PULP IDEAS TO GLOSSY WORDS

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33887, 5 July 1975, Page 10

PULP IDEAS TO GLOSSY WORDS

Before The Golden Age. A science fiction anthology of the 1930 s by Isaac Asimov. Robson Books. 986 pp. N.Z. price $14.70. The genesis of exceptional men will often give fascinating insights to their character and achievements. This is no less true of a writer than of a tyrant, baac Asimov is an outstanding writer — mainly of science fiction — and has had* his stories published since 1938 u « .U It is from the eight vears before this date, before John W. Campbell took over the editorship of what was already one of the best science fiction magazines. “Astounding Stories, that Dr Asimov has chosen some 25 short stories he read in the pulp magazines at that time and which made their impact on him then and in bis subsequent writings. He presents each story chronologically, commenting on his opinion of them then and now, 40 years later, and gives a highly readable thumbnail autobiographical sketch between each story . Born in the U.S.S.R. in 1920, young Asimov, with a sister and his parents, emigrated to the United States by way of Ellis Island, in 1923. He was, therefore, voung enough, and indeed considers himself “unbelievably fortunate" to have learned English as a native language. He relates how, from the age of nine, he borrowed magazines on sale in his father's candv store in New York and devoured what was then called "scientifiction." The reader of this collection .may

experience Asimov’s first excited impressions, 40 years ago, of what, more often than not, was read wrapped in plain brown paper. Some of the racism which was taken for granted then is still there to embarrass us now. and the science also must be accepted in the context of its time. But here too are the magic, the immensely broadened horizons, and the wide-ranging imaginations of such writers as Edmond Hamilton, Clifford D. Simak, Raymond Gallun, Stanley Weinbaum. and Murray Leinster. One of the many faults of the preCampbell era of science fiction writing was that background was often not blended with the story but presented in indigestible blocks that halted the action. Another fault was presenting the science aspect inaccurately even by the standards known at the time of it’s writing. Such an example is found in Neil R. Jones's “The Jamieson Satellite.” However, as Dr Asimov says, none of the flaws in language and construction were obvious to an 11-year-old, and he acknowledges that Jones’s “Zoromes, who were robots really, were the spiritual ancestors of his own ‘positronic robots for which he is, justly famour." The Zoromes’ objective, dignified benevolence could then have been the spark which engendered Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, those imperatives, which, he states, must be inbuilt into any robot functioning in a human society. The first law says that a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to

come to harm. The second that a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except when such orders conflict with the first law. And the third that a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first and second laws. Another crucial point in science fiction Dr Asimov feels was with the publication of “Old Faithful,” by Raymond Z. Gallun in the December, 1934, issue of “Astounding Stories.” This story helped change thinking away from the Wellsian Martian invasion syndrome (which at the turn of the century was only a reflection of what Europeans were doing in Afripa), making acceptable a sympathetic portrait of extraterrestrials. Until then the mindless vicious variety of bugeyed monster had been fashionable. Of his own early writing attempts, before the period he covers in his part-autobiography, “The Early Asimov”, he refers to one, fortunately unpublished, as “a long, incoherent, invertebrate tale” which he wrote “never knowing on one page what the next would hold” — in itself not so bad — but nowadays when writing he “knows the ending at all times, it being fundamental to know the direction at least,” Apart from the only story he had printed in his high school magazine Asimov has included a hitherto unpublished story of his own, the manuscript of which he thought destroyed. A fan, searching through Asimov’s jetsam and memorabilia how being collected by the Boston University library, discovered the lost manuscript and sent a photocopy of it back to its author. Entitled “Big Game” it has been printed for the first time in this collection. This, then, is an anthology of reading done by the young Asimov in the formative years of his second decade in a genre which even then defied the generally accepted bounds of definition, on the one hand the optimistic pseudoscience of Jules Verne, and on the other the pessimism of Wells or Mary Shelley’s Gothic monster. Science fiction is all of this and more, and the 19305, while producing few stories of great literary merit, did lay the basis for the development of the ideas which appeared in the many brilliant stories of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction. These stories of the ’3os sharpened the critical faculties of Isaac Asimov, one of science fiction’s outstanding contributors, stimulating his enthusiasm and giving him inspiration to produce "Nightfall,” voted the best science fiction short story written up to 1964 by the Science Fiction Writers of America.