The Protean Penman

By Stefan Kanfer

By the end of this year the Library of Congress will have received the 403rd book in a unique collection. Some of the volumes are composed of bawdy limericks: "There is something about satyriasis/ That arouses psychiatrists' biases,/ But we're both very pleased/ We're in this way diseased/ As the damsel who's waiting to try us is." Others are concerned with nuclear physics and organic chemistry: "It is the electron that is mobile and the proton that is relatively stationary . . . Benjamin Franklin had a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right, and he muffed it. Too bad." Some are science fiction -- excursions out in the galactic void or deep within the vessels and sinews of the human body: " 'Watch what's coming.' All eyes turned ahead. A blue- green corpuscle was bumping along ahead of them." Some follow the adventures of Sherlock Holmes in outer space; some track the steps of Albert Einstein in his Princeton office: "He could not believe that the universe would be so entirely in the grip of chance. 'God may be subtle,' he once said. 'But he is not malicious.' "

In addition, there are mystery novels, short stories and a two-volume, 1,500-page autobiography: "I did a Dick Cavett segment on June 3. It was my fourth time with him. This time I was publicizing The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, so I came out with a bra over my eyes . . . It was the silliest thing I ever did on television, and I was sorry I had agreed to do it even as I stepped out onto the stage."

And this is only a partial register. Scores of additional works are listed under such disparate categories as the solar system, the meaning of the Greek myths, the shaping of England, the birth of the U.S. and secular explanations of the Old Testament: "If the Biblical account ((of Jericho)) is taken literally, this is a miracle, but . . . while the defenders watched in fascination at the slow parading about the city, and listened to the awesome sound of the trumpets, they might not have had time to see and hear the very mundane activity of Joshua's sappers slowly undermining the city's walls."

At first glance, these volumes would seem to have nothing in common. In fact, they are closely related. Every one of them was written by the same man.

"The Guinness Book of World Records says that mystery writer John Creasey in England published more than 500 books," says Isaac Asimov. "But it seems fair to say that no one has written more books on more subjects than I." The vertical pronoun frequently occurs in the author's conversation, but there is as much self-concealment as self-promotion in his talk. As he approaches his 70th year, for example, Asimov has come to see himself merely as a "born explainer." Yet explaining implies understanding, and there is very little in this world that Asimov does not understand. If something stumps him, he goes out and buys a book on the subject. Then he stays in and writes a book on the subject. Usually, the volume he reads is full of recondite information. Typically, the one with his name on the cover is a model of clarity, making difficult subjects accessible to the common reader.

By performing this alchemy for four decades, Isaac Asimov has become an oracle, particularly in the world of science. These are, after all, the Years ^ When the Earth Talked Back, and long before the politicians, he was listening. Today readers search works like The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science and Today and Tomorrow and . . . for advice on space programs and the greenhouse effect. Many of them go directly to the source with their questions. If Asimov has respect for the interrogators, he answers thoughtfully, in detail. If not, he has a habit of assuming an abstracted, extraterrestrial manner, as if he had a lunch date on the other side of time.

Asimov is all too frequently barraged by those who confuse Shirley MacLaine's utterances with thought. The interrogations have to do with UFOs, alien visitors, astrological predictions and the healing power of crystals. "Cab drivers mostly," he says, "and passersby. I guess these are what causes them to recognize me." The term these refers to a pair of voluminous sideburns, and they make it impossible to mistake the wearer for anyone else, except possibly Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the U.S. New Age inquisitors remain one of the few puzzles Asimov is unable to crack: "I have never found a way to convince them. They tell me there is 'absolute proof' of aliens landing on this planet. They read it with their own eyes. It turns out they read it at the supermarket checkout counter, trying to escape from reality."

This impatience with pseudo science began some 60 years ago, when little Isaac fell in love with facts. He was introduced to the world of information in his parents' Brooklyn candy store. The Asimovs were culturally ambitious Jewish immigrants from Russia, where their son was born, and the boy made a habit of devouring magazines as soon as they were put in the rack. "So that the publications could be sold later without looking used," he recalls, "I read them with a very light hand. When I was through, they would close as neatly as though they had never been read. To this day I read the New York Times that way. When I am through, you will not be able to tell that it has been in any way disturbed."

The same light hand is evident in the thousands of books that fill his apartment near Central Park. From his 33rd-floor aerie, he and his second wife Janet, a retired psychiatrist, overlook the city they seldom leave. The proof of Asimov's immobility lies in the terrace situated some 40 ft. from his study. Janet tends the little garden. Incredibly, he has never set foot on the terrace, for the man whose Foundation Trilogy centers on a Galactic Empire and ( interplanetary voyages is terrified of heights. He has flown only once: "It was in the Army, and to refuse meant a court-martial." Acrophobia has its drawbacks: he does not visit foreign cities, or even many domestic ones. Fourteen honorary degrees have come his way; he has turned down many others because he hates to travel to any college or university beyond a 400-mile limit from New York City. But this unwillingness to venture far from the word processor also gives the explainaholic a few benefits: more work hours and more books. "My pace has increased through the years," he says. "In the decade from 1950 to 1960, I wrote 32 books. From 1960 to 1970, I wrote 70; from 1970 to 1980, 109 books; and in the current decade, I wrote 192."

The first of those works was a futuristic novel called Pebble in the Sky, in 1950. "I presented a copy to my father," Asimov remembers. "I think it was then that he finally forgave me my failure to get into medical school ten years before." Actually, he was in medical school -- Boston University School of Medicine -- but as an instructor in biochemistry. The meager salary, plus payments for occasional sci-fi short stories, supported Asimov, his first wife and their son and daughter for ten years. It was then that he decided to break for New York City and a free-lance career. But he retained his academic title, and he never really stopped being professorial. As he sees it, the unexamined life is not worth loving: "The moons of Saturn, the Bard of Avon, the mysteries of sex, the behavior of ancient societies -- all have to be analyzed before they can be appreciated." Besides, Professor Asimov has a vision: "I believe that if there's such a thing as God's word, it's rationality, and I have the call to spread it."

Rationality means turning away from the siren lure of mysticism and confronting beautiful theories with ungainly facts. "The so-called New Age," he maintains, "is really a throwback to the early times when we believed in ogres and devils and monsters and evil fairies. We knew so little about the world that it seemed filled with intelligences superior to our own. Naturally, we lived in terror. But now we know so much about the whole universe. Now we can concentrate on real evils."

Such evils, for example, as the assumption that nations are separate unto themselves. Today all countries are interconnected despite their territorial claims, he argues, and "saying that the Japanese have a pollution problem is ! like saying there's a bad leak in your end of the boat." Of course, hundreds of futurists share that insight. Some of them, when pressed hard enough, may even present a solution or two. That is the Asimov difference: without prompting, he offers remedies by the ream. The man who predicted assembly-line robotics in 1939, coined the term psychohistory -- "the prediction of future trends in history through mathematical analysis" -- in 1941, and foresaw the computer revolution in 1950 not only faces tomorrow, he also embraces it.

An aging population? No problem. Put senior citizens back in college: "Under such conditions, accustomed to lifelong learning, why shouldn't they remain creative and innovative to very nearly the end of their lives?"

Dirty air? Look outside the window. There stands the most efficient antipollution device ever made: trees. "They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. What could be more desirable? And they look good in the bargain. Stop chopping down the rain forests and plant more saplings, and we're on our way."

The teeming earth? Simplicity itself: "Colonize the moon. Build space stations. Then go on to populate Mars and the other planets. There is unlimited solar energy out there, and a plethora of minerals and acres of land. Going into the galaxy is not nearly so fantastic as it seems. We are already more informed about outer space than the early explorers ever were about the oceans they sailed on or the lands they discovered."

Ebullience does not mean blindness. Asimov is alarmed by overpopulation, with its insatiable demand for natural resources. He is not sanguine about the medical establishment's inability to find a cure for AIDS: "It may just burn itself out the way the bubonic plague did in the London of 1665. But this tragic disease moves much more slowly. It might take a century to disappear." And wars and weapons continually remind him about the fragility of Spaceship Earth. But in the Asimovian view, that fragility is an echo of his personal history. He was felled by a heart attack in 1977 and underwent a triple coronary bypass in 1983. Manners and habits changed overnight. Although he had a great appetite for high-cholesterol foods and no taste for exercise, he bought a machine that demands the efforts of cross-country skiing. Week by week, he worked himself into shape. En route he totally altered his diet and dropped 50 lbs. If he could overcome his nearly fatal difficulties, Asimov reasons, why can't the world do the same? Solipsistic, perhaps, but plausible. "A hundred years ago," he reminds skeptics, "95% of the labor force was involved in food production or distribution. Experts predicted that once the farms went, the world would be put out of work. If you had told them that in the next century their descendants would be, say, flight attendants or television cameramen, they would have thought you were crazy. The future is full of impossible possibilities. The irony is, those who predict it best are the historians."

So those are the ones Isaac Asimov is currently studying, seated at his TRS 80, beginning the long trek to Opus 500. Working in his customary routine from 7 a.m. to evening, he will pursue a science fiction novel, provisionally titled Nemesis; a "rather large history of science"; a collection of columns for Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine; and a collaboration with wife Janet on a children's book about Norby, the friendly robot. Every so often, he and Janet will saunter downtown for a look at some Fifth Avenue shopwindows. Royalties and lecture fees bring in a high-six-figure income; the Asimovs can indulge themselves. "And we will," Isaac says, taking his wife's hand. "We've done enough work for now. Today we'll try something different. Today we'll charge into Doubleday's and buy somebody else's books."