I, Asimov is the story of a genius who knew he was a genius and basked under the idea of it. I started reading this book because I love to read authors’ autobiographies and Asimov was an author I didn't know much about.
The author talks of his early life experiences up until the 18th chapter and he refers to them every now and then until the end. After that, he names many other authors and publishers, giving each one a short chapter. Among those are Frederik Pohl, John Wood Campbell, Cyril M. Kornbluth. Donald Allen Wollheim, Robert Anson Heinlein, Lyon Sprague de Camp, Clifford Donald Simak, Jack Williamson, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clark, and just about every science-fiction writer.
He says, as a writer, he is not a revisionist and dislikes revising; however, he puts away and saves half-finished work only to go back to it years later. He says money wasn’t important to him but being published was. About his work, he writes, “chief of these (things other than money) is the gift of being able to write what I want to write in the way I want to write it, and do it with comfortable certainty that it would be published. This, Doubleday made possible for me quite early on.” For this reason, although he ends up working with many other publishing houses, he stays loyal to Doubleday until the end.
Although the author was pushed into becoming a medical doctor, he ended up becoming a biochemistry professor and received close to twenty honorary degrees. When he moved from New York to Boston, he found to his surprise Boston to be full of science fiction fans. Boston was the city he met Hal Clements and Ben Nova, who became a lifelong friend.
When the space race with the Soviets took hold, he switched from fiction to non-fiction to help people understand the facts of sciences as his patriotic duty. He insists in several places in the book that he loves to write non-fiction better than writing fiction because he does it so easily with the aid of his “working library,” which means the information in it he uses all the time. He also tried his hand in annotating historical and literary books, guides to science, and mysteries. Still, when things changed and the publishers came to him with the requests of science fiction novels, he began writing science-fiction again. In one or two places, it surprised me to read that he liked writing science-fiction, the least, as he said, “Every other kind of writing is easier than science fiction.”
About science fiction, he writes, “In writing a science fiction novel, you must invent a futuristic social structure which is complex enough to be interesting in itself apart from the story and which is self-consistent. You must invent a plot that only works within that social structure. The plot must develop without unduly obscuring the description of the social structure, and the social structure must be described without unduly slowing the plot.”
He never paid much attention to critics. In fact, about them and the way he writes he says, “Some critics object to this, but there are idiots in every walk of life.”
Although his science-fiction and mystery writing preferences are conservative like that of the earlier writers before him, such as Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie, politically he was a liberal who was also a member and later the head of Humanists’ Society. Among the many clubs he belonged, he loved The Trap Door Spiders, The Dutch Treat Club, and The Gilbert and Sullivan society. The latter is because he had a good ear and voice and he could sing.
Asimov was a good speaker, too. After an unprepared talk on robots became a success, he never prepared for a talk again.
Toward the end of the book when his health was giving up, he talked more on death itself and the death of his friends. Still, at the end when his time was approaching, he declared he had a great life and he lived and worked such as he wished.
The author throughout refers a lot and in detail to his personal life and his relationships with his first wife, his children, and especially his second wife Janet, a psychiatrist, whom he truly liked and who worked with him on several occasions. What touched me the most is the epilogue in the book written by Janet Asimov after the author’s passing. She says in its last paragraph, “Once when Isaac and I talked about old age, illness, and death, he said it wasn’t so terrible to get sick and old and to die if you’ve been part of life completing itself as a pattern. Even if you don’t make it to old age, it’s still worthwhile, there’s still pleasure in that vision of being part of the pattern of life—especially a pattern expressed in creativity and shared in love.”
The book, despite its breadth as a large volume close to 600 pages, has been easy to read for the sincere, conversational tone of it, though a bit on the repetitive side, which is understandable, knowing that the author tended to focus on certain eras and ideas more than others. As to my impression of it, while reading the book, I felt a certain intimacy as if I sat down and listened to the author himself. In the end, I am so glad I bought and read this book. I think it is priceless.
I, Asimov: A Memoir
4.6 | 510 ratings
Price: 23.63
Last update: 01-07-2025
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Joy CagilTalent, Quirks, Interactions, Style, and a Precious Autobiography
JesusLPGCA nice look in the mind of the master.
JCA