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arrive in his father's package of new magazines, it did not show up. The eighteen-year-old Asimov was terrified that it had ceased publication. He called the publisher, Street & Smith, and was assured that the magazine still was being published. But when the new issue had not arrived by the following Tuesday, he ventured off on the subway to the Street & Smith offices in Manhattan, where an executive told him that the publication date had been changed from the second Wednesday to the third Friday of the month. Two days later the magazine arrived. |
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His panic at the thought that Astounding might vanish sent Asimov to the typewriter to finish a story he had been working at for some months titled "Cosmic Corkscrew." He completed the story on June 19, 1938, and took it personally to the editor. Campbell was familiar with Asimov's name from his frequent letters and talked for more than an hour with the aspiring author, read the story overnight, and mailed it back two days later with a polite letter of rejection. That sent Asimov back to his typewriter to work on a story titled "Stowaway." He finished it in eighteen days and took this in person to Campbell. That story came back with a rejection in four days. A pattern had been established. A rejection would come from Campbell but phrased in ways that would encourage Asimov to turn immediately to a new story. "It didn't matter that he rejected you,'' Asimov recalled. "There was an enthusiasm about him and an all-encompassing friendliness that was contagious. I always left him eager to write further." "Stowaway," however, did not end up lost for all time with "Cosmic Corkscrew." It eventually found its way into print, in the April 1940 Astonishing Stories edited by Frederik Pohl (as youthful an editor as Asimov was a writer), as "The Callistan Menace," though Asimov's third story, "Marooned Off Vesta," had appeared first, in the March 1939 Amazing Stories. |
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Meanwhile, Asimov had discovered other science-fiction readers, and not just readers but fans, fanatics like himself. This led progressively to fanzines, club meetings, and the organizing of the Futurians, a fan group that included many of the later writers and shapers of science fiction, including Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert W. Lowndes, Richard Wilson, and later Damon Knight and James Blish. Asimov attended monthly meetings, became involved in the debates and schisms to which fandom was so susceptible, began meeting other authors, and talked about his writing ambition and finally getting published. All culminated in the first World Science Fiction Convention held in Manhattan on July 2, 1939. Every Futurian but Asimov was excluded by the organizer, Sam Moskowitz, as disruptive influences. |
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