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introduced as a science writer by "How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky?" "No matter how various the subject matter I write on," he added, "I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.''
In an interview in 1979, I said to him that his autobiography revealed a great deal of loyalty to what he was, to the boy he was, and to what science fiction had meant to him when he discovered it. Asimov replied that he had deliberately not abandoned his origins. He had made up his mind when he was quite young, and said it in print, that no matter what happened to him or where he went, he would never deny his origins as a science-fiction writer and never break his connection to science fiction, and he never did.
He considered loyalty a prime virtue. In 1976 when he started Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, he told publisher Joel Davis that he wouldn't give up his Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction science articles.
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I probably bore everybody with my endless repetition of how much I owe to John Campbell, because I figure I would rather bore them than be disloyal in my own mind. It is the easiest thing in the world to forget the ladder you climb or to be embarrassed at the thought that there was a time when somebody had to help you. The tendency is to minimize this, minimize that, and I'm normal enough and human enough to do the same thing if it were left to itself, but this is a matter of having once made a vow and sticking to it.
He pointed out that it was inconvenient to always have to tell people that Campbell made up the Three Laws of Robotics, and the more important the Three Laws became the more he wanted to be the originator and take the credit, but he couldn't. "Why this is so I never really thought about. I guess I like to think about it only as a matter of virtue. I don't consider myself a particularly virtuous person, but I like to think I have some virtues, of which loyalty is one."
Possibly, however, his insistence on being considered a science-fiction writer is like his relationship to his racial origins. He says he is not a good Jew. Asimov attended no Jewish religious functions, followed no Jewish rituals, obeyed no Jewish dietary laws, and yet he never, under any circumstances, left any doubt that he was Jewish.
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I really dislike Judaism. . . . It's a form of particularly pernicious nationalism. I don't want humanity divided into these little groups that are firmly convinced, each one, that it is better than the others. Judaism is the prototype of the "I'm better than you" group we are the ones who

 
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