Books: What Makes Isaac Write?

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The lonely, insufferable kid was father of the gifted man. Forbidden to read the lurid pulp magazines sold in the store, Isaac pored over science-fiction monthlies. He soon began to send them short stories. At an age when many fellow students were struggling to express themselves, Asimov, who entered Columbia University's Seth Low Junior College at age 15, helped pay for his college and graduate school with fiction that sold for a penny a word. At a time when many young men were looking for their first postcollege jobs, Asimov published what became one of the most anthologized sci-fi stories in history, Nightfall, a speculation about how man would view the stars if they appeared only once every thousand years.

On the ascent from novice to Grand Master of true and fictive science, the autobiographer omits few details of his daily life, recollecting conversations with editors, wrangles with professors and later, when he was a professor himself (he taught biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine for two decades), with his employers. Nor does he skimp on such intimate details as the site and sound of his introduction to extra marital sex. "What it amounts to is that she seduced me," writes Asimov in apparent amazement. "I just followed along, with my teeth more or less chattering, and not out of passion."

Whether he made other amatory conquests remains to be revealed in Vol. II of Asimov's autobiography, now under fevered construction. For the normally imperturbable author is nervous for the first time in his literary life. "It's kind of frightening," he confesses. "If people don't like your novel, they don't like your novel. But if they don't like your autobiography, it means they don't like you." The anxiety is unnecessary. As William Blake once proclaimed, energy is eternal delight. Not everyone may like every one of Asimov's other volumes. But it is hard to see how anyone could finish this vigorous autobiography and not be delighted with the dynamo that produced it.

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He describes himself, on dust jackets and in introductions, as "devilishly handsome." The description is as fantastic as his novels. Isaac Asimov is a stocky man with a shock of unruly, graying hair, twinkling blue eyes and a grin that turns into a satyr's leer at the sight of an attractive woman. He is a self-acknowledged and thus thoroughly affable egotist. But then, he has a lot to be egotistical about.

Asimov is a genius according to any of the tests by which intelligence is measured, a prodigy who manifests his abilities in a tsunami of words. In the four decades since he published his first story, Asimov has written more science fiction than Kurt Vonnegut's legendary Kilgore Trout. A compilation of Asimov's other works includes several volumes of detective fiction (Tales of the Black Widowers, Murder at the ABA); books on chemistry, astronomy and religion; The Intelligent Man 's Guide to Science ("The title refers to the author, not the reader"); the novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage, which helped propel Raquel Welch through the bloodstream; and a book of instructions on how to be a dirty old man. "A lot of people can write," says the author. "I have to."