The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (39 page)

I had business to transact in Los Angeles, so Carol went on ahead and I checked in at the Century Plaza. Unfortunately, the people I most needed to see were out of town, and Los Angeles itself was in an early fall heat-and-smog cycle. They laid on a small earthquake for me, which was interesting enough because it was the only one I have ever experienced (not counting the odd volcanic shudder on Mount Vesuvius), but the visit was a washout and I caught a redeye flight home, feeling tired, gritty, and depressed.

Hawaii was a letdown from Japan, California from Hawaii, New Jersey from California; things slid downhill, all together, like a glacier creeping down a mountainside. Every day seemed a little grayer and grimier than the day before. A few weeks after I got home I was invited to take part in a New York Academy of Sciences planetology meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria. Even that went badly. October, November, December . . . do you know, I cannot think of anything good that happened anywhere at all in those last few months of 1970. Wherever I looked, things were grimier and more unrewarding than I could remember. I picked up a cold somewhere or other, and it turned into a persistent, hacking cough. I began to put on weight. Not just a little plumpness; I was fat, nearly forty pounds more than the 175 I had weighed all my adult life. Carol and I were growing more remote every day. I fiddled with a little writing, but it was hard and scant and slow, and none of it came out to suit me. I began to have money troubles. I could hardly believe that the money was running out; but some money that was due was slow coming in, some that I had expected turned out not to be going to happen, work that I had contracted to do wasn't getting done, and so I wasn't taking in very much. I let my bank balance get low. I sold the little stock I owned—I know full well that I am too ignorant of the market to invest sensibly in securities, so I don't invest at all; but I had accumulated a little as payment for services rendered. And Christmas came along, and there were four kids expecting goodies; and there was a point right then at Christmas when I was so broke I was going around the house emptying the jars and drawers of pennies tossed in them, to roll and take to the bank and convert to bills. The last week or two of 1970 and the first of 1971 were about the lowest point in my life. Nothing went well. Everything went badly. I felt exhausted most of the time, and the cough became a griping hack, and I began to think that there was a good chance that all the half million or more cigarettes I have smoked in my life were finally performing as advertised and I might very well be not far from dying. The worst part was that I didn't really mind. I found so few satisfactions in my life just then that departing from it was no sweat. I knew, in the forebrain part of my mind, that life might seem worth living again: that there might very well be fun to be had, relationships to explore, stories to write in which I might even feel pride, rewards to be obtained. But it seemed to me that it was highly unlikely that any of it would be
new
. I had tasted all those things already, and even though I recognized that I might enjoy tasting them again, it seemed little more than a summer rerun of a life I had already lived and didn't especially want to repeat.

Perhaps it is what is called the "male menopause." I don't know. I was fifty-one, which is the right time for it, I suppose.

Then a fellow knocked on my door and wanted to sell me life insurance.

I thought it was pretty funny. I really didn't think I was a good prospect; was a little sorry for him for wasting his time. But he was as persistent as an insurance salesman is supposed to be, and more or less as a joke I agreed to take the physical. I passed. I was astonished: no lung cancer, no emphysema, no hypertension, no nothing? I was, to be sure, a little overweight, the doctor said, and recommended I lose some.

So I went home, and paid my premium, and poured myself a cup of coffee and thought things over. It occurred to me that I might go to my own doctor and see what he had to say. I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to tell me. Assuming he didn't find something terminal, he would say I should lose weight, get more exercise, drink less coffee, smoke fewer cigarettes, and sleep more regularly. All right, I thought, let's try a little of that. So I did. And after a little while I began to feel somewhat more alive. I sat down at the typewriter and tried stringing some words together: they strung pretty well, I thought.
*
I took the family to the Soviet Union, partly on business, partly because I'd promised my son I'd take him to any country of which he learned to speak the language (expecting French or Spanish; but he picked Russian), and that was almost as high a spot as Japan.

And after a while it came to me that I had reenlisted for another hitch with life.

Reality is a terrible annoyance to a novelist. It does not come in tidy packages. What I want to do is to shape the events of my life to fit a dramatic pattern. They won't shape. Pieces don't fit in, others protrude and spoil the symmetry. I don't even know how to end this story. The time to stop, says Mark Twain, is with a wedding or a funeral. I am not presently in the market for either, but I think it's time to stop.

By now it is clear to the slowest observer, even to me, that I have committed my life to science fiction. It is fair to ask why. I mean, I'm smart enough. I could have had several quite different careers, and some of them, at least at the time, looked a lot more attractive in terms of dollars and pride. When you come right down to it, is making up lies about things that have never happened really a respectable way for a grown man to spend his days?

I have been asked that question.
 
And yes, dear friends, there have been times—a whole lot of times, though not so many of them recently—when I have asked it of myself. The question is rational enough, but it has only a nonrational answer: love. I do it because I'm in love. A long time ago, maybe when I was twelve, maybe even younger, I fell in love with writing science fiction. Through many turpitudes and dalliances, I have stayed in love ever since.

Let me tell you how falling in love happens, because of all the points of decision human beings ordinarily encounter, the act of falling in love is the least rational and the least understood. It goes like this:

John and Joan meet—it doesn't much matter where, or how. They notice each other. What John notices about Joan is that she smells good, has an inviting figure, laughs nicely when he wants her to laugh, and looks upon him with a rewarding show of interest. What Joan notices about John is much the same. On these flimsy data they each construct a private image of the other. They make each other up! What they know is very little. They fill in the rest of the picture by inventing qualities to match some private daydream. John has always wanted a girl to listen to violin concerti with him, who liked to make love in the morning, willing to walk five miles at a clip just to see what a stroller might see. He doesn't know these things are true of Joan. But he doesn't know that they aren't, either, and maybe? who knows? So he lays on her the traits he would like to find; going to bed with her will be like so, lounging on a beach will be thus; and the rest of the date, maybe the rest of the year or the rest of the life, is spent mapping reality against the hypothesis. The fit is never perfect. But as long as it is not too discordantly wrong, the love lasts.

And that is how it was with me and science fiction. When I first fell in love, I did not know that the creature sweated and snored. I just loved, and dreamed.

It is now clear that that first infatuated fantasy was very wrong in detail. I had the magnolious notion that there was some secret skill to writing science fiction. All sf writers had learned it, I supposed. Once I had acquired it, it would always be there, like riding a bicycle, so that writing the second story would be easier than the first, and the third easier than the second. . . . It isn't that way at all. Barring a few monkey tricks, some of which I learned with great effort and then had to unteach myself with even more, it is as hard for me to write today as it was when I was twelve. I would like to think that the end product is by some standard better, but the act of producing it has not become effortless with time. There is more drudgery than I had expected. There is a hell of a lot more frustrating boredom. But there is something else that I had not anticipated, and that is that I need it. This drudgery, this frustration, this tedium of staring at a typewriter and wishing I knew which key to hit next—this miraculous, liberating sensation of lightness and joy, when, once in a great while, it comes out almost as it should—I need it to live on.

Is spending one's life writing science fiction rewarding?

Why, sure. In all the ways I have said and many more. But that doesn't have much to do with it. You don't love a person just because she rewards you. The person is rewarding because you love her. So it is with me and science fiction. For the gifts she has given me I am truly grateful. But I loved her on sight, giftless, and it looks as if I'll go on doing it as long as I live.

Red Bank, New Jersey

1977