The Way the Future Blogs

    Peripherally inserted central catheter.
    (Photo by Pinkfud.)

A few days ago I had what’s called a PICC line installed in my right arm. This isn’t a big deal; it’s just a tube that they run up through one of your big veins to transport things like antibiotics to where they’ll do the most good. There are other ways to do that job — for instance to lie in a hospital bed for a week or so and have a nurse come by and stick a needle in you every now and then. That works just as well, but with the PICC line you can go home and do it yourself.

I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except for a coincidence. There’s a tiny possibility of some kinds of problems, like infections. The day after I got the thing, there was a story in the paper about how widely hospitals varied in the number of serious infections they gave patients who got the procedure. The number they’re all supposed to aim for is zero, but not one of the hospitals in this study made it. Some give their patients hardly any, others more than they like to admit to. (Which is really shameful because this is one of the absolute easiest to prevent problems in medicine. The most important thing the OR people need to do to eliminate them is wash their hands.)

So what I’d like to know, if any of you know the answer, is how many patients do get infected from these procedures. Any of you happen to know anything about that?

This isn’t urgent, by the way. I don’t even know anybody who had such an infection. It’s just curiosity, which is to say it’s a part of my plan for all of us to know everything so we can educate the rest of the world.

Gertrude and Isaac Asimov. (Photo by Jay Kay Klein.)

When World War II ended, Isaac Asimov’s stint as a war research scientist came to an end. Then he said good-bye (or at least au revoir to his associate researchers, because he was pretty sure to be seeing at least Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp again) and headed for the normalcy of a return to civilian life.

That, however, was not to be. His draft board had other ideas. His work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard had preserved him from being called up as long as he was doing the work. Now he wasn’t doing it any more. He was quickly promoted to become classified 1A in the Selective Service’s eyes, and shortly thereafter promoted again, now becoming Asimov, Pvt Isaac.

This was not a development Isaac had sought. Worse, it soon became a development he couldn’t live with at all, because the Army had a plan for him. With his education and his record of writing about the future, he was a natural to be selected as an observer at some upcoming military tests.

They were not tests Isaac wanted to observe. Indeed, he saw nothing but trouble, bad trouble, if that scenario was followed.

The USA had invented the atomic bomb and used it to speed the end of the war. Now it wanted to set off test bombs under experimental conditions, several of the things, so it could learn as quickly as possible just how to use this ultimate weapon. The higher-ups had scheduled several such tests, far off in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the plan was that formations of GIs would be present at every firing — to observe and protect, they said, but the suspicious-minded wondered if the tests were also likely to provide useful information about the effects of radiation on healthy young men.

There was also a political problem. The Soviet Union, America’s most potent wartime ally, had with the peace become its deadliest rival. The papers were filling up with lurid stories about Soviet spies lurking everywhere, trying to steal America’s secrets — trying hardest to learn everything that could be learned about the atom bomb and how to make one of their own. And, Private Asimov, in what country did you say you were born?

Private Asimov pointed out that he had warned of this problem to every authority figure he could find who would listen. It took a while before he could find one who was willing to do that, and by then he was well on his way to the test site. But then things improved. Isaac not only was taken off the A-bomb detail, his draft status was reviewed and he was a civilian again.

There was one bad feature. They insisted on flying him back to the States. But Isaac put up with that, confident that if he survived that ordeal he would never have to get in a plane again.

 
Since, being Jewish, Isaac was not going to be allowed to attend any decent medical school, he had no hope of ever putting the letters M.D. after his name. Next best, he thought, would be a Ph.D., and the discipline that he wanted to get the award in, he decided, was organic chemistry. And while he was working toward that goal there was one other accomplishment he wanted to achieve. He wanted to get married, because Isaac had a girl.

Her name was Gertrude Blugerman. If you picked out the letters D-E-A-R-E-S-T on your telephone keypad in those years she was the person (assuming you were dialing in New York City) who would answer.

I think that tells you an important fact about Isaac right there. Oh, of course it was only dumb luck that gave Isaac’s girl an endearing phone number. That sort of pure chance could have happened to anyone. But if it had happened to almost any other young man, it is likely that neither he nor the girl would ever have known. It takes a certain kind of mind to ring up changes on all the numbers and phrases and facts that come one’s way — the kind of mind that Isaac Asimov was born with, and that made him the writer he was.

All this time, of course, Isaac was writing science fiction, mostly for John Campbell but now and then for others. He had already established the two main currents in his fiction: The positronic robot stories (Why were they positronic? I asked him that once and he said, “Because the positron had just been added to the list of particles and no one knew what it could and couldn’t do.”) and the Foundation series.

So what else can I tell you about Isaac Asimov at this stage? His favorite breakfast was a can of Campbell’s vegetable-beef soup. As far as his general dietary choices were concerned, his family didn’t keep kosher but were not very adventurous in diet. But Isaac liked to try new things when he and I ate out together. Not all experiments were successes, When the two of us lunched one day and discovered the restaurant was offering soft-shell crabs, which neither of us had ever tried, we gave them a shot. Once was enough for me — I didn’t like their slippery feel in my mouth — but Isaac’s verdict was that he didn’t really like them but might give them another chance some time.

(More parts to come, as I write them.)

I’ve been thinking about a little girl I heard of — I’ll call her Susan, because that wasn’t her name. Susan’s mother was HIV positive two years ago, when Susan was born. There is a treatment for children being born of HIV-positive mothers and it works well, but for religious reasons Susan’s mother wouldn’t allow the doctors to treat Susan. So Susan died of AIDS at the age of two.

The game is that you and I pretend that we’re the U.S Senate and we’re writing a law about Susan and her mother. Do we conclude that Susan’s mother has committed a crime? And, if so, what is the crime, and what is the punishment?

Leave your comments here.

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, from left, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.

The Asimov store and apartment were just off one corner of the immense Prospect Park, on Windsor Place. I lived, with my mother, on the opposite corner, on St. John’s Place near where Eastern Parkway runs into Grand Army Plaza. It was a neat neighborhood to live in, with not only the Park but the fine Brooklyn Museum just across the street. I spent a lot of time roaming the park, which is a beauty, sometimes with Cyril Kornbluth or some other Futurian, more often alone.

Sometimes I would find myself at Isaac’s end of the park, and if the hour was respectable (as sometimes it wasn’t, since several of us Futurians had devil-may-care attitudes about sleep, and in those years Prospect Park was never closed), we might walk the extra block or two to drop in on Isaac. (Two notes here in the interests of full disclosure. I did also have some thoughts of the free malted that Mrs. Asimov was likely to offer me. And I did sometimes suspect that Cyril’s interest involved Marcia, Isaac’s sister. But maybe I was wrong about that. I don’t think anything came of it.)

As his brother, Stanley, began to mature into the role of full participant of candy-store chores, Isaac’s responsibilities began to ease a little. That was a good thing, since he had a busy life. In addition to his interest in science fiction, he had taken on another challenge. His father had given him a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was a gift that might have perplexed some teenagers, but not Isaac. He knew what books were for, so he picked up Volume 1, turned to the beginning of the A’s and began to read. He told me it was his intention to read all the way to the end of the Z’s, but whether he made it all the way, I don’t know.

    Isaac Asimov, 1940.

Isaac and I were pretty much of the same age. (We couldn’t be sure just how close, because neither of his parents was sure when his birthday was — sometime in the fall to mid-winter of 1919–1920, while mine was November 26th.) When we were both seventeen, we both made a major change in our educational status. Isaac graduated from high school and began college (and kept on with schooling until he reached the Ph.D. — one of the only two Futurians to get that far, the other being Jack Robins). While I quit school entirely and never went back.

Around about then, both Isaac and I formed the habit of visiting science-fiction editors in their offices. Isaac concentrated on a single one, John Campbell, who had recently replaced F. Orlin Tremaine as editor of Astounding.

What Isaac did was write an actual story, leave it with Campbell and come back a month later to get the rejected manuscript (which he then mailed off to Amazing Stories, who bought it right away), along with a thirty-minute lecture on what Isaac did wrong and what he should have done right. So Isaac wrote a second story, trying to do it as Campbell had described. That got the same treatment; bounce with lecture from Campbell, acceptance by Amazing. And the third story was the charm. It was accepted by Campbell, as were scores of others over the next decades.

While I had followed a different course entirely, visiting nearly all the sf magazine editors there were — now a couple of dozen, as science fiction was having an unexpected boom. Nominally I was an agent offering them stories by my clients. I don’t think I made any actual sales, but when I confided to one of the new editors, a kind man named Robert Erisman, that I, too, would like to be an editor, he pointed me in the direction of Harry Steeger’s pulp chain Popular Publications, currently in the process of adding a number of new titles to their list.

I went there and offered my services to Steeger. Wonderfully, he took me on, allowing me to create two new science-fiction magazines, and suddenly Isaac had a new fallback market for the stories John Campbell didn’t want, and I had a prolific contributor.

 
That was quite a happy time for both of us, but what then came along was World War II.

That affected more people than just the two of us. Campbell suddenly discovered that editing the best science-fiction magazine in the world was no longer enough to satisfy him. Through friends, he found out that the Navy was willing to set up a small research facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to take on problems that the established teams weren’t handling, and set himself to help the war effort by recruiting people to staff it. Robert A. Heinlein was an easy choice: former Annapolis man himself, invalided out as a j.g. and desperate to get back into uniform. L. Sprague de Camp because he, too, couldn’t pass the physical for actual combat. Isaac was a natural. And there was also a good-looking female lieutenant better known by the name she acquired a few years later, Ginny Heinlein.

I’m not sure the team ever made much progress in their researches, but they did give it the old Navy try. Especially Isaac, who was yearning to find some kind of high-tech career to follow, since he had learned he was never going to be a doctor. No medical school would accept him, because there was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement to limit the number of Jewish doctors threatening to convert the whole practice of medicine into a Jewish specialty. So quotas had been established, and they were all filled.

 
(Many more parts to come.)

 
Related post:

• Isaac

Bufo cognatus

The blog team asked me to explain my reference to the “damon knight Toad Theory.” (That’s the way he used to write his name, all lowercase, changing to the conventional capitalized form when he got his first editorial job.)

Damon’s theory was that all current sf writers had been toads when they were young. By “toads,” he meant that in their childhoods they didn’t mingle well with neighborhood kids and spent a lot of time by themselves, often reading.

Actually, I thought he had something there. I was a classic case myself; every time my mother sent me to school, I got sick — scarlet fever, various other UCDs — so she kept me out until the fourth grade, bamboozling the truant officer that she was home-schooling me, and we moved a lot. And I believe a fair clutch of other writers had similar stories.

 
Related post:
Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!

Today, Frederik Pohl completes his 90th trip around the Sun.

His wife and 18 of the best sf writers alive planned to celebrate by presenting him with a festschrift book containing stories and personal reminiscences on his birthday, but health problems interfered (not so much his as Betty Anne’s, the editor’s, who fell and cracked a caudal vertebra, requiring surgery, and then needed more surgery for an unrelated complaint, with longish recovery times for each), and pub date has been delayed till June 2010.

But Happy Birthday, anyway!

“Homo artificialis” as conceived by Joseph H. Kraus & H. Winfeld Secor in 1924, from Hugo Gernsback’s Science and Invention Magazine. (Via davidszondy.com)

So I was feeling pretty good, this day a few weeks ago, and I thought it was about time that I got back to the three-times-a-week cardiovascular exercise group I’d been faithfully working out with since around the year 2001. That is going on nine years. It is also, I believe, the principal reason I’m still alive now. Of course, since I’ve been pretty much housebound for most of this year with one confounded thing after another, I couldn’t get there. So I had to start all over again like a rookie.

I made an appointment and got over to the place and had a nice talk with Rose, who is now the head rehab nurse. All went well. We settled on when, where and what, exactly, I would be doing, and then Rose took my vital signs. And then it all fell apart. My heart rate was 41.

This is not a pulse that is compatible with staying alive for very long. So Rose called Adrian Deme, my new primary-care doctor. He told her to get me to an ER for evaluation. And next thing you know, I was in a hospital bed getting ready for a pacemaker.

 
Actually it wasn’t quite that fast. There were a few little annoyances they had to track down and fix first, but then it was straightforward. A pacemaker implant requires cutting a little hidey-hole into the flesh of your chest just under the collarbone, tucking the little electroshock-emitting gadget in there, with its powerful little battery. Then they run a wire from the gadget to your heart. The wire ends in something like a tiny ordinary wood screw, which the surgeon screws into the flesh of your heart with something like a tiny screwdriver. Since he can’t see through the meat and blood he has to operate this by x-ray. Then, when he gets it well screwed, he closes you up and you’re done.

Before you get to that point, though, they wheel you into the operating room, which you are not overjoyed to discover is really chilly. They keep it that way to discourage germs, and they won’t let you put on a sweater, Then the nurse spreads some soap on your bare chest and scrubs it vigorously. When she gets it the cleanest it has ever been, she spreads a fresh batch of soap on your chest and repeats the process. She does this three times. Then the surgeon steps up and starts to cut.

Were you thinking that might hurt? It doesn’t. You don’t feel any pain. At some time when you weren’t looking the anesthesiologist has put that whole area of your chest to sleep. You do feel that there is somebody doing all kinds of unexpected things down there, and you aren’t at all sure that you care for it. But then that stops and you’re on your way back to your hospital bed, all done.

And the next morning they send you home.

Photo by Josef Stuefer (Flickr)

See, I’ve got this novel that I owe my publisher and it’s way, WAY overdue. Its composition was repeatedly interrupted, first by Arthur Clarke inviting me to write The Last Theorem with him and then by some of those pesky almost-90-now health problems. I’m back on it now and the end is (almost) in sight, and I’ve even been able to write some new stuff for this blog. Including a couple of what, I hope, will be regular features.

One will be next. It comes about because I once thought that, having worn all the hats at one time or another, I might like to write a how-to-be-a-writer book. I never did it, partly because I think there are too many of them around already, but I have over the years sometimes thought of things I would like to say in it. So next will be the first installment of Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom.