Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

The importance of it was just this: for the first time, I realized stories could be “made up.” Until then, I had naturally assumed that stories existed only in books and had probably been there unchanged, from the beginning of time, without human creators.

Of the tales my friend told me, I have only the dimmest of recollections. I seem to remember that they involved the adventures of a group of men who were forever facing and overcoming dangerous villains. The leader of the group, an expert in the use of all conceivable weapons, was named Dodo “Weapons” Windrows, and his lieutenant was one Jack Winslow.

Whether my friend actually made up the stories or retold me material he had read, with adaptations, I don’t know. At the time, I had no doubt whatever that he was inventing it as he went along. And looking back on it now, his enthusiasm seems to me to have been that of creation and not of adaptation.

Both of us were careful never to let anyone overhear us in our enjoyment of the process. My friend once explained that the other kids would “laugh at us.” I suppose he felt his stories weren’t first class and that while I seemed to appreciate them, others might not. Like any true artist, he did not care to expose himself needlessly to the possibility of adverse criticism.

As for myself, my chief fear was that my father would become aware of this. Instinctively, I was certain that my friend’s tales would come under the heading of “cheap literature” and that I would be forcibly rescued from their baneful influence. This I most earnestly did not want to happen, and, in so far as I recognized that my friend’s stories were akin in spirit to the tales to be found in sensational magazines, my hunger for those magazines sharpened.

Ah, well, it didn’t last long. The storytelling spree could not have gone on for more than a few months when my friend’s family moved away from the neighborhood and, of course, took my friend with them. He never returned; he never visited; he never wrote. I never knew where they had moved, and shortly my family moved, too. Contact was broken forever.

It seems to me now that my storytelling friend could not possibly have gotten the pleasure he clearly got out of telling stories that he (to all appearances) made up as he went along, without having tried to be a writer as he grew older. I know something about that particular compulsion, and I am certain he would have tried. And if he tried, it would seem to me that he must have succeeded.

And yet I remember his name and I am certain that there is no writer by that name. Can he have used a pseudonym? Is he dead? I don’t know; I wish I did.

On a less personal note, and for the sake of statistics, 1928 was also the year of our citizenship. My parents had completed their five-year residency requirement, and in September received their papers. As minor children, my sister and I were mentioned on my father’s citizenship papers and automatically became American citizens in consequence. (After I married and left home, I got citizenship papers of my own, dated 1943, so that I need not be forced to send my father to his safe-deposit box every time I needed proof of citizenship. To any future biographer who may find documentation of the 1943 citizenship, however, this is to inform him that I have been a citizen since 1928.)

The year ended with another change of residence. My father, having increased his savings, thanks to the candy store, felt it was time to sell it and buy another. Partly, I suppose, he felt he would welcome a change, and partly there was always the hope that another candy store would be more profitable.

In December 1928, therefore, we moved to 651 Essex Street, on the corner of New Lots Avenue. There the second candy store was located. I had to transfer from P.S. 182 to P.S. 202, something that involved another traumatic readjustment of friendships.

Then came the crucial summer of 1929, in which everything seemed to conspire to change the direction of my life. (It was the last summer of the Roaring Twenties, the last merry spark before the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, but no one knew that, of course.)

For one thing, it was a time of crisis for Amazing Stories. Though it had been doing well, there were business machinations of a kind that go beyond the capacity for understanding of my essentially simple mind (Sam Moskowitz knows the story in detail), and Gernsback was forced out of ownership of the magazine.

The last issue of what we can call the “Gernsback Amazing” was the June 1929 issue, I believe. (I may be wrong by one or two months here.) It had gone thirty-nine issues. The magazine was taken over by Teck Publications, so with the July 1929 issue we can speak of the “Teck Amazing.”

Gernsback, a man of considerable resource, had no intention of leaving the magazine field or, for that matter, of abandoning science fiction. Without missing a step, he founded another science fiction magazine, which was thereafter to compete with Amazing Stories and was to double the supply of reading matter for the science fiction public. Gernsback’s new magazine was called Science Wonder Stories, and its first issue was dated June 1929.

Gernsback went further indeed and started a companion magazine called Air Wonder Stories, which began with the July 1929 issue. The supply of science fiction was thus tripled, and the existence of these new magazines was to prove of crucial importance to me.

The June in which those two new magazines were both on the stands for the first time, I was completing my stay in the fifth grade. The teacher of the course had offered to take a selected group in the class on a post-term trip to the Statue of Liberty. I did not qualify, since my marks in “Deportment” did not meet the minimum standards. I looked so stricken, however, that the teacher (presumably recalling that I was the brightest student in the class) asked the class permission to include me. The nice kids gave it and I went.

The trip was on July 2, 1929. I remember because I was nine and a half years old that day. It was exciting in itself, but the most remarkable thing about it was that for the first time in my life I had gone a considerable distance without my parents. The fact that the teacher was along didn’t count. She did not have parental authority. It gave me an extraordinary feeling of having reached manhood.

The third event of the period was the fact that my mother had entered a third pregnancy (this one, I have reason to believe, unplanned) and, in July, was nearing term. It meant she couldn’t help much in the store, and my poor father with only a nine-year-old assistant was terribly harried.

Now observe the concatenation of events.

Not long after my trip to the Statue of Liberty, I noted the new magazine Science Wonder Stories on the newsstand. It was the August 1929 issue, the third of its existence. I noticed it, first, because it had a cover by Frank R. Paul, the artist Gernsback always used, a man who painted in primary colors exclusively, I think, and who specialized in complex, futuristic machines.

But I also noticed it because it was a new magazine and my eye hadn’t grown dulled to it. Finally, I noticed it because of the word “Science” in the title. That made all the difference. I knew about science; I had already read books about science. I was perfectly aware that science was considered a mentally nourishing and spiritually wholesome study. What’s more, I knew that my father thought so from our occasional talks about my schoolwork.

Well, then, the loss of my storytelling friend had left a gnawing vacancy within me; my trip to the Statue of Liberty filled me with a desire to assert my independence and argue with my father; and the word “science” gave me the necessary leverage.