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peared. That had been taking place all along, through the 1940s, but between what Walter Bradbury taught me and what I had learned at Breadloaf, the change accelerated under my own deliberate prodding. |
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My writing became ever more direct and spare, and I think it was The Caves of Steel that lifted me a notch higher in my own estimation. I used it as a model for myself thereafter, and it was to be decades before I surpassed that book in my own eyes. |
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What had brought Asimov's capabilities to fruition? Partly, one can guess, experience. Asimov had been writing science fiction for fifteen years and getting it published for fourteen when he began work on The Caves of Steel. Some writers, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. E. van Vogt, begin writing at the top of their form and never do it much differently; others, like Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, continue to improve until they attain full command of their writing skills and creative drives. For writers like the latter, the process seems to take about ten years, depending perhaps upon the age at which the writer begins to publish and the amount of writing done. Heinlein, for instance, started writing in 1939 at the age of thirty-two and came into his mature period in 1949. The first adult novel in which he demonstrated his integrated abilities, The Puppet Masters, was published in 1951 (two years before The Caves of Steel was serialized in Galaxy). Asimov, who was only eighteen when he went to see John Campbell for the first time and nineteen when his first story was published, was thirty-three when he began writing The Caves of Steel. |
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Asimov also had gained confidence as he matured. He had become a successful author in many ways. Instead of creeping "pallid and frightened" into Campbell's office, he now was able to breeze into the office of any science-fiction editor in New York and "expect to be treated as a celebrity." His science fiction was beginning to appear in books with regularity, and he had some assurance that every novel he wrote would be published as a book. I, Robot and Pebble in the Sky had been published in 1950; Foundation and The Stars, Like Dust, in 1951; Foundation and Empire and The Currents of Space, in 1952 two books a year, alternating between Doubleday and Gnome Press. And his Lucky Starr juvenile novels, written under the pseudonym Paul French, were beginning to appear from Doubleday, starting with David Starr: Space Ranger in 1952. Second Foundation and Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids were in the works for 1953. His first scientific book, Biochemistry and Human Metabolism, which was neither particularly satisfying (because it was a collaboration) nor particularly successful (but showed Asimov the possibilities of science writing), had been published by Williams & |
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