Some thoughts on the life and death of Isaac Asimov: He and Leonard Bernstein lived to almost exactly the same age . . . Bernstein was seventy-two years, one month and nineteen days at death, Asimov was seventy-two years, three months and four days. Like Bernstein in many ways—his fecundity, his passion (in Ned Rorem's words) to "be the Onlie Begettor," his bemused but dead serious attempt to be all things to all of us, always—Asimov had begun to fail close to his seventieth birthday; like Bernstein he was obsessed with the fate of his father and the feeling that a sad ending would duplicate the father's demise. At his seventieth birthday celebrations in August, 1988, Bernstein recollected how Sam Bernstein had had a huge party on his own seventieth, had passed through that age only to fall apart physically almost immediately thereafter and lived a miserable, invalided, truncated old age. Asimov's father died in 1969 at seventy-two. Asimov had apparently been obsessed for a long time with the intimation that he would die at that age.
Bernstein wanted to write all the symphonies, be all the symphonies, make love to every composer, conductor, musician and listener in the world and, heedless of his condition or risks, smoked three packs a day, drove on and on, conducted Bruckner in Vienna and Bruckner in Manhattan and Tchaikovsky at Tanglewood and the student symphonists in Florida, defying all limitations . . . but when he stumbled off the stage at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, having coughed and gasped his way through the two final movements of Beethoven's Seventh, he went to the respirator, sunk into a chair while Koussevitsky's magical cloak was draped around him and, waving his hands said, "I'm canceling the tour." He had been scheduled to take the Tanglewood students to Europe in September. "I'm canceling the tour," he said and went back to his apartment, announced his retirement on a Tuesday less than two months later and died on a Sunday. Isaac Asimov, as The New York Times guy Gerald Jonas said, wanted to write the Encyclopedia Galactica and gave it a good try, but when he got to column #399 in his unbroken series of monthly essays for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he had made one try at the 400th column and quit, announced that he was incapable of going on. This man who counted publications in the way that Doctor Johnson had counted fenceposts backed off from his 400th column, announced that he had retired and spent his last months in silence. On the last afternoon of his life, Bernstein watched Live at Lincoln Center, listened to Yo Yo Ma and Emannuel Ax play the Rachmaninoff sonata for cello and piano; lying there, breathing through the respirator, listening to Rachmaninoff (who died of cancer in 1943, less than a week before Rachmaninoff's birthday), what could the conductor have been possibly feeling? In those last months, what would Asimov have felt? But this is not the issue of course; Bernstein's thousand recordings and videotapes, West Side Story and the Age of Anxiety Symphony are already in or on the verge of the canonical and scholars, common and uncommon readers will still be trying to assess the effect of Isaac Asimov a century from now. His contribution was no less extreme than Bernstein's and—in its influence upon the young, in the way that the work directed so many of them toward a lifetime of awareness and in some cases commitment, was no less resonant.
When I came into this field in the mid-sixties it was—as I have written elsewhere years ago and quite sentimentally at that time—still a one-generation field. Almost everyone who had ever written science fiction in this country, almost everyone who had defined it as a distinct genre was still alive and (in most cases) writing. The field was so much a one-generation phenomenon that those who had made signification contribution and had died were virtually a special interest themselves, a cell within the party, another division like costume fandom or First Fandom. There was Kornbluth and Kuttner and Weinbaum, there was Lovecraft (not really a science fiction writer although some of his important work had appeared in Astounding), there were marginal figures like Oscar Friend ("The Kid from Mars") but almost everyone else was alive. This was, of course, an actuarial fluke and everyone was quite aware that science fiction would soon enough join the mystery and that lurking anomaly, mainstream fiction, on the mortality tables but at the first convention I ever attended, the 1967 world convention in New York at the Statler Hilton it was possible to feel hermetic, almost smug about the buying and selling and population count of the field. It was at that convention—on Saturday night, September 5 I think at what was then and now called a "pro party" although I was no pro—that I met Isaac Asimov for the first time. Terry Carr introduced me; Asimov struck me as a splendidly ebullient man, utterly unaffected, even unaware of his fame, and as he embraced Richard Wilson in that crowded room, I did not know if it was Asimov or Wilson who I envied more. The time went on as it inevitably does (find a science fiction writer in distress and you will get a cliché every time) and the deaths of consequence began and kept on and on—Gernsback in 1968 and Campbell of course which was a shocker and so onward until the staggering late eighties when suddenly Sturgeon and Moore and Simak and Shaara and Wilson and Heinlein went in a shockingly brief span of time . . . but it still felt like a one-generation field. Ravaged, of course, doomed and haunted, forced to become worldly all against its will ("First Fandom will never die!" one of the brethren said to Harry Harrison in 1970 when Harrison had suggested, gently, that First Fandom might want to explore formally the possibility of a Successor Fandom as inheritors) but the essential containing factors were there. What were those factors? One could construct a complex metaphysical or literary paradigm to explain why science fiction, even in ever greater absence, even while beginning to sound like Haydn's Farewell Symphony still seemed self-contained but the explanation was really not at all elaborate or metaphysical.
Isaav Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the reason that it still felt like a one-generation field. Present at what the canoneers had come to regard as the creation (Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction, that 7/39 issue of the magazine and then the Foundation and the robots and later on Horace Gold and Tyrann and The Caves of Steel and right on to the big boom and the six-figure advance) he was still there all the time and tomorrow; the magazine with his name on it, the Foundation sequels as best-sellers, the Fantasy & Science Fiction essays going on and on. "He was fixed in the heavens, as immovable as the North Star," Isaac Asimov had said in a 7/71 eulogy for Locus when John Campbell had died and so seemingly was Asimov; his presence held the field together in a single, continuing line, his absence bisects it abruptly and permanently. It was said of Beethoven that he made music something that came before him and after and can be heard in no other way; art critics seem to feel the same way about Picasso. This may be the final judgment on Asimov, that his death and the end of his work marks the point at which science fiction, which has been on the verge of implosion or atomization for many years now, begins—like one of Van Vogt's great space cruisers in "Storm"—to break up.
Asimov was not the only binding figure by stature and chronologically; it is probable that he was so stylistically as well. Everyone after about 1945 either wrote like him or tried to write like him or tried to write unlike him; his was the voice which was either imitated or violently repelled but it was the reasonable, clarifying, paradigmatic voice of modern science fiction itself. (For these opinions I am indebted to John Clute who pointed it out to me in private correspondence and he is absolutely right. Everything after this parenthesis however may be seen as my own misinterpretation; from this point, Clute is a free man.) I think it was Edmund Wilson who defined Ernest Hemingway as the most important and influential American novelist; after he became famous everyone either tried to write like him or, as in the case of Faulkner and Faulkner's disciples, went out of the way to not write like him, doing everything possible to function in reaction and avoid comparison. Certainly, the reactive changes in both style and content which can be clearly perceived in the 1950s and which by the late sixties had become the cutting edge (if never the most widely read or even read at all) of science fiction came in clear reflex to that rational voice which had amassed background and plot and enabled the one to drive the other in the most logical and concise fashion, the emphasis upon clarity. There were many science fiction writers who attempted that clarity and expository force but were simply not good enough to carry it off at all, but it is Asimov driving the most familiar novels and most of the content of the magazines through the decades by inspiration and occasional example. In that sense he was, even more than Campbell (who had become quirky and then an isolated figure in his last twenty years) the fundamental influence that held matters together and he did so with an utter conviction of audience which in no way can be disputed by sales figures; he, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke are still the only science fiction writers to have had work on the best-seller lists and Clarke's work is driven by 2001 and its movie sequel, Heinlein's by the extrinsic success of Stranger in a Strange Land, but Asimov—who never had a film adaptation of any consequence at all in his lifetime and who remained locked within the perimeters of science fiction, being for the general audience synonymous with science fiction—seemed capable without any particular effort other than the work and the effortless presentation of persona to find an enormous audience for his fiction and he did so with utter consistency.
This becomes, then, the death which is a stake through the shield; that first death beyond which there is no other. Heinlein was a strange brooding, isolated figure, sick and shielded by barbed wire and an obdurate wife and his own glare of fear and contempt for the audience. Sturgeon, a great writer in his time, had shrunk to near silence and clownishness; Bester, another great writer, had never attracted much attention outside the field and had in any case vanished from it utterly between 1950 and 1973, emerging only when the job at Holiday had folded up and he had to raise some new money. Simak was a beloved figure and a writer of no mean consequence but he had been no ambassador to the masses; isolated in Minnesota he had barely been an ambassador to himself. Judy Lynn del Rey was a much more important figure than almost any of us had recognized until very close to the end, but she had come to the field only through a kind of indirection and the period of her great influence lasted less than a decade. Asimov had been the single, the controlling, the central voice of the field for fifty years.
Leonard Bernstein's death was devastating to classical music (Vienna and all of Austria had their flags at half-staff, the sense of devastation was global and absolute) but it was the immediate family, the two daughters, the son and the closest friends who felt the death not as symbol or metaphoric passing but as desperate, personal loss; the "outside world" for Isaac Asimov was composed of all those who had read the books and reacted to the public figure . . . but the immediate family in his case was science fiction itself. It is an intolerable—but irreversible—death in the family, then, and beyond that and some mumbling about atomization, one would have to be a fool to make predictions.
Isaac Asimov died on April 6, exactly nineteen years to the date after The Gods Themselves did not win the first John W. Campbell Memorial award for the best novel of the year, an award which most of the community would have felt proper (the novel did win the Hugo and the Nebula). Instead, that award was won by your undersigned, and perpetrated a series of resentments and troubles (never from Isaac Asimov) which for me will never be over. "I wonder what that means or what he would have made of that," I said to my wife that evening. "Only you would even think of something like that," she said.
Almost 100 percent but not quite, I think that Asimov, if it had been called to his attention, would have found something profound and yet hopeful to say about that as this (essentially) despairing man managed with almost everything. But we'll never know, will we?
I'll never know.
9 May 1992