- - - --;k -~~~1 --- -.4 - - ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ "N -A - --- - - - - - , . w- - s - ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . - -... -- ---..- 4y .n - ; .......---..-.-.-.-.-.-. - 7 -- - - - - - --. - - -- -- - -I- --s Remembering Isaac Asimov Frederik Pohl SFgrandmaster Frederik Pohlco-foundedtheFuturiansfangroup in New York Cityin the 1930sand has recently begunwriting about theearly days of thegenre.Thisfirst installment of his new memoir isabout fellow Futurian Isaac Asimov. The way I met Isaac Asimov (1920-92) was theway Imet almost everybody else who became not only important tome as a teenager but a lifelong friend: like every other kid in theworld, Imet a lotof other kids in those years from, say, fourteen to nineteen in school, in theneighborhood, in theYCL, in the (don't laugh) Olivet Presbyterian Church Thursday-afternoon teenagers' class, which I attended until I was seventeen. But those friends came and went and were gone, while many of theones Imet through fandom were friends all their lives?Isaac, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, DirkWylie, Dick Wilson. In fact, there are one or two?Jack Robins, Dave Kyle?whom I still count as friends, seventy-odd years later, although none of us is very mobile these days, and it's been a while since we got together. I digress. (In fact,you may notice, I do so often.) In those days, the thingwas thatwe kids had been captured by science fiction.And when a burgeoning fandom gave us a chance to meet other captives, we signed up at once. Like most of us in the New York area, Isaac's firstclue that there was away to join others came from reading Hugo Gernsback's magazine, Won der Stories (the successor toAmazing Stories). In an effortto improve sales, Gernsback had started a correspondence club, the Science Fiction League, and allowed somemembers to charter local chap ters. One, theQ (for Queens) SFL,was in the New York area and became thepoint of firstcontact for most of the area's newbies because they'd read about it in the magazine. So theQSFL was where Isaac firstshowed up, butwe Futurians kept an eye on theirnew blood. Anyone who turnedup with an interestin writing SF as well as reading it, we kidnapped; thatwas one of the reasons theQSFL's heads, JamesTau rasi,Will Sykora, and Sam Moskowitz, weren't real fond of us. And Isaac made it clear thathe was definitely going tobecome a professional SF writer, as soon as he figured out how. At thattimeIsaac didn't givemany indications thathe would achieve that ambition,much less thathe would become I*S*A*A*C A*S*I*M*0*V. He was, if anything, deferential. Isaac was born Russian-Jewish, brought to America as a small childwhen his father, who had immigrated early, was at last able to send forhis family. Many of theFuturians had already begun to write SF stories, showing the manuscripts to each other and talkingabout the stories' successes (few) and flaws (many).One or two of us had actually made some tinysales. (Includingme. I had had a trulysappy poem published inAmazing Stories.)A few of us had begun teaming up as collaborators. Isaac yearned, but he had to miss most of that. His parents owned a candy storeat theeastern edge of Prospect Park, and theirchildren had tohelp with thework of running it. Isaac got to ourmeetings when he could, but seldom to the writing sessions. Candy stores are getting scarce in this twenty first century, in Brooklyn and everywhere else. They did sell candy?nickel candy bars at least? but thatwasn't all they sold. They were one of the places where you went foryour daily paper or favorite magazine, or for a pack of cigarettes (or fora single cigarette,price ltf,ifyour bankroll was low), or for a malted or an ice cream cone if, as they mostly did, the store included a small soda fountain.They were definitely a familybusiness, and both Isaac and his sister, Marcia, with a little help fromhis young brother, Stanley, had to be able tohandle all parts of thebusiness. The easiest part was the candy bars; hand over theMilky Way, drop thenickel in the cash register, and the sale was complete. The soda fountain took themost skill, and on hot summer days, when a lot of traffic might appear, itwas usually Isaac's mother...