Ben Bova - Foundation’s Friends

Mind you, I am only talking length of professional life here; I am not talking quality. Anyone work of these gentlemen- David Copperfield, The Count of Monte Cristo, or Hamlet is worth innumerable times my entire oeuvre. I know that, so don’t bother writing to inform me of this matter.

Rather, I am merely telling you this in order to explain how grateful I am that I have been allowed a full fifty years at my profession-and still going. Nothing I write can be within light-years of Shakespeare, but this I will maintain as loudly as I can, and to my dying day. Everything I write has given me as much pleasure as anything Shakespeare wrote could have given him, so is not length of professional life something to be grateful for?

3. Fifty years as a science fiction writer. But it’s not just fifty years of professional life, either. It’s this particular professional life. Just think what the last fifty years has meant to a science fiction writer. When I began writing, robots were pure fantasy. So I wrote robot stories freely out of my own imagination. The first one was written in June 1939. I have lived long enough to see robots (in very simple form) become real, and to have my Three Laws of Robotics taken seriously.

Flights to the moon were sheer fantasy in 1939, and my first story in Astounding dealt with attempted rocketry to the moon. I lived to see that become real.

Think of other science fictional standbys that have become real (even if I didn’t particularly write about them myself). There were no computers in 1939, and no television either, though both existed in science fiction. Science was also overflowing with ray-guns, and we have lived to see laser beams.

How fortunate I was to have started when I did and to have lived as long as I have.

—But it all comes full circle. More important than anything else are one’s friends. Foundation’s friends are all my friends, whether they have written for the book, or published it, or bought it or borrowed it. My friends are all those who have read my stuff over the last half-century and have enjoyed it.

I thank you all. I cannot thank you enough.