Isaac Asimov

We asked two very special members of SFWA to give us a baseline for science fiction In this volume: Isaac Asimov, to tell us about the past when he was an ambitious and unlicked cub, and Norman Spinrad to look Into the tutum and show us what the time foray years hence holds for us. It was an easy choice In both cases.

The author of our first essay is Isaac Asiriiov, who Is not only a talented writer but someone who was actually there In that great Golden Age when John Campbell was reshaping science fiction and all the world was young. Also, he is the softest touch In science fiction. His work load Is staggering. By rights he had no business taking time out to *mlnlsce for us—but he did, and we’re well pleasedl

Science fiction in 1938, by modern standards, virtually did not exist. Suppose we call the roll—

There were three pulp magazines: Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. The first two paid a cent a word, the last paid half a cent a word.

Only Astounding might be considered a quality magazine. Thrilling Wonder Stories featured action stories intended to appeal to younger and less sophisticated readers. Amazing, which passed under new management that year, was getting set to feature fringe nonsense. It was the oldest of the magazines, being fully thirteen years old.

There were a few comic books that might be classified as very simplistic science fiction. “Flash Gordon” was to be found in the newspaper strips.

There were a few books published that were science

fiction, but they were put out by houses that were at best semi-professional; their sales were low and their earnings lower.

There were occasional movie serials that seemed to aspire to a science-fiction quality not quite as high as those of the comics. Even more occasional serious motion pictures appeared now and then. that might be classified as honest science fiction. The Shape of Things to Come springs to mind.

Out of it all, almost nothing was at more than a childish level. What kept it from sinking through the sub-basement and into moronic oblivion was the unrdmitting labor of one quixotic and idiosyncratic man, John W. Campbell, Jr., who in 1938 took over full editorial responsibilities for Astounding Stories and promptly changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction.

It was in that year, 1938, that I sold my first science-fiction story and broke into the field. Why on earth did I bother?

Science-fiction fans of today, accustomed to multimilliondollar extravaganzas in the movies and on television, to novels that earn blockbusting advances in six figures, to endless racks of paperbacks, may think of the impoverished era of the 1930s with disbelief, and pity those of “First Faadom” who grew up with science fiction in those days.

Don’t! The pity is misplaced. What we had, the fans of today will never have.

In the first place, there were few fans, and in such cases, less can be more.

There were many readers, to be sure. The magazines had circulation figures that were as high then as they are now (though magazines were the entire field then and are only a small proportion of it now). Most of the readers were casuals, however, who came and went and were content to be silent. They contributed their dimes and chat was the extent of their importance.

There were, however, a few fans-who not only bought the magazines but kept them; who not only read the stories, but discussed them; who not only enjoyed the stories but sought out others with whom to share the enjoyment.

So restricted was the experience of science fiction, so narrow were the limits within which it was familiar, so few were those who knew the language, the subject matter, the unending excitement of it, that it was as though we had a secret world that no one knew. We all lived in a tree house

in a trackless forest, in a cave in an unapproachable cliffwall, in a burrow in the hidden center of a vast labyrinth. We had a universe of our own and the world was well lost.

We few-we happy few-we band of brothers—

Well, we weren’t a band of brothers exactly, for discussions degenerated to arguments sometimes, and we were all young enough to know that we were right and that there was no such thing as compromise. We were also ‘sufficiently articulate-all of us-to shake the walls of the cosmos with even our lesser adjectives. Those were the days when Hitler’s speeches ruled the headlines, but for fervor and extremity of utterance he could have come for lessons to any of us.

The magazines cooperated. They ran pages and pages of letters in microscopic print in which every one of us could be a lordly critic—dismissing some stories with bluster, praising others with a hallelujah, spreading salvation and damnation at whim.

That was not enough, so some of us began fan clubs with memberships of five, six, even ten. There was the place where we developed our taste for power. There we competed for leadership and dreamed of political coups that would leave the club in our hands, and organized splinter groups of two or three to burrow from within.

There were many who felt, “Today, the Astoria Science Fiction Club; tomorrow, all of fandom.” I doubt that anyone dreamed that the day after tomorrow might bring the world itself to heel. If one could control fandom, the mere world would be an anticlimax.

Fans from different cities began to visit each other. They were all young, all virtually penniless; so getting from one place to another was an adventure and called for ingenuity.

No one could foresee in those happy infant days that in one more year the first World Convention would be held, that this would be followed by the hibernation of World War II and then the explosion of the atom bomb and the suffocating blanket of respectability. People out there would begin to take us seriously. The world would flood in and gone forever would be joy and innocence.

But in 1938, the last year of our delight, there was no hint of such a thing.

Remember, too, that aside from the fact that we fans had each other, we had the world of science fiction; the whole world. It was perfectly easy to read every issue of every

science-fiction magazine and in that way stay abreast of all of science fiction. I mean all of it-every word.

The fan could know all the authors and everything each one of them wrote. For years, for instance, I kept a catalog in which I listed every story that was published. I don’t mean lots of them. I mean every story. I listed them alphabetically by title and by author; I rated each one and gave my comments. I made lists of the better stories.

You could wake me up in the middle of the night and whisper a title to me and I could give you, without perceptible pause, the author, the plot, my opinion of the quality, and sometimes the exact issue of the exact magazine in which it appeared.

Try and do that now.

The most assiduous reader of science fiction must allow innumerable novels and short stories to get past him; must find that writers will win Rugos and Nebulas and that somehow he has never heard of them; occasionally discovers that his favorite author has written twenty items he has never read and cannot locate; finds something he considers wonderful and is lost in frustration because no one he knows has read it or heard of it.

You may read science fiction today but you can’t know science fiction; no one can.

We could.

In those days, most fans dreamed of being writers, of selling stories to the professional magazines. I don’t think we worried much about making money. Money was nice but it was not to be compared to the glory of seeing your byline in the magazine, of becoming a god in the tiny microcosm of science fiction. (Even your name on a letter in the back of the magazine was the equivalent of archangeldom.)

Seeing my name on a story in Astounding was my dream, too.

And we could make it, for standards weren’t high. Anyone who could really write-anyone-would try for other markets that paid better and had greater opportunities for advancement. Only fanatics (of which “fan” is a short form) insisted on writing science fiction; and as long as the sentences hung together at least loosely, you might very well sell. Then, for a time, you could make a few hundred dollars a year in money; and a few million dollars -a year in glory end adulation in the only place that counted-fandom.

Nowadays, the standards are enormously higher, the difficulties of breaking in massively greater. I couldn’t possibly sell the equivalent of my early stories in today’s market.

And the expectations are greater now, too. Having once sold a novel, if you sell your second for an advance of less than fifty thousand dollars, you fire your agent and take to drink.

In the old days, your story was off the stands and unavailable exactly one month after it appeared, and you had to write another one for another one-month stand. That was all there was. Nowadays, if your books go out of print, you fire the whole world and build a tent to retire to and sulk in.

-Well, how much of all this is nostalgia for vanished youth?

A lot of it, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to go back; I’m spoiled. I can’t bring myself to want to exchange wealth for poverty and celebrity for nonentity. I, too, have tried rich and poor; and 1, too, find that rich is better.