What Makes Isaac Write?

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He has had to since he looked up from a laboratory bench at Boston University and decided that his future was at the typewriter, not the microscope. "I realized that I would never be a first-rate scientist," recalls Asimov. "But I could be a first-rate writer. The choice was an easy one: I just decided to do what I did best."

What he does best is simplify science for those who have little or no scientific training. But he also does well with specialists. Astronomer-Author Carl Sagan considers Asimov "the greatest explainer of the age." Says a Harvard research physicist: "Frankly, I read the man so that I can explain my own work to friends." Martin Gardner, an editor of Scientific American, calls Asimov "one of the top science writers in the business simply because, like all good novelists, he knows how to dramatize."

The dramatist correctly analyzes himself as "not a speed reader but a speed understander, and a natural-born explainer." He is also a natural-born worker. He never has fewer than three projects going simultaneously, sits down seven days a week at a cluttered desk in his Manhattan apartment and writes at least eight hours a day, banging out manuscripts at a phenomenal 90 words a minute. Unconcerned with literary style, Asimov concentrates instead on clarity. The result is a manuscript that can usually be taken from the typewriter to the typesetter. His publishers, who know a good thing when they see it, welcome his work, from which they have made millions over the years.

Financial security has meant a great deal to the candy-store owner's son. But what Isaac Asimov enjoys even more than comfort is that festival of contradictions known as Isaac Asimov. The man who talks like a randy bachelor is, in fact, the proud father of a son and a daughter, both in their 20s, and the husband of Psychiatrist Janet Jeppson (his first marriage ended in divorce in 1973). The robust and prodigious eater is the survivor of a 1977 heart attack as well as a thyroid cancer operation. The inveterate partygoer and dazzling conversationalist never drinks anything stronger than ginger ale. The carefree author cannot shake a persistent fear−certainly not of writer's block, or of ill health, or even of nuclear catastrophe. The man whose fiction has sent men and machines across whole galaxies, and through time in perhaps his most memorable single novel, The End of Eternity, refuses to board a plane. "Everybody has to worry about something," he muses. "Some people worry about sex. With me, it's jets." Which seems fair. After 200 books on every conceivable subject, it would be surprising to see Isaac Asimov up in the air about anything. As proof, an Asimov sampler: