"Yes."
"How many?"
"Sixty-nine in the first act. Sixty in the second . . ."
"That runs five minutes shorter," he interposed quickly.
"Twenty-six in the last act. Total: a hundred and fifty-five."
"Not bad. Not bad at all, but you never know. My club act has forty-five minutes of unrelenting jokes. Some nights some jokes get the laughs, other nights, others. You can never tell about laughs. The phenomenon of getting and losing laughs can't be understood. It's a delicate chemistry."
The stage manager called "Places, please."
"You know, I didn't prepare for this show," Woody said: "Not one jot. And I haven't taped my club act at all, outside of failing with women and psychoanalysis and being short."
He jogged to his position onstage in his tatty sweater, chinos and sneakers, his raggedy red hair disheveled, and sat down to watch the TV presentation of a Bogart film that opens the show: The curtain went up with a creak, and the world's most successful loser was on.
The name of this game is Masochism For Fun and Profit.
Holiday, May 1969
Isaac Asimov
There's no doubt that Isaac Asimov is the finest popular science writer working today, and in my opinion Ike is the finest who has ever written; prolific, encyclopedic, witty, a gift for colorful and illuminating examples and explanations. What makes him unique is the fact that he's a bonafide scientist—associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine—and scientists are often rotten writers. Read the novels of C. P. Snow and the short stories of Bertrand Russell if you want proof. But our scientist professor, Asimov, is not only a great popular science author but an eminent science fiction author as well. He comes close to the ideal of the Renaissance Man.
His latest (120th) book, Asimov's Guide to Science (Basic Books), is a must for science-oriented and/or science-terrified readers. Many people have the frightened feeling, "What are they up to now?" Asimov tells us with clarity, charm, with calm. His new Guide will fascinate the layman, and if the layman gives it to his kids to read they may very well wind up on university faculties with tenure. Ike makes everyone want to turn into a scientist.
Asimov's Guide to Science is the new and third edition of The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, first published in 1960 by Basic Books. Asked why the change in title, he said, "Well, there's a whole slew of Asimov's Guides and Asimov's Treasuries, so we decided to go along with it. I presume the fourth edition will be Asimov's New Guide to Science. What the fifth will be, I don't know."
The encyclopedia has been revised and updated, of course. Much has happened since the 1960s. Asked about his changes, Ike rattled off, "Pulsars, black holes, the surface of Mars, landings on the moon. Then there's seafloor spreading and the shifting of continents, which I dismissed with a sneer in the first edition. You see, at the time of the first edition the space satellites were just being flown and hadn't done their research yet. I thought the earth's crust was too solid and hard for the continents to drift. I was wrong. Now we know that the continents aren't floating; they're being pushed apart by the upflow of magma from the seafloor. Then I've covered quarks and—"
"Wait a minute. What are quarks?"
"They're hypothetical particles which may make up all the subatomic particles, but first we have to isolate one. In other words, you can think that ten dimes make a dollar, but you have to take a dollar apart first and find a dime." This is the Asimov style.
He also discusses why enough neutrinos have not yet been detected coming from the sun, the biological clocks in animals, tachyons—a fascinating hypothesis about subatomic particles which travel faster than the speed of light—and cloning.
"What's so special about clone cultures, Ike? They're simply families raised from a single individual. I raised many clone cultures from a single paramecium or amoeba when I was a biology student."
"No, no. Now we're talking about despecializing specialized cells. You can take an abdominal cell from a frog, fertilize it with an ovum and get a whole frog. There may come a time when they can cut off your little toe when you're born, fertilize it and end up with a whole race of Alfie Besters."
"What a horrible thought."
"Yes, but they wouldn't know it at the time."
He's a powerful man, 5'-9"—180 pounds, with thick hair going grey, steel-blue eyes, beautiful strong hands, and rather blunt features. He was born in Russia in 1920 and was brought to the States in 1923 by his family, which wasn't exactly well-to-do. Nevertheless he managed to put himself through Columbia University to his doctorate which he won for a thesis on enzyme chemistry.
He was married in 1942, has two kids, and is recently separated from his wife. He now lives in a comfortable suite in a residential hotel just off Central Park West. The living room is his workshop; jammed with shelves of reference texts, files and piles of scientific journals. He works from nine to five, seven days a week without a break.
"No, I'm lying. Sometimes I goof off on part of Sunday."
"Do you think at the typewriter, Ike?"
"Yes. I type at professional speed. Ninety words a minute."
"Great, but do you think at ninety words a minute?"
"Yes, I do. The two work together neatly."
He receives an enormous amount of mail from his fiction fans and his science fans, which he answers. Small boys ask him to settle disputes they're having with their science teachers. Asimov winces when he recalls a terrible boner which he perpetrated in the first edition of his Guide. A student got into an argument with his teacher over it and said, "Asimov is always right." Asimov was forced to write "Sometimes Isaac Asimov is a damned fool."
He gets a few crank letters. "One guy was mad because I wouldn't say that Nikola Tesla was the greatest scientist who lived. I've only had one anti-Semitic letter. This was a kook who thought I gave too much space to Einstein. He said Einstein was all wrong, and anyway he stole everything from a Gentile. Naturally I didn't bother to answer that."
He's rather amused by what he calls his steel-trap memory. "I have a tight grip on things in inverse proportion to their importance. The trouble is, I can't throw anything out. The day a friend mentioned an old song, 'The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,' and I sang it for him."
Damned if he didn't start singing it for me, miserably. "You see?" he grinned. "Another five brain cells wasted."
Publishers Weekly, 1973
Robert Heinlein
The one author who has raised science fiction from the gutter status of pulp space opera (still practiced by Hollywood) to the altitude of original and breathtaking concepts is Robert A. Heinlein. And there is no doubt that his latest novel, Time Enough For Love (Putnam), an enormous work covering the next 24 centuries, played on nine planets, with several hundred vivid characters, will evoke the same reaction that his 30-odd previous books have: a curious combination of admiration, awe, shock, hatred and fascination.
For Heinlein is a delightful paradox, and the contrasts of his character show in his splendid, challenging and sometimes infuriating writing. One thing is certain: Heinlein (the name is pronounced "Hineline" and he prefers being called Robert to Bob) will never bore you, in life or on the page.
The layman's image of the science fiction author is of a frail, skinny intellectual wearing huge spectacles and subscribing to publications like Space Symbiosis. Heinlein is a big, tough ex-Navy lieutenant (6'-170 lbs), a graduate of Annapolis and a guy you would hate to get into a fight with. The public also thinks of the science fiction author as a cold-blooded logician, a sort of walking computer. What, then, do you say to a hard-headed gunnery officer who is yet so warm, courteous and empathetic to the needs of others that he verges on the sentimental? He has a dry, hard voice; he is witty (but tells the worst jokes in the world), he knows his own mind and can never be deflected; he is a hard-hat patriot, which is why some members of the intellectual community accuse him of fascism.
But let him speak for himself, i
n his Navy way: "Born 7-7-07—which makes me very lucky at craps—in Butler, Missouri. The family moved to Kansas City when I was four and I was raised there. The family is German and homesteaded in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1756, but I'm more Irish than anything else. Some Cherokee Indian in the family, too, and a trace of African."
"How big a family, Robert?"
"I have three brothers and three sisters. I'm No. 3.1 had no older sister so I had the privilege of being an honorary sister, with the right to wash dishes. I went to Greenwood Grammar School, with Sally Rand, then Horace Mann and Kansas City Junior College."
"How did you end up at Annapolis? Were you queer for the sea like another Kansas boy I know, Rex Stout?"
"I got a political appointment. Our family was always in politics. I worked two years writing letters and applications and finally got the appointment through a Boss Pendergast man, Jim Reed. I would have taken West Point as readily, but the only opening was the Academy. I was always honored by Reed because I was the first of his appointees that ever graduated."
Heinlein graduated 20th in a class of six hundred from the Academy in 1929 and swears he would have been fifth if he hadn't acquired three "Black N Stars" which are demotions in rank for malefactions. "I got caught off-limits too many times when I was out chasing girls." He went to the carrier Lexington, shifted to destroyers as a gunnery officer, and was retired from the Navy when it was discovered that he was suffering from TB.
"So how did the science fiction start, Robert?"
"In '39 I started writing and I was hooked. I wrote everything I learned anywhere—Navy, Army—anywhere. My first science fiction story was 'Lifeline.' I saw an ad in Thrilling Wonder offering a prize of $50 for the best amateur story. But then I found out that Astounding was paying a cent a word, and my story ran to 7,000 words, so I submitted it to them and they bought it."
"You son of a bitch," the PW interviewer said between his teeth. "I won that Thrilling Wonder contest and you beat me by $20."
He burst out laughing. Then he continued, "I asked myself how long had this been going on? I kept on writing science fiction. I never served an apprenticeship. I never rewrote. Nobody ever told me. I still never rewrite."
"Then how do you work?"
"I write three or four months out of the year and then Ginny [his wife] and I take off and travel. Then I get the twitches and have to start writing again."
"How fast do you work?"
"Well the fastest was—I'll have to explain. When we were living in Colorado there was snowfall. Our cat—I'm a cat man—wanted to get out of the house so I opened a door for him but he wouldn't leave. Just kept on crying. He'd seen snow before and I couldn't understand it. I kept opening other doors for him and he still wouldn't leave. Then Ginny said, 'Oh, he's looking for a door into summer.' I threw up my hands, told her not to say another word, and wrote the novel The Door Into Summer in 13 days."
"What's your technique?"
"I start out with some characters and get them into trouble and when they get themselves out of trouble the story's over. By the time I can hear their voices they usually get themselves out of trouble."
"Robert, I have to bring up a very sensitive issue. You're often accused of being a hard-hat fascist in your writing, justifying and sympathizing with villainous hawk types."
"Alfie, have you ever seen a villain in any of my stories? I don't really believe in villains. No man is a villain unto himself. Once or twice I've used cardboard villains, but that's all. One thing runs all through my stories. I believe in freedom. I believe in a man's total responsibility for his own acts. I'm downright reactionary about that.
"Patriotism is a nice long polysyllabic abstract word of Latin derivation, which translates into Anglo-Saxon as Women and Children First. And every culture that has ever lasted is based on Women and Children First or it doesn't last very long. But there's no way to force patriotism on anyone. Passing a law will not create it, nor can we buy it by appropriating billions of dollars."
At this point he actually began to break down. PW could not endure the sight of a colleague on the verge of tears, so I changed the subject. "Forget it, Robert. It's the politicians who've given patriotism a bad name. Let's get back to science fiction. What's your definition of it?"
"Well, it's not prophecy, despite the endless list of things which have appeared in science fiction before they were physical realities. Nor is it fantasy, even though critics ignorant of science have trouble telling them apart. I'm not running down fantasy; I enjoy it and sometimes write it, but fantasy is not science fiction."
"Then what is science fiction?"
"Science fiction is realistic fiction. A serious science fiction writer must attempt to start with the real world and ask, 'What if—?' He must do it alone, then turn his scenario into a story that will entertain a reader—thousands of readers—or he has failed, no matter how logically he has extrapolated the present into the future."
"And how do you make sure that you don't fail?"
He grinned. "First you've got to pull 'em in off the sidewalk. Then you hang on to their lapels—don't let 'em get away—then pass 'em along from paragraph to paragraph and finish with music."
Publishers Weekly, 1973
Introduction to The Demolished Man: The Deleted Prologue
This section includes the original prologue to The Demolished Man, as published in Galaxy in 1952. It's a centuries-spanning recap of the events that led to the Esper society and the Esper League, the formation of the Reich—D'Courtney dynasties, and details about the conquest of space through the discovery of antigravity (Nulgee) and the provenance of the knife-pistol-knuckleduster that comes into deadly play in the novel.
Bester obviously loved this form of intense storytelling, for he used it again four years later in The Stars My Destination. Why then, does the latter novel retain the prologue, while the former had it stripped in 1953?
The answer lies in The Demolished Mans popularity. After its run as a serial in Galaxy, it was picked up by the small publishing house Shasta for a hardback reprint (which went on to win the first Hugo award for best SF novel in 1953). Paper shortages were common in post-WWII, and the cut was made as the book was assembled for printing. Shasta also apparently made Bester clean the novel up a bit—a careful reader will notice that Ben Reich's company is called Sacrament here, and not Monarch—and some small cuts were made. Future editions followed the Shasta edition, and the prologue was lost. Here it comes again, almost a half-century since its last appearance.
This section also includes Bester's illuminating essay, "Writing and the Demolished Man," published in 1972.
The Demolished Man: The Deleted Prologue
Rich and powerful, Ben Reich was a criminal who couldn't possibly fail in a society where telepaths made it unlikely for criminals to succeed!
On Sol Double-3 (for the Cosmic Eye sees Earth and her moon as a planetary binary) in January of 2103, Edward Turnbul of Coates Teachers College decided to explore the Hysterisis Enigma for his research thesis. The Reamur Variations on the Einstein Post-mortem Equations had suggested a paradox which no one had bothered to explore. Atomic research had bypassed it; and what are the dead ends of science for if not to provide harmless occupation for graduate students? Turnbul studied the original research, ran a few duplications and then tinkered with the apparatus.
Get the picture: A serious young man, fat, sallow, a genuine bore. A Phi Beta Kappa anesthetising his frustrations in a laboratory. A magnet is his sweetheart, caulds of X-27 Duplexor are his conjugal embraces. He tinkers at midnight and sublimates his maladjustments in the excitement and suspense of the experiment. Will it work? Can he really develop a commercial process, earn a million dollars and overpower women with this uncontestable proof of his virility?
Turnbul unwraps a sandwich, aping the dashing insouciance of fictional heroes, then pulls the switch. The experiment works. Thirty-two pounds of apparatus and a liter of methylene dimethyl ether loft up from th
e bench and smash against the ceiling. Turnbul has stumbled on something they just missed a century ago . . . anti-gravity. Unique? No. Inevitable. In the infinity of a universe crawling with searching, inquiring, experimenting creatures, this had happened, was happening and would happen beyond the count of simple integers. Statistics made it inevitable.
Forget Turnbul. He is not your protagonist. If you identify with him, you will be lost in this story, as Turnbul himself is lost in the shifting pattern that produced The Demolished Man. Turnbul patented; he was sued. He fought in courts for fifteen years with inadequate counsel and the patent was broken. Turnbul was notorious enough by that time to receive a full professorship at the Institute. He married a librarian, raised children, taught miserably, and jealously inspected each new textbook, content if credit for Nulgee was paid him in footnote or appendix.
On September of 2110, Galen Gart's wife died. She was a tall, lustrous, remote woman, and he had loved her deeply for thirty years. They had been a devoted couple, and in the course of their marriage had grown to resemble each other, as couples often do. It was hard to distinguish their handwriting, their voices, their jokes.
"We even think alike," Gart used to say. "Half the time I answer her before I realize she hasn't had a chance to speak her thoughts." And after her death he said: "What's the use of going on? We were part of each other. We didn't need words. How can anyone else give me the same intimacy?"
But Galen Gart, fifty, desolate, prematurely aging, met a pungent child of twenty with an exciting poitrine, a satin skin, and the infantile nickname of Duffy, and they were married six months after the funeral.
"You're not so old in the dark."
"Why, Duffy!" exclaimed Mr. Gart. "What a nice thing to say."