Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

I don’t know how it is with other prodigies, for I have never gone into the subject. Perhaps many of them have had a sense of unhappiness, of isolation, of drudgery, and may have wanted to be like other people.

Not so in my case, however. I enjoyed every minute of my prodigiousness, because, nasty little devil that I was, I enjoyed knowing more than the other kids and being far quicker on the uptake.

Of course, it had its difficulties. By the time I entered the fourth grade, I was a year and a half younger than anyone else in the class, and small for my age at that. And since I was still the smartest kid in the class and very self-appreciative about it, there were many of my schoolmates who lusted for my life. I found, however, that if I picked out the biggest and dumbest kid in the class and did his homework for him, he constituted himself my protector.

Another point that may have helped save my life was that I was never a teacher’s pet. Never! I was a loudmouthed extrovert then, as I am now, and I could never resist the chance of upsetting the class with a funny remark. I was forever being disciplined, and when that was insufficient I was sent to the principal’s office. (Believe it or not, I was evicted from class as a disruptive influence even as late as my college days.) So, of course, the other kids decided that anyone as badly behaved as I couldn’t be all bad, and they resisted the impulse to eradicate me.

During our first years in the United States, my father worked in a knitting factory for a while, and then tried his hand at being a door-to-door salesman. Finally, in 1926, in a search for some sort of security, he put what money he had been able to accumulate into a candy store that existed on Sutter Avenue (good Heavens, I’ve forgotten the street number), right around the corner from our apartment.

A candy store is a good thing in some ways. You work for yourself and the work is steady. The profits are small but they’re there, and we went through the entire period of the Great Depression without missing a meal and without ever having to spend one moment’s anxiety that my father might lose his job and that we might all be on the bread lines. To those of you who know nothing of the Great Depression firsthand, let me assure you as earnestly as I can that we were very lucky.

On the other hand, a candy store is a rotten thing in some ways. Back before World War II, candy stores stayed open from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. seven days a week, with no holidays. It meant that from the age of six I never had any but an occasional, fugitive hour of leisure with either parent. Furthermore, a candy store can be operated only by an entire family, which meant that I had to pitch in. Each year, I did a larger share of the chores.

The work wasn’t hard, but it kept me behind the counter for much of my spare time, dishing out candy and cigarettes, making change, delivering papers, running a block and a half to call someone to the telephone, and so on. It kept me from the gay social life of my peers, eliminating punchball and ring-a-levio and many other things of the sort.

Not entirely, of course. In those days (and maybe in ours, too, for all I know) there were “seasons.” One day, everyone was playing complicated games with marbles. The next day, all the marbles had disappeared and everyone was out with tops, or checkers (with which to play a marvelous game called “skelly”). I could play all the games with moderate ability, but I was considerably hampered by the fact that I was under strict instructions not to play “for keeps,” because my father disapproved of gambling and it was difficult to get other kids to play me “for fun.” (“There’s no fun in playing for fun,” they would say.)

Life was not all work, of course. There was a movie immediately across the street from the candy store. Every Saturday afternoon, my mother gave me a dime and supervised my crossing of the street. For that dime I saw two (silent) movies, a comedy, a cartoon, and, best of all, “an episode,” which is what we called the movie serials of those days.

Then, too, I read a good deal. We had no books in the house (they were one of the very many luxuries we could not afford), but my father wangled a library card for me before I was seven. My very first taste of independence was that of going to the library alone by bus in order to pick out books.

I could go to the library only at certain times, however, and I could take out only two books at a time when I did go, and I generally finished them both before it was time to go to the library again, no matter how slowly I tried to make myself read. As a result, I constantly felt myself gravitating toward the magazine rack in my father’s candy store. It was filled with apparently fascinating reading material.

Along a string stretched across the window, there were draped a dozen paper-backed novels featuring Frank Merriwell and Nick Carter, which I yearned for. There were other paper-backed objects with pictures on the cover, which I learned were called magazines, and some were particularly fascinating; there were pictures of people shooting other people with guns, and that looked great. There were even magazines with names like Paris Nights, whose purpose I didn’t quite understand but with color illustrations that roused the most intense curiosity in me.

But, standing in the way of all this was my father. He simply would not let me read any of the magazines he sold, for he considered every one of them cheap and sensational trash that would only blunt and ruin my razor-sharp mind. I disagreed, of course, but my father was a remarkably stubborn man and he still had the European notion that Papa was boss.

My fate, however, all unknown to me, was approaching.

In the spring of 1926, the first magazine ever to be devoted to science fiction exclusively was placed on the newsstands for sale. It was entitled Amazing Stories, the first issue was dated April, and the publisher was Hugo Gernsback.

To fill the magazine, Gernsback was at first compelled to make heavy use of reprints of the works of European writers. It wasn’t till the August 1928 issue that a new world really opened. In that issue there appeared the first installment of a three-part serial entitled The Skylark of Space, by Edward E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby.

As literature, it was a total flop (may the shade of good old Doc Smith forgive me!), but it had something more than good writing, much more. It had adventure of an unprecedented kind. There was the first introduction of interstellar travel. There were mind-boggling distances and encounters; a kind of never-slowing action centered about indestructible heroes.

The readers whom Amazing Stories had been attracting went wild. It became the first great “classic” of American magazine science fiction, and it was the forerunner of native American science fiction, which ever since has dominated world literature in that field.

But, alas, The Skylark of Space came and went and I knew nothing of it. I don’t even recall seeing Amazing Stories on my father’s newsstand during the years 1926 to 1928. I must have, but no trace of it is left in my memory.

Yet 1928, the year of The Skylark of Space, was notable for me in a number of ways.

For one thing, I briefly made the acquaintance of a remarkable youngster, who influenced me far more strongly than I could possibly have realized at the time.

He was roughly my age, rather smaller than I was, and rather darker in complexion. Somehow I discovered he had the ability to tell stories that held me enthralled, and he discovered simultaneously that I was an audience most willing to be enthralled.

For some months, we sought each other out so that we could play the roles of storyteller and audience. He would rattle on eagerly while we walked to the library and back, or when we just sat on someone’s front steps.