In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov (1920-1954)

"This is my favourite Asimov book. It is something of a personal choice, because I came to Asimov recently as a science fiction historian, and so obviously his memoirs were of great interest to me. But these are remarkable books. These were the first two volumes of his memoirs. They came out in 1979 and 1980, so he still had over a decade left to go. They are huge books. In Memory Yet Green, the first volume, is over 700 pages, and In Joy Still Felt, volume two, is 800 pages, in small font. They really cover what almost at times feels like every day of his life, as if he kept a detailed diary. A lot of the entries are very mundane things: he took the car to the shop to get it repaired, or he fixed up his office… but it’s incredibly compelling. And I think it’s a testament to his voice, which is unmatched. He’s a very conversational writer. Also, the material is fascinating if you’re a writer, or if you are interested in the life of a writer, especially from this period. For that, it’s one of the best books imaginable. It’s full of good gossip and interesting stories about all the writers from that period. It’s full of incredible material on Campbell and that circle and on what it meant to be a person like this – what kind of personality could write 400 books over the course of his career? I was looking at the book last night, and I couldn’t stop – you start reading, especially the second volume, and it’s just so interesting. So as a biographer, it was an incredible source of material, not just on him, but on the entire world of science fiction. I will say there’s one thing, and this is probably the best place to mention it… Asimov is very candid; he talks a lot about his personal life and his personal behaviour in ways that are meant to be a little bit self-deprecating. He’s got this act he puts on, where he’s this bumbling genius who can be helpless in social situations. But he talks very candidly about his behaviour toward women, and it was very troubling. He was a groper. He engaged in unwanted touching for decades with, I would say, hundreds of women, mostly young fans at conventions, secretaries and people he met in private. He touched them in ways that were unforgivable. I’ve read a lot of accounts from recipients of these attentions and they say it was traumatizing. So that is a known fact about Asimov, and I have to say it, I have to bring it up when I talk about him. The interesting thing is that he talks about it in these books – if you’re looking for material to support that reading of his life, it’s all right here. He was very open about it. It was treated as a kind of running joke at conventions, that he was this dirty old man who would grab at woman’s bottoms. And I’m still working through the implications of this, because I don’t do it to the extent that I should have in Astounding . So, elsewhere, I’ve been trying to talk about it… It is not controversial to say that this happened. This is something that Asimov himself talks about throughout his memoirs and acknowledges, and yet it took a long time for people to actually start to grapple with it. One thing that I’m really struck by about Asimov, having read so much of him, is that he’s a much more complex figure than people understand. I think he became very good at playing a certain role. During his life, he was a sort of ambassador of science fiction to the mainstream. At conventions, he was the toastmaster, the life of the party. But this came out of someone who I think, deep down, had a lot of unresolved feelings about himself and about other people. His fiction is limited in some ways by this fact. He has trouble writing women; there are very few good female characters in these stories. What we look for in fiction, the world building, the prose…. It’s not always at the same level as someone like Heinlein , who is working at the same time and is a much more engaging writer in some ways. But Asimov was unmatched when it came to ideas. The ideas in these stories and in his nonfiction are still incredibly exciting. I would not dissuade anyone for a second from looking at him – as a source of insight into the sciences, into history, and into a huge range of subjects that he thought about and was able to explain more clearly than just about anybody else."