Call Me Isaac

My favorite science fiction magazine, hands down, is Astounding Stories, ever since F. Orlin Tremaine became the editor. The stories are better, and more interesting, than in the other magazines. If I ever manage to get a story published in Astounding, I'll know I've made it as a science fiction writer. John W. Campbell, Jr. recently started working as the editor, with Tremaine being the editorial director. Not only has the magazine not suffered, it's been getting even better.

Officially, the magazine comes out on the third Wednesday of every month. However, our store only gets magazine deliveries on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we get Astounding on the third Tuesday of every month -- which happens to be today. I've finally got my hands on this month's issue, the February 1938 issue, and it's a good one. For one thing, it includes the last installment of Doc Smith's novel Galactic Patrol. Now that I've finished it, I feel sort of let down. I hope he writes more Galactic Patrol novels. Anyway, I saved the last five issues of Astounding, so now I can go back and re-read Galactic Patrol all at once.

Apart from the Smith novel, the best stories in this issue are Raymond Z. Gallun's "Mercutian Adventure" and Eando Binder's "The Anti-Weapon". I had a letter printed in the December 1937 issue, and I've been writing one every month since then. Let me tell you, it is extremely pleasant seeing my name printed in the magazine. Maybe someday it'll be above a story.

After we moved to Windsor Place, a cat decided to attach itself to the candy store. Every morning she waits for my father to open up the store. After he sets out the morning papers in the newsstand, she jumps up onto the pile of New York Timeses and stretches out. When a customer approaches and wants a Times, my father slips out the second one from the top, and the cat settles down by the thickness of one newspaper without any concern. On nice days, my father will sometimes walk the two blocks to Prospect Park, saying, "Come on, cat," and she follows him. She goes into the park for five minutes, then he calls again, "Come on, cat," and she comes back out and walks back to the store with him. One time, she went missing. I was secretly worried that some medical student had kidnapped and dissected her, but I didn't tell my family that, and after three days she came back.

One day last summer, she was sitting on the newsstand and a tomcat walked down the street across the way. I decided it would be fun to block her view of the other cat, so I moved in front of her and put my face in her way. When she tried to crane around me, I put my head in the way again. Then, before I could react, she swung her right front paw and gave me a smack in the face. The look she gave me said, I could have used my claws to slice your face open, but I didn't. I got the hint and moved out of her way, since she was clearly smarter than I was.

Her only weakness was dogs. Whenever a customer entered the store with a dog, we would have to grab her to keep her from attacking it. When I got back from school today, I learned that the cat had attacked a dog's owner, and that my family had to take her down to the SPCA. We've had cats before at the other places we've lived, but never one as good as her. It feels like we've lost a member of the family. We have lost a member of the family.

The papers today reported that the Samoan Clipper, the plane that carried the first Air Mail from New Zealand, blew up yesterday while flying back across the Pacific. Now Pan Am is suspending its air mail service to New Zealand. Two steps forward and one step back.

Sunday mornings are always busy at the candy store. There's a Catholic church not much more than a block away, and our neighborhood is heavily Irish Catholic. We mark off the mornings from 6 AM to 1 PM by the Masses, and we all have to be ready to go as the crowds flood past the store after each Mass.

It's also a very conservative neighborhood, and the people tend to be uneasy at best and downright hostile at worst about having Jews in their midst. The Catholic newspaper, the Tablet, sells like hotcakes. It's always violently anti-Roosevelt and filled with thinly-veiled anti-Semitism. Although it constantly harps on the Communist Menace, you'd never know from reading it that there was anybody in the world named Adolf Hitler.

Worst of all, as far as I'm concerned, is the fact that I have to wait on them and be polite and servile. If I ever forget to say "thank you" to one of them, they complain long and loud to my father, and then I have to listen to one of his interminable lectures. I'm really not cut out to be a shopkeeper, so I'm glad my parents want me to make a better life for myself. I just wish they weren't so eager for me to become a doctor.

One of the ways I like to keep myself amused is to work out various statistics. In fact, one of the reasons I like to follow baseball (apart from rooting every year for the Giants to make it to the World Series) is because I can spend endless hours calculating percentages, places in the standings, games behind, and so on. True, the next day's papers would have it all, but I have to do it first.

My family has owned five candy stores since we bought our first store at 751 Sutter Avenue in the autumn of 1926. We remained there for a little over two years until December 1928, when we sold it and bought a new store at 651 Essex Street, at the intersection with New Lots Avenue. Four years and a few months after that, early in 1933, we sold that store and bought one on Church Avenue. That one turned out to be more than we could handle, though, so after a month we sold it again and bought a fourth store at 1312 Decatur Street, in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Brooklyn. Just under four years after that, in December 1936, we sold that store and bought the one we own now, at Windsor Place.

So, over the course of some 11.25 years, we've gone through five candy stores. That works out to an average of 2.25 years at each store. If you don't count the Church Avenue store, which was really an experiment that didn't work out, that's four stores in 11.25 years, or an average of 2.8125 years at each store. We've been at Windsor Place now for one year and one month, or 1.08333 years. So, statistically, we ought to sell it and buy another candy store in 1.729 years, which works out to November 1939.

I hope we don't, though. I absolutely hate moving. New stores always look dangerous to me; new neighborhoods unnatural and ominous; new people monstrous. Every time we move into a new place, I hope it's the last time. So far, I've always been disappointed.

Check back with me in November 1939. If we're still here at Windsor Place, you'll know we're beating the odds.

By the way, that photo of me up there was taken four years ago. I'm standing in front of our Decatur Street store.

Blogging about my writing hobby yesterday got me thinking about writing. I dug out my unfinished science fiction novel and read a few pages that I only vaguely remember writing. Writing about a catastrophe that has destroyed photosynthesis, I wrote, "Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer."

The thing I find most striking is that my writing in the novel is nothing like the writing in this blog. Of course, the reason for that is that writing for publication is different than writing for yourself (which is what I'm doing here, even though it's possible in theory that somebody else might eventually read this). When you're writing for a science fiction magazine, your descriptions have to be more colorful, and your vocabulary more expansive.

Here's a sample from Campbell's "The Brain Stealers of Mars", copied out of the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories: "They reached the top of one of the long rolling sand dunes and the country was spread out below them. It looked exactly as it had been from the last dune that they had struggled up, just as utterly barren, utterly bleak, and unendingly red. Like an iron planet, badly neglected and rusted."

That's the sort of writing style you need if you want to write for the science fiction magazines, and I'm afraid I haven't mastered it yet. If all the writing I do is in the blog, I doubt I ever will.

When I talked about becoming a chemist as opposed to a doctor, I didn't mention my writing hobby. There's a good reason for that, of course. I can't imagine wanting to write anything but science fiction, and you can't make a living doing that. There are only three science fiction magazines to sell to, and they don't pay very well.

There's also the fact that I've never finished anything I've ever started writing. A couple years ago, after my father bought me a typewriter, I started writing a novel set in a world where magic works, inhabited by fairies, dwarfs and wizards. I just typed whatever it occurred to me to type, and after forty pages or so I ran down and abandoned it. Later on, I decided to write a science fiction novel, and again I just typed and typed until I ran out of story, and then I abandoned it. Last summer I decided to forget about the novels and write a short story, one that I could actually sell to one of the magazines. I called it "Cosmic Corkscrew" and I started writing it on May 29, 1937. I kept at it on and off until the fall semester started, then I stopped. It's still sitting around somewhere, but I doubt whether I'll ever get around to finishing it.

Of course, this blog could also be considered writing, but for one thing nobody is ever going to read it, and for another thing, I'm not going to get paid for it. Maybe someday I'll try to write another story, but right now, between college and working at the candy store, I don't really have the time.

I wrote a couple days ago that my parents want me to become a doctor. What I didn't write was that I'm not very keen on becoming a doctor myself. When I first started college three years ago, I majored in zoology with an eye toward medical school. There were a couple of incidents that turned me off the idea.

One was the cat incident. During my freshman year, I took a course in zoology, and the lab work involved dissecting animals. I dissected worms, frogs, dogfish, and other animals, working my way closer to the mammals. My friend Sidney Cohen was better at it than I was, by the way. At first I thought it was just because he wasn't as squeamish as I was. I've since realized it's because he's just better at lab work than I am. Anyway, during the second semester, we were assigned to find a stray cat, bring it home, chloroform it, and dissect it. And I did! It sickened me at the time, and the memory still sickens me, but I did it.

During my sophomore year, I took an embryology course that consisted largely of looking at microscope slides of sections of chick embryos and then making drawings of them. Well, as I said, I'm not tops when it comes to lab work, and I'm even worse at drawing. I have no artistic talent at all. I failed the lab portion of the course, and only my good work in the lecture portion allowed me to finish the class with a C-.

Between them, the cat incident and the embryology lab made it increasingly clear to me that I might not be cut out for a medical career. At the end of my sophomore year I switched majors from zoology to chemistry. Chemicals are much more pleasant to deal with than dead animals. I'm starting to think I'll end up becoming a chemist rather than a doctor.

On another topic, the papers today all mentioned the arrival of the first Air Mail flight from New Zealand, on a flying boat called the Samoan Clipper. The world is getting smaller.

I turned 18 today, but it's no big deal. I'm still not old enough to drink (assuming I drank, which I don't), or smoke (assuming I smoked), or vote. I am old enough to volunteer for the military, but I have no intention of doing that. The closest I've come to celebrating was going to see a Yiddish play with my mother yesterday. I understand Yiddish perfectly well, by the way. My parents used to speak it at home all the time when I was younger. They've been in America for fifteen years, now, though, so they tend to stick to English these days. My sister Marcia doesn't understand much Yiddish, and my brother Stanley doesn't understand it at all.

In addition to English and Yiddish, my parents also speak Russian. They never spoke it at home after we moved to America, though, so I never picked it up. A pity.

I don't know whether anybody is reading this, but I've never let that stop me before, and I'm not going to let it stop me now.

My name is Isaac Asimov, and tomorrow is my 18th birthday. I've decided to start blogging about my life, even though nothing ever really happens to me. I'm a junior at Columbia University, majoring in chemistry. My parents want me to be a doctor. When I'm not attending classes at Columbia, you can usually find me working at my family's candy store at 174 Windsor Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn, a couple blocks west of Prospect Park. I have a fifteen year old sister named Marcia (her original name was Manya, but she prefers Marcia) and an eight year old brother named Stanley.

My favorite hobby is reading. I like to read pretty much everything, but my favorite subjects are Greek mythology, history, science, and above all, science fiction. I began reading the science fiction magazines in my family's candy store when I was 9 1/2 years old. My favorite science fiction writers are Nat Schachner, E.E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton and John W. Campbell, Jr., and my favorite science fiction magazine is Astounding Stories.