside world , and he was finally declared, with no greater requirement of time or coursework from him, a full professor of biochemistry. As Budrys also suggests, the accumulation of detail and how he manages to keep the recounting of those details lively through multiple hundreds of pages gives the reader some sense of how Asimov the man and writer worked...even when he's not so explicit as describing his plight ca. 1960, where he rather looked upon himself as a failure: not yet having had his breakaway success with the Guide to Science, still dependent on a low salary at a third-rate medical school, not happy in his marriage nor able to make his wife happy, his relations with his children a mixed bag at best, and decreasingly happy even with his work in sf, or his ability to continue to contribute to it (very much aware of his significance to the field in the '40s and '50s, but even as the decade wore on and his success began to flower in other writing, feeling himself more and more a dinosaur in the field of writing he loved best...something he wouldn't shake till the '70s, though he marked as a turning point a conversation with the ill-fated Evelyn Del Rey in the mid-'60s, when he noted his feelings of obsolescence to her, and she replied, "Isaac, when you write sf, you are the field"). Things got much better before they got worse again. 

I've yet to read the Jeppson excerpts volume, released on the tenth anniversary of Asimov's death, but I probably will, sooner or later. Having just been dipping back into the first two volumes, and finding them as easy to dig into as I did upon first reading them as a teen, I can say they are more than a useful look into Asimov himself, while of course first and foremost that. 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Lester Del Rey (or Leonard Knapp), Evelyn Del Rey. Frederik Pohl, Carol Metcalf Ulf Pohl

FFB: HELL'S CARTOGRAPHERS edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss (Harper & Row/Wiedenfield & Nicholson 1975)

Among their collaborative projects in the 1970s, along with most notably the Best SF annual published by Berkley, Briton Brian Aldiss and US world-traveler Harry Harrison co-edited and -published the critical and literary-historical journal SF Horizons, an engaging and contentious magazine that was reprinted in boards by the late '70s so that I could find it at one or another Hawaiian library, and would make it's own even more obscure Friday Book...but among the offshoots of that effort was this anthology of autobiographical and procedural essays by six important writers in the sf field, including the editors themselves. And these essays, in their turn, were at least the seeds of Damon Knight's group memoir The Futurians and Frederik Pohl's personal The Way the Future Was, if not also of the longer or collected memoirs since published by Aldiss and Robert Silverberg.

Writers are rarely averse to producing autobiography at some length or in some format, but this was, I think, the first selection of autobiographical essays by sf writers to be published, at very least by large commercial publishing houses. I'd seen Alfred Bester's first, "My Affair with Science Fiction," for it appeared first in Harrison's anthology, otherwise given to first-publication of fiction, Nova 4 (1974), sadly the last of that fine series, and the paperback edition of which, from Manor Books of all people (and they did an unusually elegant job with it), was the first book I ever gave my father as a birthday gift, to his surprise. Bester, in his usual breezy style, takes us on a quick trip through his early writing experiences (his first published short story is repurposed at submission to win a contest at Thrilling Wonder Stories that Robert Heinlein was considering entering with his first published short story, "Lifeline," till Heinlein noted that selling the same story to Astounding Science Fiction, if he could, would make slightly more money than the contest prize; as Bester elsewhere recalls saying to Heinlein much later, "I won that contest and you made ten dollars more than I did."), how he came along with TWS editor Mort Weisinger when he moved over to DC Comics and worked with other writers on all but Batman "and Rabinowitz" scenarios for a few years, before breaking into radio-drama and nonfiction writing, particularly for Holiday magazine, all the while continuing to publish increasingly sophisticated and adventurous sf and fantasy (and how John Campbell's embrace of Scientology helped chase Bester away from his magazine). Harrison followed a similar path, though he started professionally in comics, and sold his first short story to Damon Knight at Worlds Beyond in 1951; oddly enough, Knight also started professionally as much a visual artist and illustrator as he did writer, with his first professional publication being a cartoon in Amazing Stories in 1940 (among his more notable illustration jobs was for Weird Tales's reprint of Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator" in the March, 1942 issue, the same one that features Robert Bloch's "Hell on Earth," noted here recently; the HPL story had first appeared in the little magazine Home Brew).
I had read Knight's and Pohl's books previously, so their essays were interesting mostly for the small counterpoints to the longer texts, but hadn't read too much autobiography at that point from the youngest contributor to the book, Robert Silverberg, nor from the only non-Yank contributor, Brian Aldiss, and so Silverberg's journeyman passage through the men's sweat magazines and similar markets rather than comics nor primarily the pulps (though Silverberg would contribute to many of the last of the pulps as that format of magazine faded with the passing of the 1950s, and their children the digest-sized fiction magazines flourished) is a counterpoint, as was Aldiss's early experience of American fiction magazines (in the post-war era, often dumped on the British equivalents of five and dime stores after serving as ballast in cargo ships, and comparable to the influence of American records on the young musicians in Britain of the '50s and '60s) and his career as someone just a bit to the side of the Angry Young Men but like them willing to explore every sort of literature if it looked at all interesting or fruitful, while particularly devoting himself to developing his work in sf...the title of this book echoes that of once Angry Young Man Kingsley Amis's collection of lectures recast as essays, New Maps of Hell, one of the important works of criticism about sf to arise at the turn of the 1960s, along with such collections of critical pieces as Knight's In Search of Wonder and James Blish's The Issue at Hand (and Blish would probably be in this book, but was in the process of dying from cancer and the effects of cancer surgery while it was being prepared; Aldiss notes that Michael Moorcock begged off, as the only requested contributor to do so out of what Aldiss considers excessive modesty...though perhaps insufficiently-cooled anger by the mid-'70s over what had happened to Moorcock's baby New Worlds magazine might also have played a part).

So, a key book in the history as well as about the history of the science fiction field, and good fun as well as touching and startling at times, and consistently illuminating.

For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.