The Way the Future Blogs

I’ve been nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo
(and I couldn’t be more pleased!)

Of course being nominated for a Hugo isn’t quite the same as winning one. This is a lesson I have been taught several times. All the same, it’s a nice feeling, and I appreciate it.

The blog team was absolutely right, too, in urging you to join the Worldcon, give them the $50 and get the sampler of Hugo nominees. It comes in electronic form instead of good old ink on paper, which I personally much prefer, but the price is right. All those great novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories would be many times more expensive if you paid retail, and you get samplings of all the other awardable categories, too.

* * *

As long as we’re talking I’ve got a couple of other things I meant to talk to you about. One is a really neat book that’s coming out next month from Tor. Its title is Gateways — note the plural s — it’s edited by my favorite anthology editor ever (that is, the one I’ve been married to for the last quarter-century, Elizabeth Anne Hull) and it came about when Betty Anne told our Tor editor, Jim Frenkel, that she would like to put together a festschrift anthology for my then upcoming 90th birthday, composed of new stories written by writers on whose careers I had had some significant effect, as editor, agent, collaborator or whatever.

When she made a list, Jim whistled and said, “That’s a list of most of the top writers in the field.” Not all of the writers were able to produce stories for her but most did, and it is my opinion that some of these are going to be showing up on awards voting this time next year.

She didn’t make the deadline for my birthday, though. I kept getting sick, and her efforts would be devoted to keeping me alive for a while. And then Betty herself fell in a bank parking lot and cracked a lumbar vertebra, resulting in pain, surgery and a lot of lost time. But now it will be in the stores before you know it, and I think you’ll like it.

* * *

Speaking of the ills the flesh is heir to—

A couple weeks ago, I had to get an adjustment in one of the contrivances that keep me more or less normal. We had just parked at the hospital where they do most of my repair work when another car pulled up beside us, and out of it came our production staff, comprising Leah A. Zeldes, our blogmeister, and her husband, Dick Smith, who makes sure we have enough bandwidth and keeps our computers functioning much of the time. (They are, by the way, pretty good fanzine Hugo candidates themselves, having been nominated for the award in three separate years for their handsome zine STET.)

I was out of there and back home in a couple of hours. Leah, not so much. She had a couple of days of being observed while the doctors figured out what she needed, then a spot of surgery, then bed rest for recuperation, and then, just to keep the doctors on their toes, a bit of pneumonia to round things off.

Now she’s back home recovering. But she still managed to get up a couple of posts from her hospital bed.

Virginia Heinlein, 1976.
(Photo by David Dyer-Bennet.)
 

Robert Heinlein’s next, and final, wife was Lt. Virginia Gerstenfeld. She worked with (and outranked) Heinlein at the little wartime research group in Philadelphia that was charged with trying to figure out what a high-altitude (read: space) suit should be like.

Politically, she and I were nowhere near close, but we agreed to disagree and generally talked about something else. That didn’t really matter. Bob had picked her and she was his loyalest fan and ferociousest protector, and as long as he lived that was plenty good enough for me.

But then he died, and Ginny didn’t stop protecting all that was left of him. Specifically his image — or rather her image of him, which I believe was of a chivalrous, well-mannered and quite refined Annapolis man.

This became a problem for me when I was editing the SFWA Grand Masters series of anthologies for Tor. My plan was to include for each of these giants a selection of their most important work. I knew exactly what I wanted, too. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the opening part of the story is told in a sort of modestly Russian-Latino English-language dialect, by its central character. I desperately wanted to reprint those opening scenes, in which the narrator tricks a giant computer into revealing that it has become a person. Ginny would have none of that.

When I first told her my plan, she said she’d have to think about it, and when she had thought she said, well, no, she didn’t want to include anything from that book because she had discussed it with some friends and they agreed that it was, well, a bit … “vulgar,” I think was the word she used. And she was unswayable.

Then there was Grumbles from the Grave. Robert had talked about allowing posthumous publication of his real feelings about a lot of things that he didn’t feel comfortable to talk about while he was alive, and indicated that some of his private letters would be a source for the book. Then some posthumous book with that title did come out, and it was a great disappointment. Someone — it could have been only Ginny — had washed his face and combed his hair and turned whatever it was that Robert might have wanted to say into the equivalent of thank-you notes for a respectable English tea.

I know that Robert wrote some much more raunchy letters than any of those, because I myself got one or two. But all the raunch has been edited out. What’s left is actually rather boring and does a great disservice to the real Heinlein, whose physical person may have been embodied as a conventional hard-right conservative but whose writing was — sometimes vulgarly — that of a free-thinking iconoclast.

Pity. It is good that Heinlein’s novels are now going to be reissued as he wrote them, without the alterations of editors like me. It would also be good if a similar job could be done on his letters.

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

Robert A. Heinlein

Then there was the affair of Robert Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Stranger in a Strange Land.

I was editor of Galaxy at the time. I had hired AJ as our official book reviewer, a job which he took seriously and performed well, and when Heinlein published a major new novel called Stranger in a Strange Land, AJ went all out in a detailed and penetrating criticism — which, when he delivered it and I began to read, filled me with horror.

If there was one thing I knew about Heinlein it was that he was almost pathologically protective of his privacy — had threatened to sue people who invaded it — and, I was pretty sure, would take a dim view of some of AJ’s quite perceptive remarks. So there was a dilemma. I didn’t want to deprive AJ of an audience for a piece of good, hard work. I also didn’t want to get Robert mad at me. I stewed over the problem for a while, finally decided to leave the decision up to Robert himself and shipped off a copy of the review to him, pleased with myself for having solved the problem.

Then, a week or two later, the mailman handed me a large and heavy manila envelope with Heinlein’s return address on it and, “My God,” I said out loud, “Bob has written me a novelette!”

    Algis Budrys

I was wrong about that, though. The twenty or thirty closely typed pages in the envelope weren’t fiction, they were an impassioned denunciation of the review, of invasive reviews in general and of the person who had written it — who, Robert conjectured, was some effete New York bookworm who had never traveled more than a few dozen miles from his home and had no knowledge of what the real world was like.

This was a factual error on Robert’s part, because AJ was actually born in Lithuania, the son of a high-ranking diplomat who was assigned first to Nazi Germany and then, while AJ was still a young boy, the United States. (English was actually AJ’s third language, after Lithuanian and German.) However, I could recognize a cry of pain when I heard it, so I ash-canned the review and told both Robert and AJ that it wouldn’t be published.

I am still not sure that I made the morally correct decision, but anyway it had a happy ending. At the Seattle Worldcon a little later I had the pleasure of introducing AJ to Robert. They hit it off and became friends.

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

Robert A. Heinlein
 

Along the way, Robert Heinlein and I had got to be pretty good friends. We shared some minor vices, for example in those days smoking the same brand of cigarettes (cork-tipped Raleighs, and we both saved the coupons that came with every pack), and we both abhorred each other’s political views but had some good times arguing about them. We didn’t get together very often because the Heinleins were West Coasters and I was resolutely East, but every now and then our paths would cross.

When the Heinleins came to New York, they preferred to stay in a mall but spiffy hotel somewhere near Tudor City, and on occasion asked me over for an evening of smoking, drinking and amiably criticizing each other’s world views. (Well, usually it was amiable.) And there were evenings I remember at places like Tulsa and Grand Rapids and that wonderful circular house that the Heinleins built on a gorgeous, if rattlesnake-infested, piece of California land when Ginny’s health no longer let her live halfway up a Colorado mountain. Now and then, though, a shadow did fall.

One of the darkest of them happened when I published a Heinlein serial — I am embarrassed to say I have forgotten which one, but it may have been the one about the future in which Africans have become the dominant gens in the world. After I had read it, I phoned Lurton Blassingame, then Robert’s literary agent, and said I would be glad to publish the story but thought there were five or ten thousand words in the beginning that were argumentative, extraneous and kind of boring, and I wanted permission to cut them out. (But, I promised, we would pay for even the words I wanted to cut.)

“Sure, go ahead,” said Lurton, and I did. But Lurton hadn’t consulted with Robert Heinlein and when Robert got the issue containing the first installment he went ballistic. When I told him that I had asked for, and received, permission he transferred his ire to Lurton … but not quite entirely, because when the book version came out Robert appended to the copyright notice a line that said something like “An unapproved version of this work, brutally corrupted by Fred Pohl, appeared in his magazine If.”

(Well, I think that’s what it said, but I no longer have the book. As I mentioned earlier, these reminiscences are first draft, which means right off the top of my head, and I may get some details wrong which will be corrected when I ultimately publish them in a book. For which reason, if any of you out there can tell me which Heinlein novel it was and exactly what he said in the copyright notice, I will be grateful.)

More Heinlein to come. . . .

 
Related posts

• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

    Robert A. Heinlein
 

I mentioned that greatest of Campbell-era sf writers, Robert A. Heinlein, a while ago, and that got me to thinking about the man and what it was like to be his editor, at least for the magazine publication of a lot of his work. So I went poking around some musty old papers (and some of the even mustier crevices of my brain) and produced some memories to share with those of you who are interested.

As many of you (especially the ones who have read The Way the Future Was) already know, at the age of nineteen, principally because of dumb luck, I found myself the editor of two professional science-fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, and one of my contributors was that same Robert Heinlein.

I hasten to add that that statement conveys an implication which is unjustified. In such a relationship, it is supposed to be the editor who makes the buy-or-bounce decisions, and therefore it is the editor who dominates it.

In this case, that was incorrect. It happens there is a member of my immediate family who exemplifies the Pohl–Heinlein relationship of that period more accurately. Her name is Milly. She is a nine-year-old Jack Russell, and at every meal she sits at my feet, waiting for me to finish so she can lick the crumbs off my plate. This well describes how things were between Robert and me around 1940. Everything he wrote went at once to John Campbell. The few stories that John rejected went to me — to be run only under a pseudonym, to be sure, because that was how John had decreed it.

Still, it wasn’t too bad either for Milly or me. Milly makes a decent living out of my dinner plates (she also gets regular dog food, of course, but I know which she prefers), and I got some nice stories that John had been too opinionated to publish.

Of course, later on things improved for me. By the time I was editing Galaxy and If in the 1960s, John and Bob had suffered some sort of cooling off, and so I got the choice of everything Bob wrote. I didn’t buy it all, but I did buy quite a lot.

For years I was under the impression that the explanation for this was that Robert, for whatever reason, had told his agent not to offer anything to John. I’ve since been told that that’s wrong; the novels were indeed submitted first to Campbell and he rejected every one. If this is true, as I am forced to believe, then it just proves that even the best of editors has occasional fits of idiocy.

Anyway, I was, I admit, a little rueful about the Heinleins I was publishing because Robert had by then apparently begun to run out of steam. Novels like Podkayne of Mars were reasonably cute, but a long way below the products of his glory years. Then, without warning, along came The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, not only right up there with his best but maybe his very best novel ever. I began running it at once.

Naturally it won that year’s Hugo (so did the magazine I ran it in, largely because I had been lucky enough to get such good serials), and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

 
More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

    Murray Leinster
 

Will F. Jenkins, who sometimes chose to sign his stories with the pseudonym Murray Leinster and sometimes didn’t, was one of the most influential science-fiction writers ever, and I want to write something about him. What’s wrong with that simple ambition is that I didn’t know him very well. In fact, I don’t think —

1. that he and I were ever in the same room, or,

2. that I ever bought a story from him during the decades in which I was successively working as an editor for Popular Publications, PopularScience/Outdoor Life, Galaxy, Ace and Bantam, and was regularly buying work from just about every other significant sf writer alive.

But I do have some special knowledge of Jenkins/Leinster from other sources. One of them is the same for me as it is for any other fan. I’ve read a lot of his stories, and what stories they are! There’s “Sidewise in Time,” from the June, 1934, Astounding, which was the very first parallel-time story, and so provided interesting new story explorations to be made in all of the hundreds and thousands of paratime stories that followed. There was “A Logic Named Joe,” which got just about everything right about the most important invention of the 20th century except one thing, the name of the logics. (When they came true, we called them computers.) And there was “First Contact,” the first science-fiction story to think through the problems you encounter when your exploration ship comes across a ship of intelligent aliens exploring the same planet.

The thing about Will Jenkins’s stories is that there are so many of them, over 1,500 short pieces, both articles and short stories, that we forget just how good they are. He even started near the top, making his first sale, a short story called “The Foreigner,” to the classiest magazine of the time, the legendary The Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. He kept on appearing in it, too, so frequently — indeed sometimes with more than one story in and issue — that he had to create the pen name “Murray Leinster” to attach to the surplus. Science fiction wasn’t common in America yet, but Will began writing it early with stories for Argosy like “The Runaway Skyscraper,” which canny old Hugo Gernsback reprinted in Amazing as soon as he started it.

 
As I’ve said, I never met Will Jenkins and, to tell the truth, I’m not at all sure that we would ever have become close friends if I had. After all, his choice for the greatest man who ever lived was the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, while my own would have been President Abraham Lincoln. We might have had to fight The War Between the States over again a few times first.

All the same there’s a lot to admire in Will Jenkins, as I’ve discovered in reading the unpublished biography of the man that two of his daughters, Jo-an J. Evans and Wenllian J. Stallings, have just finished writing. That is my source for a good deal of what I know about him.

What I know is that, in addition to being a talented and seminal writer, he was a good father, a kind human being and a talented inventor. Perhaps his most successful invention was a system of forward-projecting surround scenes when shooting a movie, which sounds to me a lot like what Stanley Kubrick was experimenting with when he shot the opening ape-men scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’ll tell you one thing. If I were still drudging away as a book editor, I would quickly write a contract for this book, perhaps plumping it out by adding “Sidewise in Time” and “A Logic Named Joe” to show what I was talking about. Then I would get it out in the stores so everybody could read the facts about this commendable man, including his reasons for giving his four daughters such, ah, distinctive names.

The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, Riverhead Books, New York

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco
 

On 9/11, otherwise known as 11 September 2001, Americans were shaken out of any delusions of security they had possessed when 19 al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four air liners on the East Coast. Two of the aircraft were operated by United Airlines, the others by American, and each of the hijacking parties was assigned a specific target to attack. UA 175 was to strike the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, AA 11 the South Tower. American 77 was to take out the Pentagon and United 93 the White House. The two that hit the towers were Boeing 767s; the other two Boeing 757s.

Over a period of about ninety minutes that morning the first three sets of hijackers accomplished their missions, crashing into their assigned targets and killing more than three thousand men, women and children in the attacked structures (and, of course, also killing themselves and the passengers and crew of the destroyed planes.) The fourth team of hijackers, however, was defeated by the passengers and surviving crew of United 93, who attacked their hijackers en masse. They were successfully overpowering the terrorists when the one at the plane’s controls, apparently convinced they were defeated, cried, “Allah is the greatest!” and put the plane into a near-vertical dive, crashing, with the deaths of everyone aboard, near the little community of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

This was fortunate for the White House in more than one way. At that point UA93 was only about 20 minutes flying time from the White House that was its target, and — the “ground truth” being the opposite of what the participants claimed — the President’s team did not have the situation well in hand. The F-16s pursuing it were not even given the order to shoot it down until well after it had already crashed. It isn’t even clear that the order could ever have been issued in time. The authorities seemed less interested in UA93 than in another plane that had been suspected of being a hijack, Delta 1989, but wasn’t. Actually, at the time of the discussion, Delta 1989 was proving that by obediently landing a thousand miles away in the Midwest.

 
From Farmer’s text in his book, The Ground Truth:

“History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11attacks. The story they were told gave a false assurance that by the time the last hijacked plane was heading for Washington, some ninety minutes after the attacks began, the military, from the commander in chief on down, had reasserted control over American airspace and was prepared to respond to the final attack…. (T)hat wasn’t true.”

The trouble with attempting to review this book is that, in it, Farmer documents all of his charges. Having read the book, it is clear that what he just said is true: generals, department heads and even cabinet officers had to be either outright conspiritorial lying (orchestrated mendacity) or unforgivably ignorant of the actual conditions they were describing and pretending to control (administrative incompetence).

But to prove them in this review needs a lot of words — -probably about as many as are in his book. And in many cases what those responsible actually did might not have looked particularly important to the testifiers. For example, the scrambling of the F-16s from the Langley Air Force Base was due to a report of a hijacked plane heading out of New York and toward Washington, with its terrifying wealth of potential targets, whereupon the fighters were scrambled. What was lied about was the identity of that hijacked plane. Someone on the radio — it was never established who — said it was AA 11, and it is true that that was in fact the “plane” the fighters were scrambled to intercept. Of course, that was impossible. AA 11 had already ceased to exist as an actual airplane and was by then just part of the components of the South Tower inferno. But the error persisted.

Then when American 77 turned up — a real hijacked aircraft, actually heading for Washington and it was untruthfully said to be what inspired the order to launch the F-16s — one may suppose that the mendacious ones thought all they were doing was simplifying an over-complex situation.

But the little emendations all moved in the same direction, which was to eliminate reporting of all the blunders that had been made by the higher-ups and strengthen the illusion that they were actually in charge. All those little “corrections” to actual history did have two quite serious consequences. The first was the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, since his allegedly strong and wise dealing with 9/11 and its consequences was his principal claim to competence. The second was the ungodly, even lethal mess that followed Hurricane Katrina’s onslaught on New Orleans in 2005.

(I should state that the claim of the influence of the 9/11 cover-up on the results of the 2004 election is not explicitly made by Farmer in his book, although I think it inevitably follows from the evidence he presents. As to the Katrina event, see below.)
 

The good thing about Katrina is that planners had always known that it was likely to happen some day, and that led many thoughtful people to believe that the nation had better prepare to deal with it.

Accordingly, in July of 2004, several hundred emergency workers participated in an exercise in which representatives of all the assorted agencies who would play a role in a real disaster were involved. Over a three-day period they worked through what to do about the incursion of a (non-existent) Hurricane Pam on the vulnerable city..

All agreed that the exercise was a great success that had revealed serious faults in the existing plans. New plans were quickly drawn up Some of the things they called for were improved relations between parties and agencies involved; for pre-positioning stores of water, food, ice and other necessities at least 72 hours before they were expected to be needed; and for revised traffic laws, including one that would permit the Louisiana State Police to limit the use of local highways to “contraflow” one-way driving, limiting all lanes for use only by people leaving the city.

In the event, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco did alter the highway plans accordingly. In the opinion of experts, this saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of lives that would have been lost otherwise.

Unfortunately, no other step was taken.

In the event, those involved did not work closely together at any point. Some, including the New Orleans Police Department, hardly worked at all; only a few police stayed on the job, most walked away to go home and care for their families, a large fraction not only didn’t quell the looting that broke out but actually joined in it..

The higher up the individuals involved were, the less their actions were relevant to the needs of the situation. Governor Blanco and President Bush’s staff squabbled over whether troops providing aid should be federalized or not; Bush’s team wanted to do it, the governor said that was an attempt to gain credit. The President convened regular meetings to expedite aid. They had no contact with those aid forces actually doing so.. The prepositioning of needed stores of water, ice, food, etc., 72 hours before need didn’t happen. At about 12 (not 72) hours before Katrina struck, the President got on TV to assure the people of New Orleans that vast stores of all needed supplies had been sent on their way. Perhaps they were. What he did not say was that it would be several weeks before all of them would arrive.

It was a great plus that the legal steps to contraflow the highways were indeed taken by Governor Blanco, but how much better it would have been if the relief organizations had carried out all of the other excellent plans they themselves made — and then ignored.

 
We know what the “ground truth” of New Orleans was in the time of Katrina, thousands dead, tens of thousands of homes destroyed, tens of thousands stranded in the neighborhoods of a city that had lost power, food, water and the rule of law. But to know what it was like to be in the city when the violence of Katrina struck — and when the storm moved on and the human violence of the lawless city replaced it — we need to look to the story of the Syrian-born Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who stayed through the worst of it because he thought he could help — and who was rewarded by being arrested as a looter — in his own home — and jailed incommunicado.

Isaac Asimov, 1965.

All this time Isaac was continuing to write for John Campbell — Foundation stories, robot stories, all kinds of stories. Perhaps his biggest hit for John, though, wasn’t exactly a story. It was what came to be called “a non-fact article,” this one a dead-pan scientific report on a compound called “thiotimoline,” which had the curious property of beginning to dissolve before it was added to a solvent.

For a time I was back in the literary-agency business, handling Isaac among most of the other top sf writers in the world. The publishing of science fiction in book form in the U.S. had just begun, and I wanted Isaac to get in on it. The trouble was that Doubleday, the most interesting of the hardcover houses, had decided that they wanted new works, not reprinted serials taken from the pulps. (It was a dumb decision, and later, when they realized what they were missing out on and reversed it they made a fortune out of those old Foundation and robot books.)

But at the time that was policy and I couldn’t argue them out of it. But I happened to know that Startling Stories had asked Isaac to write a short novel for them and then, when he did, rejected it. When I told him what I had in mind, he dragged it out of the dead file and handed it to me. “Fred,” he said, “this is my only copy. Be very careful of it, because if it gets lost, you are no longer my agent.”

That pulled my cork. I think it was the only time in my life that I was really mad at Isaac. I all but threw the manuscript back at him. “Isaac,” I said — well, I think yelled, “we’re talking about grown-up publishing here. You’re the author. You give me a manuscript, I try to get it turned into a book, but I’m not the one who provides the manuscript.” (There may have been a few expletives thrown in here and there.)

Anyway Isaac backed down, we were friends again, and Doubleday was glad to have the book. Isaac had called it “Grow Old Along With Me.” Walter Bradbury, the editor who wrote the contract, called it The Stars, Like Dust, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s still in print today.

If the established New York publishing houses were too proud to pick up reprints from the pulps, the fan-owned semi-pros who had started the whole thing weren’t. What I couldn’t sell to Doubleday or Simon & Schuster I mostly sold to them. Isaac’s robot stories, for instance, went to Martin Greenberg’s Gnome Press. When I handed the manuscript over to Marty, he said, “I don’t have to read this, I’ve already read them all. I’ll write a contract. But I need a title and there isn’t one on the script.”

He was right. No new title occurred to me, but I’d admired the title on an Eando Binder robot story — “I, Robot,” borrowed from the great Robert Graves novel, I, Claudius — and it wouldn’t matter what we put in the contract, because the title could always be changed and titles aren’t copyrightable anyway. So said the contract, and the Binder title just never got changed.

Funny story: Isaac had told me that “his” Three Laws of Robotics were actually given to him by John Campbell — Isaac had just tinkered with the wording. But when the movie people actually made a film called I, Robot, the story that was filmed had nothing to do with Isaac’s actual stories but was something written and published by another writer, and all they used of Isaac’s work was the title and the Three Laws. Neither of which had been his.

 
In 1948, Isaac got his Ph.D. It is the custom before that degree is granted for the candidate to appear before a sort of jury of people who already have the degree, who question him or her at depth about various details of the particular field of study involved. When Isaac went before the group for his orals, he expected they would make him sweat and they did.. Then, when he was just about ready to flee from the room, the most senior of his questioners said, “Now there is one subject we haven’t touched on, but it may be the most important of all. Mr. Asimov, what are the properties of the compound thiotimoline?”

And Isaac knew he had it made. As he had. Not only the degree, but also a job, teaching biochemistry at Boston University (not to be confused with the famous Catholic school, Boston College) and no one could take it away from him because he had been granted tenure. With his wife Gertrude — Gittel for short — and their two babies, he could now look forward to a comfortable and stress-free life in New England.

He was, however, not quite prepared for superstardom.

 
Final installments coming up when I write them.

 
Related posts:

• Isaac
• Isaac, Part 2
• Isaac, Part 3
• Isaac, Part 4
• Russians, Jews and Isaac