What Makes Isaac Write?

OPUS 200 by Isaac Asimov; Houghton Mifflin; 329pages; $10.95

IN MEMORY YET GREEN: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ISAAC ASIMOV, 1920-1954 Doubleday; 732 pages; $15.95

Other writers may sit white-knuckled at their desks, grinding out a few pages a day, a book every couple of years. Not Isaac Asimov. Back in 1938, the teenage author sold his first tale to Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine. Encouraged, he branched out from sci-fi to fields as varied as his interests: literary criticism, psychology, mathematics, mystery, poetry, humor, American history. Simenon may have written more thrillers, Chesterton more poetry and philosophy, Pulp Romance Writer Barbara Cartland more novels. But no single author has ever written more books about more subjects than Isaac Asimov.

This month he extends that record with the publication of his 200th book. Leave it to Asimov to complicate things by passing the milestone twice. With rival publishers equally eager to bring out the landmark work, the author has satisfied both by assigning the same number to two offerings.

Both are remarkable works. Opus 200 is a cornucopia: for sci-fi buffs there are excerpts from the 1972 novel The Gods Themselves and the award-winning robot story The Bicentennial Man. For those who prefer Asimov's other talents, there are such tours de force as an introduction to binary numbers; an explanation, in language that even Dick and Jane can follow, of why it is possible (but not practical) to reverse the basic nuclear reaction and convert energy into matter; some witty Asimovian annotations on Shakespeare, the Bible and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Byron; as lagniappe, he throws in a few limericks of the type An ability to dramatize. that family magazines do not reprint.

The other Opus 200, In Memory Yet Green, is a guide to Asimov himself: a detailed, candid account of his early days in Brooklyn, in the developing field of science fiction, in the worlds of college teaching and book publishing. In Memory, which follows its central character to his 34th year (he is now 59), may not fall into the same class as Rousseau's Confessions. But like the author, it is ceaselessly informative and entertaining.

Asimov skips quickly over his birth and early life in the tiny Russian town of Petrovichi, which he left at the age of three and does not fully remember. But he writes with total recall of his sister Marcia and brother Stanley (now assistant publisher of the Garden City, N.Y., daily Newsday) and of their early days in Brooklyn, where Papa Asimov serially owned five candy stores.

"A candy store is open every day of the week," writes Asimov of those early days. "In some respects, it made me an orphan." The demands of the store cut him off from his parents; Isaac's behavior severed him from his contemporaries. For he was not only brighter than his older classmates, he was eager to make them aware of his stratospheric IQ.