Isaac Asimov: The Early Asimov. Volume 3

My career was to be chemistry. All the time I was writing and selling stories, I was also slaving away at Columbia. Once I earned my Ph.D., I intended to make my living by doing chemical research for some large industry at some munificent salary such as a hundred dollars a week. (As the son of a candy-store keeper, brought up in the depression, I suffered dizzy spells if I tried to think of more than a hundred dollars a week, so I confined my ambitions to that.)

My Philadelphia job, to be sure, paid me only fifty dollars a week at the beginning, but a young couple could live on that, those days, with taxes very small, with an apartment costing $42.50 a month and dinner for two at a restaurant coming to two dollars (including tip).

It wasn't the height of my dreams, but it was only a temporary war job, after all. Once the war was over, I would go back to my research and get my Ph.D. and a better job. Meanwhile, even a salary of $2,600 a year seemed to make it unnecessary for me to write. By my marriage day, I had written forty-two stories, of which twenty-eight had been sold (and three more were yet to sell). My total bachelor earnings over a space of four years had been $1,788.50 for those twenty-eight stories. This amounted to an average earning of just under $8.60 per week or $64 per story.

I never dreamed at that time that I could ever do much better. I had no intention of ever writing anything but science fiction or fantasy for the pulp magazines, which paid one cent a word at most - a cent and a quarter with bonus.

To make even the feeble fifty dollars a week that my job paid me would make it necessary for me to write and sell some forty stories a year, and, at that time, that didn't seem conceivable to me.

It had been all right to labor at the typewriter to pay my way through school, when I had no other source of income, but for what purpose ought I to be writing now? And with a six-day, fifty-four hour week, and the excitement of a new marriage, who had time?

The very existence of science fiction seemed to fade. I had left my magazine collection in New York; I no longer saw Campbell regularly, or Pohl, or any of my science fiction cronies. I scarcely even read the current magazines as they came out.

I might have let science fiction die altogether, and my writing career with it, except that there were little reminders from the outside world, and little itchings inside me that meant (though-I didn't know it at the time) that writing was a great deal more to me than just a handy device to make a little spare cash.

I had hardly begun to work at the N.A.E.S., for instance, when the June 1942 issue of Astounding came out with my story 'Bridle and Saddle.' And it made the cover.

It was quite beyond my power to resist the temptation to take a copy to work and show it around. I couldn't help but feel the status I gained as a 'writer.' Later that summer and fall, three other stories were published: 'Victory Unintentional' and 'The Imaginary' in the post-Pohl Super Science Stories and 'The Hazing' in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Each kept the science fiction world alive for me.

And although my New York coterie of science fiction editors, writers and readers were gone, I was left not entirely bereft.

Working with me at the N.A.E.S. were Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp, and I kept up a close social relationship with both. To be sure, each had quit writing for the duration but they were far more successful writers than I was and I hero-worshipped them. In addition, John D. Clark, who was an ardent science fiction fan and who had written and published a couple of stories in 1937, was living in Philadelphia at the time and we frequently saw one another. All three kept the science fiction atmosphere about me.

It was on January 5, 1943, though, that the real trigger came. On that day I received a letter from Fred Pohl to the effect that he was planning to rewrite 'Legal Rites' and was going to try to sell it again. That was exciting. He wasn't to succeed in selling the story for six more years, but of course I had no way of telling that. To me it seemed that another sale was in the offing and that I was an as-yet-active writer.

Besides, 'Legal Rites' was a fantasy and I had never yet satisfied that long-standing desire to write and sell a fantasy to Unknown. Five times I had tried, and five times I had failed.

On January 13, quite suddenly, a week after the letter had come and fourteen months after my last-written story, the urge overwhelmed me. I sat down to write a fantasy called 'Author! Author!'

Quickly I found there was something lacking. It was the first time I had ever tried to write something for Campbell without conferences with him. I missed the inspiration that invariably came through talks with him; I missed his encouragement. In fact, I wasn't sure that I could write at all without him. So the story limped and there were dry spells. I didn't finish the first draft till March 5, and the final version wasn't ready for mailing till April 4, 1943.

It had taken me nearly three months to write the story. To be sure, it was twelve thousand words long, but 'Bridle and Saddle,' which was half again as long, had taken me only three weeks.

Perhaps if 'Author! Author!' had been rejected, it might have been a long time before I would have had the courage to try again. Fortunately, that was never put to the test. I mailed the story to Campbell on April 6, 1943 (the first time I ever mailed him a story instead of handing it to him), and on the twelfth the check of acceptance arrived. There was not even a revision requested, and what's more, Campbell paid me a bonus for the first time since 'Nightfall.' I received one and a quarter cents a word, or $ 150 in all. My sixth try at Unknown had succeeded.

It was the equivalent of three weeks' pay at the N.A.E.S. for something that had taken me, off and on, three months. However, the three months' work on 'Author! Author!' had been of a totally different kind than the three weeks' work at the N.A.E.S. would have been, and the receipt of the $150 check was infinitely more exciting than picking up a similar check, or even a larger.one, earned in the course of a punch-the-time-clock job. (Yes, indeed, I punched a time clock at the N.A.E.S.)

As it happened though, the happy excitement with which I greeted the sale was premature. I had scaled the heights of Unknown too late, and though I had the money, I didn't have the magazine. Robert Heinlein brought me the sad news on August 2, less than four months after the sale.

Unknown had been having a difficult time of it. Sales weren't high enough, and after its first two years of operation it had had to switch from monthly to bimonthly issues. Now the war had introduced a paper shortage and Street amp; Smith Publications decided to save what paper it could receive for the more successful Astounding and let Unknown go.

At the time I made my sale, there were only three more issues of Unknown fated to be issued and there was no room in any of them for 'Author! Author!' The story remained in the vaults of Street amp; Smith indefinitely; a story sold, but not published; and the $150 check was deprived of most of its fun as a result.

There is, however, a happy ending. Twenty years later, Don Bensen of Pyramid Publications was publishing a paperback anthology of stories from Unknown, he asked me for an introduction. With glad nostalgia I complied, writing it on January 15, 1963, almost twenty years to the day after I had started writing the only story I ever sold to the magazine. In the course of the introduction, I referred to the sad story of my attempts to write for Unknown.