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Page 162
fiction author. Now he was fifty years old. His hundredth book had been celebrated in 1969 with Opus 100 and numerous interviews, some on television. He was becoming known as the most prolific man of letters of his time, and his reputation as a child prodigy had been supplanted by the image, however exaggerated, of an authority on almost everything.
Asimov was much in demand as a public speaker, commanding substantial fees. He could find a publisher for almost anything he wished to write and for some books he did not. He was wealthy; in spite of the impending divorce settlement he would never have to worry about money again, even if he never wrote another word. But that, of course, was unthinkable. Writing was his life, even if it was no longer his livelihood. He accepted small advances so publishers would let him write what he wanted to write.
A couple of questions, however, disturbed him. He was not sure he could write in new surroundings: radical changes always brought this terrible possibility into his mind. Each time, however, the fears had been unnecessary, and this time was no different. One question remained to be answered: would he ever write serious science fiction again? In spite of his statement at the end of his collection, The Bicentennial Man, that he had never stopped writing science fiction, the intensity with which he had written his early stories, the amount of himself that he had poured into those hopeful works, had been missing for a number of years.
If anything, Asimov's social life improved in New York. He soon was seeing his editors more regularly than ever and, in addition, his old science-fiction friends, Lester del Rey, Judy-Lynn Benjamin (who became Mrs. del Rey), Robert Silverberg, and others, including John Campbell, until his untimely death, on July 11, 1971 of a ruptured aorta, at the age of 61. And Asimov attended various local science-fiction conventions. At one of them on January 23, 1971, Robert Silverberg and Lester del Rey participated in a dialogue about ''the ins and outs of science fiction." At one point Silverberg illustrated the greater importance of the human aspects of a science-fiction story over the scientific detail by asking why anyone should be overly concerned with some trivial matter concerning, say, plutonium-186.
In the audience Asimov laughed because he knew there was no plutonium-186 and could not be. After the dialogue he told Silverberg this, and Silverberg shrugged it off. Asimov said, "But just to show you what a real science-fiction writer can do, I'll write a story about plutonium-186."

 
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