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him into "a bum," his father said. The boy had been reading library books of all kinds, but he longed for the brightly colored pulp magazines with their cover paintings of futuristic machines and planets and alien menaces. Finally, when Hugo Gernsback lost control of Amazing and brought out a competitor, Science Wonder Stories, the then nine-year-old boy brought the magazine to his father, pointed out the word "Science" in the title, and won his battle. Possibly his father just did not have the spirit to fight, because his mother was about to give birth to Asimov's younger brother, Stanley.
The science-fiction magazines filled Asimov's imagination with ideas and dreams. They did not consume all his reading time because there weren't enough of them (only two a month at first, and only three a month in 1930). He kept up his omnivorous reading of other books, mostly library borrowings, but science fiction became what he lived for. Oddly enough, Asimov's early writing efforts did not focus on science fiction. "I had the most exalted notion of the intense skills and vast scientific knowledge required of authors in the field, and I dared not aspire to such things," he remembered.
On his new typewriter, however, he ventured into fantasy and then into science fiction. Like almost every aspiring author, Asimov started many stories and finished none, and what he wrote was derived mostly from what he liked to read. His derivative writing was to persist through several years of his career as a published writer until he finally rid himself of what he called his "pulpishness." He got his inspiration, his plots, even his vocabulary from other science-fiction writers. From them came the blasters and needle guns and force beams that litter his stories and early novels, and even, by an analogous process of invention, such concepts as neuronic whips and psycho-probes, hyperspace and Jumps. When he turned to more unique concepts such as psychohistory and the Foundations, the logical development of robots, a radioactive Earth and the lost origin of man, and particularly human reactions to overcrowded cities, his fiction began to glow with its own fire.
Not long after he got his typewriter, Asimov wrote a letter to Astounding Stories that was published in 1935. Two years later, when Campbell had become editor of the magazine and had changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov began writing letters again, "commenting on the stories, rating them, and, in general, taking on the airs of a critic." Such letters became a monthly event; usually Campbell published them in a letters-to-the-editor section called then, as now, "Brass Tacks."
One Tuesday in May when the new Astounding was scheduled to

 
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