I. Asimov

by Isaac Asimov

This book sat on my nightstand for nearly two years, and I read a page here and there. It was broken into small sections, and reading it that way worked well.

Asimov was born January 2, 1920 in Russia. But fully culturally American. He says he cares about truth more than appearing vain. I don’t know about the truth part, but he certainly appears extremely vain many times in this book! Taught himself to read. A remarkable memory. Like Murakami, this has the feeling of a “self-myth,” but is it? It’s not so farfetched. He comes out and says hs is self-absorbed (3), proud, immodest (4). Slow to grasp things about human nature and society.

In America, his parents bought and ran a candy store. (6)

“Never tempted toward religion of any kind.” A rationalist. (13)

His god is himself. His name is holy. “I identified myself so strongly with my name that to have the story appear without my real name would have been no satisfaction to me.” (17)

“I don’t celebrate holidays… Every day is a work day to me.” (18) I suppose this helps with being prolific.

He re-read The Iliad over and over as a teen. (25) Another example of re-reading (27). Read The Pickwick Papers 26 times! (28) – I have noticed the idea of re-reading good books coming up more and more, and it is making me consider doing this intentionally. I don’t naturally revisit books, usually, with a few exceptions.

He calls himself “self-centered.” His own narcicism is a topic of interest…to himself. (34)

“It became unfashionable for Americans to express racist views” after WWII, a reaction to Hitler’s racism. (41)

In pulp stories, women were only introduced to make the villains more villainous and the heroes more heroic. (43) IA thought they slowed things down, wrote letters complaining about them, did not include women in his early writing.

“True literacy is becoming an arcane art,” he writes in 1990.

He still hates a writing teacher from literally 60 years earlier. Obsesses over him to the point that he wrote a time travel revenge story based on him. (53)

He says “Double Star” (1956) is the best thing Heinlein ever wrote.

As a zoology major, he had to kill a stray cat by trapping it in an ashcan containing chloroform. That’s how they obtained cats to dissect and study. (He later switched to chemistry.) (90)

“Nightfall” is considered one of the best magazine SF stories. (99)

No plans to have children (although later he had two). Too many people. (174)

His first non-fiction book was “The Chemicals of Life” (1954).

US intelligence agencies investigated a sci-fi writer whose 1944 story too well described an atomic bomb. (221)

Ben Bova: “Science fiction writers are scouts sent by humanity to survey the future.” (221)

Svirsky: Science wiped out “the distinction between life and non-life.” (Pure materialism? Not positive what he means…) (275)

The Trap Door Spiders - “a literary, male-only eating, drinking, and arguing society in New York City”. They were the inspiration for Asimov’s fictional group of puzzle solvers, the Black Widowers. Like a sci-fi version of The Inklings.

He received a Nebula award engraved “Issac Asmimov” – both names misspelled! (319)

Ogden Nash line which he quotes when writing about obsessively reading the NY Times obituaries: “The old men know when an old man dies.” (538)

“There may be some morbid satisfaction in being a last survivor, but is it much better than death to be the last leaf on the tree, to find yourself alone in a strange and hostile world where no one remembers you as a boy, and where no one can share with you the memory of that long-gone world that glowed all about you when you were young?” (538)

He finished writing this book in May 1990 and died two years later, April 6, 1992. His (second) wife, Janet, wrote an epilogue, but she makes no mention of HIV. In her version, he died from failing kidneys (which could also be true). According to Wikipedia, “In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.” Reading around on this internet, this seems to be widely accepted and confirmed in Janet’s own private letters.

Vocab

• contumelious - rudely contemptuous (70)
• dun - make persistent demands for payment (88)
• propinquity - proximity (63)
• ukase - the edict of a czar