The Assiduous Isaac Asimov
”For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.” — Isaac Asimov
The Asimov family story is a familiar immigrant story. He was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents who had emigrated from Russia to the U.S when he was 3 years old. His father Judah, understood what life would be like for his family after the Bolshevik Revolution and decided that America would be a better place to raise his children.
“My father came to the United States in the hope of a better life for his children,” writes Asimov, “and this he certainly achieved. He lived to see one son a successful writer, another a successful journalist, and a daughter happily married. However, this was at great cost to himself.”
In Russia, his father had been a prosperous merchant, an educated man who was looked up to by those in his community. In the United States, however, he found himself penniless and virtually illiterate, for he could not read or understand English.
“He turned his hand to any job he could get and after three years had saved enough money for a down payment on a small Mom-and-Pop candy store and our future was assured.”
His parents worked around the clock to keep the store open 19 hours a day, seven days a week — from 6 A.M to 1 A.M — which kept them afloat during the Great Depression. Young Isaac, being the oldest of 3 children, found a small job as a paper boy and would deliver papers from 6 A.M. before school and work afternoons and evenings at the store.
His father instilled stern values in him: If he was five minutes late for his chores, he would berate him for being a “fulyack” — which is a Jewish term for sluggard. Reflecting on this, Isaac would go on to say;
“It is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6:00 A.M. anyway. I am still showing my father I am not a fulyack.”
Young Isaac was by all accounts a child prodigy. Before he was 5 years old, he had taught himself how to read by learning the shop signs on the street and studying the newspapers in the store. When he was 7 he had taught himself to read Yiddish, much to the bemusement of his father. At the age of 8, he began teaching his younger sister how to read. Isaac had such an affinity for learning that he was pushed up 3 grades and had received his high‐school diploma by the age of 15.
Isaac Asimov’s career as a writer started out by writing short stories and reading them to his friends, he says in one excerpt:
“I made up stories as I went along and it was a great deal like reading a book I hadn’t written. What would happen to the characters? . . . The excitement was all I wrote for in those early years. In my wildest dreams it never occurred to me that anything I wrote would ever be published.”
During his spare moments at the store, he would devour the science fiction literature in the rack and fell in love with the genre. The early twentieth century was the golden era and great possibilities lay ahead. In his mid-teens he tried his hand as an amateur writer and discovered that he was rather good at it. Not long after that he sold another called “Nightfall” which would be later hailed by the Science Fiction Writers of America as the “Best Science Fiction short story ever written” up to that time.
At age 15, Asimov then applied to Columbia College but was rejected because the school’s quota for Jews for the year was already filled. He then attended Columbia, where he earned a Chemistry degree. Hoping to become a doctor, he applied to five medical schools in New York but was not accepted. He applied again a year later and was once more turned down. He also applied to Columbia’s graduate school for chemistry, but was denied entrance there also.
Despite the slow start, Isaac eventually earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry and worked his way up the ladder of academia, moving from a postdoc position to a job as a biochemistry instructor at Boston University’s med school. His lectures were popular, and within a few years he was promoted to associate professor.
When he switched careers to full time writing, he would sit at his typewriter for 10 hours a day, seven days a week — typing page after page — “thinking, through his fingers” as he would put it. His first novel was in 1950 at the age of 30 which was received well, within the next two years he published several more books, and for the next 19 years he would display the most astonishing feat of literary activity that has seldom been reproduced. On his 49th birthday, he had published up to 100 books and by the time he died at age 72, was credited with having published well over 500 books. “Writing, to me, “ he says, “is simply thinking through my fingers.”
Remarking on his work ethic he would always make clear that compulsive writers are made, not born and always avoided talks of Genius;
“I write for the same reason I breathe,” he says, “ — because if I didn’t, I would die. Getting stuck is normal, it’s what happens next, the reaction, that separates the professional from the amateur. I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more.”
Although chiefly known as a Science fiction writer, he wrote books about Shakespeare, the Bible, American History, World History, the History of Math, the History of Chemistry and books on various branches of Mathematics and Science, including many on Astronomy and Cosmology.
His success saw him become the lead consultant for the long-running Sci-Fi show Star Trek and his books have produced numerous film adaptations, one of which was I, Robot which starred Will Smith in 2004. His short story called Runaround introduced his famous Laws of Robotics, which is: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
His works continue to inspire discussion in many fields today and have inspired an entire generation of Science fiction enthusiasts and writers. John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov’s written output, once observed, “It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style.” Along with such figures as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, Asimov left his mark as one of the most distinguished inter-disciplinarians of the 20th century.
On his own legacy, Asimov says;
“What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.”
Read more in my new book! The Trials And Triumphs of Hyperachievers
