My accountant said I should invest it, and I knew that, but how?

  I was told to get a broker, and I knew that, too, but who?

  I asked various people if they could recommend a broker, and among others I asked Tim. He recommended two young men he was using as brokers who had made him considerable money. I took his advice (I had to take someone’s advice, and he was my security-figure-in-chief), and on September 22, 1961, I went down to Wall Street and actually interviewed these brokers.

  Eventually, I gave them ten thousand dollars to invest for me, and it took them only a few years to change that into about sixty-five hundred dollars.

  3

  Meanwhile, I was writing an experimental science biography for Tom Sloane. I chose as my subject (almost at random) U. J. J. Leverrier, the nineteenth-century French astronomer. Tom approved and the book was under way.

  4

  On September 30, we bought a new TV set, one equipped with remote controls. It was a much better set than the old one, which had broken down frequently.

  Nevertheless, the old one still worked. We put it down in the basement primarily for the use of the children, and we were now a two-TV family as well as a two-automobile family. We were taking on all the appurtenances of suburban living.

  5

  The New York Times Sunday Magazine asked me to do an article on science-fiction conventions, and I did one and mailed it to them on October 2—and they rejected it.

  That was my first attempt for them, and I managed to get something out of it by writing a second and more serious article on science fiction, which they took and published in their November 19, 1961, issue under the very irritating title of “Fact Catches Up with Fiction.”

  Nevertheless, that didn’t make things easier for me with the Sunday Magazine thereafter. They request an article now and then, but they reject at least as many as they accept, so that my batting average is under .500.

  I wish I could say that this was the worst score I’ve ever made. It isn’t. Cosmopolitan has asked me twice for an article; twice I’ve obliged; twice I’ve been rejected. Batting average, .000.

  The loss is not total. I can generally sell a rejection elsewhere or cannibalize it into another article. In fact, I even welcome an occasional rejection (a very occasional rejection) because it makes the game more interesting.

  6

  My biography—a very small one—came to be written for the first time.

  Sam Moskowitz was writing a series of articles for Amazing that consisted of biographies of various science-fiction writers of the past and present and, eventually, running out of everyone else, he came to me.

  On October 17, Chris Moskowitz came to interview me on husband Sam’s behalf, and I did my best to give her all the statistical material she needed. Sam himself interviewed my brother, Stanley, and I don’t know who else.

  The biography, about the length of a short story, eventually appeared in the April 1962 Amazing under the title (his, for heaven’s sake, not mine) “Isaac Asimov: Genius in the Candy Store.”

  It had some mistakes, the worst of which was making Campbell rather than Tremaine express the opinion that people who sold stories free to Wollheim ought to be blacklisted. This was corrected when the article appeared in a collection of Sam’s biographies, published under the title “Seekers of Tomorrow.”

  I think that was the first time I was called a “genius” in print, but not the last time.

  Even before Sam used the term, however, I’d grown tired of it. I’d already been asked, often enough, “How does it feel to be a genius?” or, more bluntly, “Are you a genius?,” or, more hostilely, “What makes you think you’re a genius?”

  The fact is that I’ve never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that’s their problem. I myself shoot for other more meaningful and more significant goals: like being the best science-fiction writer/science writer/public speaker in the world. That is good enough for me.

  7

  On October 20, 1961, I met Cliff Simak, face to face, for the first time. I had been corresponding with him, on and off, for twenty-three years, but our paths had never before actually crossed.

  I was no longer an eighteen-year-old would-be writer, and he was no longer a father figure of nearly twice my age. The alchemy of time had converted me into a forty-one-year-old member of an aging establishment and very nearly Cliff’s contemporary. It was a delightful lunch; we kept pausing to stare at each other as though we had never been truly certain that the other existed.

  8

  Something new was brewing. According to Bob Mills, it started with Avram Davidson. Avram, not averse to earning some badly needed cash, bent his mind to thoughts of some anthology that would, of necessity, include a story of his. It occurred to him, therefore, that what was needed was an anthology of those short pieces that had won Hugos.114 One of the stories that would then be included would be “Or All the Seas with Oysters” from the May 1958 Galaxy. It had won the Hugo for best short story at the sixteenth World Science Fiction convention, held in Los Angeles in 1958.

  Bob Mills thought it was a good idea and discussed it with Tim Seldes, who was willing to accept and publish such an anthology. The question arose as to who should be editor. It occurred to one of them that it had better be a name that was as well known as possible, but also one who had never himself won a Hugo so that the book would not seem self-serving. I seemed a natural possibility, and on October 31, 1961, I got a letter from Bob suggesting the notion.

  That struck me as a good idea, because I had never done an anthology and I thought it would be fun to try. What had always held me back from offering to do one was my reluctance to choose the stories myself. I wasn’t certain of the value of my judgment. Here, however, was my chance to do an anthology in which I did not have to choose the stories. The stories were already chosen. All I would have to do would be to take care of some mechanical problems, such as obtaining tear sheets and permissions, and to write an Introduction.

  But then another problem arose. The number of my books had now become an issue with me, and I wanted to be able to list the anthology as part of the corpus of my works. Could I do that if the book consisted simply of nine stories written by other people? If I myself had chosen the stories, I could do it; the fact that the stories were my choice would place a personal impress on the book that would justify my calling it mine.

  But the stories were already chosen, and if I had neither written nor chosen the stories, how could I have the face to call the book mine?

  It occurred to me, therefore, to make the Introductions both to each individual story and to the collection as a whole, very highly individual. It would then be an anthology that no one else but myself could have put together in just that way, and it would be my book.

  I made up my mind that in each Introduction I was not to deal with the story at all. After all, why describe the story when it was there to be read, and why praise it when the Hugo award was automatic praise? Instead, I would deal with the author, and I would make it funny. And I would make the over-all Introduction funny, too; if I could, of course.

  And since the reason I was chosen was because I had never won a Hugo, I decided to make that the point of the humor. I would complain bitterly throughout the book about never having won a Hugo.

  And, after all, if I complained loud enough and long enough, someone was bound to give me a Hugo for something, if only to shut me up.

  Naturally, I said nothing of this to Tim Seldes or Bob Mills in advance.

  9

  Still another new project came up on November 4. I received a letter from a firm based in Los Angeles asking me to write a short science-fiction piece that would run as part of an advertisement.

  They stressed that the advertisement would appear only in outlets of high prestige such as Scientific American and Fortune. They also assured me that although they wanted the piece to deal with communications, since the advertisers specialized in communications devices, the story would not be expected to tie in to the advertisement in any way.

  Finally, they were offering $250 for a story that would be 1,200 words long. That meant $.20 a word, which was five times the rate a science-fiction magazine could pay me.

  I was tempted and agreed to do it. The firm ran a series of six advertisements, and two of them included a story of mine. The first, which appeared in the February 1962 Scientific American, was in the second advertisement of the series and was called “My Son, the Physicist.”115 The second story, which appeared in the sixth advertisement of the series in the October 1962 Scientific American, was “Starlight.”116

  10

  On November 7, 1961, I received my royalty check from Basic Books. In the previous statement, half a year before, my $1,500 advance had been paid off and there had been a little money left over. But now the bulk of the sales had been made, including lump sums from several small book clubs, and I found myself staring at a check for $27,600.

  It was five times larger than any check I had ever before held. It was in itself very nearly as large as all I had made in the previous year.

  It was four times as large, all by itself, as the annual salary that Keefer felt the med school could not afford to pay a science writer.

  I was glad my parents were alive to see the day, for it was a world away from that first check I had received twenty-three years ago, the one that was for $64 and had seemed so large.

  Yet it had its sad side.

  It was a unique check that could not possibly be repeated, it seemed to me, unless I happened to write another book like The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science; one that was at once as highly priced and as highly regarded, and that didn’t seem very likely to me. What’s more, it came at the end of a year that, even before the check arrived, was already setting a record for me.

  This meant I was going to end the year with an impossibly high sum of money and that there would be no way of duplicating it ever again. The year 1961 would have to be my top money-making year and I was only forty-one and I wasn’t ready to have my top year yet. I didn’t want to spend thirty years or so (assuming I lived out a normal lifespan) looking back on that one miracle year.

  So I was sorry. I never wanted sudden fame, sudden wealth, sudden windfalls. What I had always wanted, and what I had so far always gotten, was a gradual increase, a little more each year, so that I would never have to feel that I was living in the anticlimax period of my life.

  But there it was, so I eventually put it in the bank. And even that check didn’t make me like The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science any better.

  11

  I had lunch with Bob Mills in New York on November 13. He was planning to leave F & SF and open a literary agency. I was sorry. I had done about forty F & SF essays by then and the exchanges between “the Kindly Editor” and “the Good Doctor” had become a pleasant fixture. No matter who replaced him I didn’t feel that I could do “the Kindly Editor” bit ever again.

  I then delivered a talk at the New York Public Library. It had been arranged through Houghton Mifflin and Mary K. Harmon was in New York for the occasion.

  Mary K. (as she was always called) was a new member of the juvenile department and I was going to work more and more with her as Austin moved up to positions of higher responsibility. Mary K. was one of the most pleasant and cheerful women I have ever met. Never, in years and years of association, was there a cross word between us, or even a neutral word. All the words were cheerful, pleasant, and happy, whether in her office, or having any of innumerable lunches at Locke-Ober’s.

  Locke-Ober’s had a room downstairs in which only men were allowed. (I don’t know if that’s still true in these days of women’s liberation, but it was true then.) I sometimes ate downstairs when my lunches were with Austin, but I much preferred it upstairs with Mary K. or with Austin or with both.

  12

  Two days after I got back from New York on that occasion, I was feeling incredibly lousy, rotten enough to be unable to hide it. Gertrude wanted to take my temperature, but I fended her off until I had finished an article and driven to the post office to mail it. I promised that as soon as I got back I would let her take my temperature.

  The article was “Blood Will Tell” and it was meant for the IBM house magazine Think, which was offering me five hundred dollars for twenty-five hundred words. I was already routinely requesting a ten-cent-a-word minimum for any article I did outside the science-fiction magazines, and often got more than that—twenty cents in this case.

  Gertrude did take my temperature when I returned and it proved to be 101° and I was kicked right into bed.117

  The next morning my temperature was normal and, bounding out of bed, I somehow managed to wrench my back, found myself (for the first time in my life) hobbling about with a bent sacroiliac, and got right back into bed.

  Fortunately my back improved greatly by the next day, but from that time on, I have taken to pampering it. I began to favor harder and harder mattresses.

  I remember once when Robert Silverberg wanted to make a telephone call in my place and I directed him to the phone in the bedroom. He dropped down on the bed, looked pained, and said, “Who has the bad back?”

  I said, “No one, precisely because that’s what we sleep on.”

  So my sacroiliac is fine and never gives me any particular trouble.

  13

  One of my early F & SF essays, which appeared in the October 1959 issue, was “The Height of Up.”118 In it, I attempted to discuss what the maximum possible temperature might be. I don’t consider it one of my better essays.

  Nevertheless, a young graduate physicist at Princeton, Hong Yee-chiu, sent me a letter, which I received on November 22, 1961, telling me that reading that essay had changed the direction of his research. He began to consider what the maximum temperature might be in the world of actual phenomena—at the center of exploding supernovae, for instance—and in the process worked out a theory of neutrino formation at very high temperatures that could be a legitimate explanation for the mechanics of stellar collapse.119

  It is difficult to describe how pleased I was at this. I suppose that anyone going into the sciences dreams of making a major discovery or of evolving a major theory someday, but that can only happen to a very few and there comes a time in almost every scientist’s life when he is forced, more or less reluctantly, to let go of that dream.

  I had had to let go quite early in the game. My ineptitude in the laboratory meant I was not likely to make major experimental discoveries, and I lacked the patience to see some theory safely through all its difficulties. Fortunately, by the time I let go I was succeeding in my writing career, so that the trauma was minimal.

  Nevertheless, there remained the secondary dream of the teacher: If I could not accomplish great deeds in science, I might yet inspire them. Hong Yee-chiu was an example and I was so grateful that he had taken the trouble to write and tell me of what he had done.

  14

  It was about now, by the way, that Avram Davidson replaced Bob Mills as editor of F & SF. Avram was a perfectly good editor, but he and I were never as close as Bob and I had been.

  I asked Avram if he wanted the essays to continue, and was quite ready to appeal over his head to Joe Ferman if Avram said “No,” but he said “Yes.” He also indicated that he would not welcome any continuation of the “Kindly Editor” bit, which suited me, since I had already intended to drop it.

  It did seem to me that Avram’s blurbs for my articles were too esoteric and, on occasion, too barbed for my tastes, and eventually I managed to persuade the magazine that my essays had become too well known a series to require individual blurbs and, rather to my relief, they were dropped permanently.

  15

  At the beginning of December I finally got around to writing my science review of the year for the World Book Year Book. That wasn’t dilatoriness on my part. I deliberately waited in case there were any last-minute developments. I mailed it to Chicago on December 4, and eventually received word that it was satisfactory.

  That same day, however, there was something that was less satisfactory. I received a letter from Roy Fisher suggesting that the editorial board get together at some mountain resort in West Virginia, on May 1 and 2 next, all expenses paid, two hundred dollars per diem, wives invited.

  I was outraged. I had explained I didn’t travel, but Gertrude was quite excited about it and wanted to go, so I rather grumblingly agreed to do it.

  I consoled myself by working madly on my science biographies. I already had a notion that it was going to end up by being more than the 250 biographies that Tom Sloane had asked for, since I was writing up everyone I could think of, and each scientist suggested several others to my fevered mind. As is usual in such cases, however, I let the book find its own length (as I am doing with this book, for instance) and meant to worry about unpleasantness with editors later.

  16

  On December 6, I took the bus to New York and handed in the manuscript of The Human Body to Mac Talley. On that same day, I took the train to Baltimore, for I was slated to give a talk at Johns Hopkins on the morning of the eighth, one which, according to my diary, “brought down the house.”