Айзек Азимов: Before The Golden Age

TO MANY science fiction readers who are now in their middle years, there was a Golden Age of Science Fiction—in capital letters.

That Golden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart’s desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire.

In that sense, the Golden Age endured till 1950, when other magazines, such as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, entered the field. The editorial personalities of H. L. Gold and Anthony Boucher were as strong in their ways as Campbell’s, so the field grew wider and more diverse. In many ways, it improved still further as it spilled out of the magazines and into the books, the paperbacks, and the electronic media.

But then the individual could no longer comprehend the field entire. It grew too large for one to do more than sample, and the Golden Age, when all of science fiction could belong to the reader, was over.

I lived through the Golden Age in the best possible way, for I was among the first of the new writers Campbell discovered, and I am sure there was no other in whom he took so personal and paternal an interest. My book The Early Asimov (Doubleday, 1972) is both my memorial to those years and my tribute to John.

But let us forget the capital-letter Golden Age, and let us be more personal. To anyone who has lived a life that has not been utterly disastrous, there is an iridescent aura permeating its second decade. Memories of the first decade, extending back to before the age of ten, are dim, uncertain, and incomplete. Beginning with the third decade, after twenty, life becomes filled with adult responsibility and turns to lead. But that second decade, from ten to twenty, is gold; it is in those years that we remember bliss.

It is the second decade that is the golden age for each individual; it is the memory of life as it was then, that we consider to be life as it ought to be. For any science fiction reader, the gold of the second decade of his life permeates the stories he read at that time, so I frequently hear enthusiasts of thirty speak of “the golden age of the 1950s.” If I live out my normal lifetime, I fully expect to hear some rotten kid talk to me of “the golden age of the 1970s.” (I will rise from my wheel chair and hit him with my cane.)

Well, then, what about me? My own golden age (small letters) lay in the 1930s. It came in the decade just before the Golden Age (capital letters), and it had a glory for me—and a glory for everyone, for it was in my golden age that the personalities that molded the Golden Age, including Campbell himself, were themselves molded.

The science fiction stories I read in the 1930s were in magazines I could not keep. I took each magazine, as it arrived, from my father’s newsstand and then, having read it as quickly as I could, I returned it to my father’s newsstand so that it might be sold. I cultivated a light hand, which left the magazine in its pristine crispness even though I had read, rabidly, every word on every page. (I had to, for if the magazine suffered, my father would have issued a ukase forbidding me to touch any of them, and I don’t know about you, but my father expected, and got, instant obedience.)

So I never reread those science fiction stories of my personal golden age after that first reading. Oh, a very few of them, yes, when they were reprinted. However, very few stories published before the Golden Age have been reprinted. The Coming of Campbell wiped out all that went before.

The science fiction of the thirties seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, and naive. The stories are old-fashioned and unsophisticated.

All right, grant that they are all those things. Nevertheless, there was a rough-hewn vigor about them that sophistication has, to some extent, lost us.

Besides, I remember them. Some of them, although I read them only once at a very early age, I remember over a space of forty years. Through all that has happened and all that I have read and, for that matter, written, I remember them—and love them still.

Those stories were dear to me because they roused my enthusiasm, gave me the joy of life at a time and in a place and under conditions when not terribly many joys existed. They helped shape me and even educate me, and I am filled with gratitude to those stories and to the men who wrote them.

And aside from my personal involvement, the stories form an essential part of the history of science fiction, a part that has been unfairly neglected and is in danger of being forgotten altogether, since virtually no important anthologies have dealt with pre-1938 science fiction.

You would have thought that a person of my incredible ingenuity would have conceived years ago the notion of repairing this omission and editing an anthology of the great stories of the 1930s. Oddly enough, that is not so. Never once, in my conscious moments, did so obvious a project occur to me.

Fortunately, I am not always conscious.

On the morning of April 3, 1973, I woke and said to my good lady, “Hey, I remember a dream I had.” (I virtually never remember my dreams, so this came under the heading of a stop-the-presses bulletin.)

My good lady is professionally interested in dreams, so she said, “What was it?”

“I dreamed,” I said, “I had prepared an anthology of all those good old stories I read when I was a kid and I was getting a chance to read them again. There was ‘Tumithak of the Corridors’ and ‘Awlo of Ulm’ and The World of the-’”

I think that’s about as far as I got. I had been chuckling as I talked about the dream, because it seemed like such a ridiculous thing to do. But was it ridiculous?

Simply talking about it filled me, quite suddenly, with a burning urge to do it. I’ve had those burning urges before, and I know it means I will have to do it at once regardless of any commitments I may have. But who would publish such a thing? —A ridiculous question. After all, in a quarter century of association, the good people at Doubleday & Company, Inc., had never once said “No” to me.

It was at 7 a.m. that I told my dream, and I had to wait for the opening of the business day to do something about it. At 9:05 a.m. (I gave them five minutes’ grace) I was on the phone, talking rapidly and earnestly to Lawrence P. Ashmead and to Michele Tempesta, two splendid editorial representatives of that estimable publishing house. They did not say “No” to me.

I then thought about it some more. As I told you, I did not have those old magazines, and it is most difficult to get copies these days. Difficult, but not impossible.

There was always my old friend Sam Moskowitz, who shared my golden age but bought and kept every magazine that was published, memorized them all, and can quote them all word by word at any time of day or night.

He has put his knowledge and expertise to good use by becoming a historian of science fiction, perhaps the only true specialist in this unusual section of human knowledge in the whole world. He has written two volumes of biographies of great science fiction writers, Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow. (One of these biographies dealt with none other than your un-humble servant, Isaac Asimov. Sam, never one to skimp on hyperbole, called that one Genius in a Candy Store.”)

He also produced Science Fiction by Gaslight, a history and anthology of science fiction in the popular magazines of the period from 1891 to 1911, and Under the Moons of Mars, a history and anthology of science fiction in the Munsey magazines from 1912 to 1929.