 I am Simon Borgen. We are with Dr. Isaac Asimov, a biochemist who may be the most widely read of all science fiction writers. He has written 155 books and hundreds of magazine articles and short stories. Dr. Asimov's books are translated wherever books are published, and there is no such thing as an Asimov book that doesn't sell. There is also no such thing as a dull Asimov book, and it would be hard to find a writer with wider interests. His work includes science fiction, Greek and Roman history, mystery novels, fiction and non-fiction for teenagers, and a whole corpus of books interpreting science and technology for the layman. Dr. Asimov is co-authored a medical textbook, and there is Asimov's guide to Shakespeare and Asimov's guide to the Bible as well as a history of the United States. As a professional biochemist, Dr. Asimov is unique among science fiction writers, but it might be more accurate simply to say that Dr. Asimov is unique. He was born in Russia near Smolensk and brought to New York at the age of three. He was nine working in his father's candy store in Brooklyn when he sneaked a copy of amazing stories from the magazine stand and confronted spaceships for the first time. He had already scribbled his first novel, The Greenville Chums at College, into a five cent copy book. A brilliant student and possessed of a phenomenal memory, Asimov entered Columbia University at fifteen. He sold his first science fiction story at eighteen. By the time he had worked as a Navy chemist during World War II and returned to Columbia to get his doctorate, he was earning his living by writing science fiction. He sold his first book in 1949, just as he joined Boston University Medical School to teach biochemistry. After ten years of teaching, Dr. Asimov found that it was confining to be able to write only on weekends and he quit teaching so that he could devote full time to writing. Dr. Asimov's readers will no doubt find it painful to think of how much they might have lost had Boston University continued to claim five-sevenths of Dr. Asimov in the past fifteen years. At Dr. Asimov's current rate of writing, he will have produced two hundred books by 1980. He isn't likely to tire or to slow down. Dr. Asimov's idea of a vacation is being left alone at his typewriter. Dr. Asimov, at a time when science and technology are producing the almost incredible every day, how does a science fiction writer stay ahead of things? Well, he doesn't really have to. I mean everything that science does gives him new plots. Right now, for instance, a science fiction writer can write perfectly amazing stories concerning black holes. Five years ago, the science fiction writer never heard of black holes. And yet, many people who look back to what was predicted by science fiction writers in the 1930s, simply because these things have arrived, they believe that science fiction writers are out of anything to write. Well, you're right. You see, people think that what we used to write about is what we have to keep on writing about. Not at all. What we wrote about in the old days is now passe. We'll write about new things. I think you said somewhere along the way that whereas you used to write about these things in amazing stories, now you write about them in the New York Times. You write about colonies on the moon, for instance, about robots. Well, back in 1939, you published a story that dealt with the first flight around the moon and back. Frank Borman and his Apollo 8 crew actually carried this mission out in 1968. You placed the story in 1974. How does a science fiction writer feel when something like that happens? Well, it makes him feel very good. I'm a little annoyed with myself because I was so conservative. You see, I'm six years behind and also I didn't allow for all the various things we did before then, men in flight, men docking, mid-course corrections. I just had someone get into a ship and go around, one man. And it makes me feel as though I wish I could do it more often. But as a matter of fact, if you go through all my books, you'll find that the number of things I've spoken about that have really come true are very small. That probably goes for other science fiction writers as well. Oh yes, when people talk about how science fiction writers predict the present, it's because they've gone through a large corpus of work and picked out certain things. We can't just predict. There isn't enough story material and straight prediction. We make up futures. It doesn't matter whether we really think they'll come to pass or not. But we ask ourselves only, will this be interesting to deal with? Will this make a nice story? If some of them do come true, well, good. I think you wrote an essay called Escape from Fantasy to characterize what you thought the essence of science fiction was. Most people think it's a flight into fantasy. I think the title is Escape to Reality. Escape to Reality, I'm sorry. Well, that's because you see, when you think of the future, you try to make it as plausible as possible. Back in 1933, for instance, there were science fiction stories dealing with a world in which all the oil and coal had been burned up. Well, the youngsters who read that story in 1933, including myself, took it seriously. At least I did, and I said, my goodness, what happens if we do burn up all the oil and coal? That's the first time that ever occurred to me that this might be a problem. So that on and off, I worried about using up our fossil fuel supplies for the last 40 years. And most of the world, virtually all the world, has only started worrying about it a few months ago, you know? I read a comment recently by a Russian scientist about an HG Wells story. It's called When the Sleeper Wakes. The hero awake who has gone to sleep in London in 1900 wakes up 200 years later in 2100, and he finds that London's power is being supplied by huge wind-powered machines over London, and there are airplanes about the size of the first DC-3s. And the scientist's comment was, the imagination of science fiction writers is certainly limited. Well, that's true. Back in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story set a thousand years in the future, in 2848. And in it he had transatlantic aeronautical voyages, only in balloons going a hundred miles an hour. In other words, in his day there were balloons, so his vision of the future was of faster balloons. If a New Guinea native thought of a future in which you could communicate between continents, he'd think of very loud drums, you see. It's very difficult really to visualize the real future. Well, this raises the question of why science fiction writers are constantly going into outer space and to the moon and past them to the planets. Do they go there because that's where the future is going to be or was going to be? Or do they go there because as a device of the novelist to set up a controlled environment? I suppose there's a little truth in both. The entire history of mankind has been that of crossing the hilltop to see what's in the next valley. Mankind has been exploring the earth over thousands of years. Somehow, just because we have now explored the entire earth, even Antarctica and Greenland, it seems a shame to stultify this impulse of ours. And the next thing to explore is the moon and the planets. That's one thing. It's a thought of an analogy from the past, an extrapolation forward. But then another thing, the environments on these other planets are made to order for our purposes. Strange environments, the possibility of new forms of life. This takes the place of stories in the old days about mysterious islands in the Pacific or hidden civilizations in the Amazon Valley and so on. You couldn't produce that kind of heightened consciousness if you set your story in New York City, for instance. No, it gives us an interesting background. Then, of course, no matter how strange the background is, what goes on in the foreground should, if it's a good story, illuminate the human condition. One of your stories, one of your books suggested something so fantastic as a nuclear submarine floating within the bloodstream so that the crew could do an operation on the human brain. What story was that? That was a fantastic voyage and it was an unusual book of mine in the sense that I'm not responsible for it. They made the movie without me, but then they came to me and asked me what I novelized it. And after a certain amount of discussion, I agreed to. And I wrote the novel based on the movie script. Is there anything to the suggestion, scientifically, is there anything to the suggestion of that story that you can experiment on biological miniaturization? No, I don't think really that's possible scientifically. The movie people didn't worry about it. They simply reduced everything in size. But when I came to write the book, knowing a little something about atomic physics, I realized that if you allowed these miniature human beings to be built up of ordinary atoms, there just simply wouldn't be enough atoms in their tiny, tiny brain to make the brain complex enough to be a human brain, so that I also had to miniaturize the atoms as well. Now, there is no known way of doing this and I had to use a kind of plausible gobbledygook in the book to account for it. But then you see, in science fiction, you're allowed to depart from scientific possibility, provided you know that you're departing from it and can't explain it. The reader will go along with you into the realm of fantasy if you'll give him an excuse. But to do it without realizing you are going into fantasy is insulting to the intelligent reader. I expect they came to you, however, at least partly because of your familiarization with the human body after all your professional biochemist. Well, they wanted somebody who would make the entire project sound plausible and I did my best and they felt I was qualified to do that and I hated to tell them anything else, so I said, yes, I am. Dr. Asimov, a writer who turns out four thousand manuscript words a day, book upon magazine, article upon book, would seem to be in some kind of race. Well, I'm not. It seems so, but it isn't so. Actually, what it amounts to is that I'm not happy except when I'm writing. It's almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly. And so I'm naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don't type. Deadlines hold no terror for you? No, because I know that if I have an article to write, I can generally write it without trouble whenever I sit down. So if there's an article that must be written within, say, two weeks as there happens to be one, I'm not concerned because sometime before the two weeks is up I'll sit down and whatever day I sit down on, by the end of that day the article will be written. A colleague of yours once said that if he read all of your books he wouldn't have time to write any himself. Well, it's reversed in my case. Considering how much I write, I'm having very little time in which to read anyone else's. I think it's a book, a book a month. For the last four and a half years it's been a book a month. I mean, it's not something I've set myself as a goal. I just worked it back and I said, my goodness, it's a book a month. I think there's a general impression that the best science fiction writers are American and British. Is that your opinion? Well, it's hard for me to say. I read science fiction only in English and my own surroundings, my own circle of friends of all the English-speaking science fiction writers. But I know for instance that right now Stanislaw Lem, a Polish science fiction writer is considered one of the best in the world. And there are science fiction writers in the Soviet Union that are highly thought of. And I suspect that in time to come more and more there'll be a diminution of the English-speaking domination of the field. More and more we will be aware of non-English science fiction. Dr. Asimov, would you have been in favor of sending a science fiction writer to the moon as an astronaut? Well, maybe, but not this science fiction writer. I'm not only too old, I'm too scared. Well, what might we have gotten that we haven't gotten assuming that a science fiction writer qualified as an astronaut? I would say we might have gotten a more dramatic description of what had happened. The astronauts we do have tend to be extremely stable individuals who simply by the mere fact that they're not afraid to undergo this to me absolutely terrifying experience means that they can look at everything where they kind of calm eye. In addition to which they are not chosen for their poetic flights of the imagination. There's no reason they should be so that it is enough for them to describe something as G, it's beautiful. And if you had a science fiction writer there, he might have instead of G, it's beautiful written some 5,000 words of gorgeous description. Memorable prose. Yes. I'm interested and I think everybody is interested in the three laws of robotics. Could you explain those? Well, back in 1939 I began writing Robert's stories. And by the time I'd written two and three there was a pattern in these stories which John Campbell the editor of astounding science fiction and my literary father pointed out to me. He said I was having my robots behave as though they were guided by three laws. The first law was that a robot couldn't hurt a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. The second law was that a robot had to obey orders given it by human beings provided that didn't conflict with the first law. And the third law was that a robot had to protect its own existence except where that would conflict with the first two laws. And after that I always use them and the stories evolved out of those three laws, out of the mutual contradictions, out of the ambivalences, the incongruities and so on. The interesting thing is that scientists say that when robots are built that they may be built according to these laws and also that almost all science fiction writers have adopted them as well in their story. That's true about the science fiction writers adopting them. They are now taken for granted. No writer actually quotes them except myself, but the readers are so used to it now that they know it and they take it for granted. And somebody writing in an architectural journal pointed out that these laws hold for tools generally. Number one, a tool must be safe to use. And two, provided it is safe to use it's got to do what you want it to do. And third, provided it is safe to use and it does what you want to, it's got to last. But could your three laws of robotics be overloaded on the side of humanism? There are those who believe that the machines we create are going to be Frankensteins. Well, of course the three laws of robotics were originally invented by me in order to avoid the Frankenstein motive because before I wrote my stories, most robot stories were filled with this Frankenstein bit about the robot destroying its creator. There are some things that men were not meant to know. However, having worked with the three laws for now, for 35 years practically, I was asked to write a robot story to end all robot stories so I wrote one in which robots became so intelligent by any reasonable definition. They defined themselves as human beings, you see, so that now the three laws of robotics became the three laws of humanics. And we're right back to the Frankenstein motif. I received letters from readers saying, does this mean you're never going to write any more robot stories? And I wrote back saying, don't worry, if I think of a good robot story, I'll write it anyway. Tell me, does it disturb you that science fiction has been taken over by the academicians? I think there are about 100 universities that now teach science fiction as literature. There are students in various universities writing doctoral thesis about Isaac Asimov. There are science fiction textbooks. Yes, it is frightening for two different reasons. In the first place, as you say, people are now getting master's degrees and working for their doctorates analyzing my stories. There is a course given in the University of Dayton, Ohio, entitled The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, three points, three college credits. In fact, the guy who gave that course is publishing a book on my science fiction and it frightens me because I'm not sure that I can stand up under all this scrutiny. Well, the question is whether the body of science fiction can stand up as well, whether the delight will remain. One of the professors said, since I've been teaching it, I don't enjoy reading it as much. Well, you know, that's a very important factor when I started writing it. I stopped enjoying it as much as I did before. And eventually, after I've been writing it for 20 years, I found I wasn't reading science fiction anymore. That's one of the reasons I don't write as much now as I used to. I feel the field has gotten away with it, away from me. And with academicians interested in, the field has become so quote, literary, that it frightens me now. I feel I'm not competent to write science fiction because I don't know that much about literature. What is it that draws readers to science fiction? My own feeling is that science fiction is the relevant literary form for today. Of all the different types of fiction, science fiction is the only one which takes its basic assumption that societies are going to change and which sets its stories against a fundamentally different society. There's something with great differences in it, whether it's time travel, whether it's overcrowdedness, whether it's space travel, whatever. It's not the present society. Well, there was a phrase you used, and I think what was your very first novel, you talked about the awful powers of darkness. Is the whole question of magic and fantasy and mystery and myth, what brings people to it as well? Some people have that theory, but I don't. Because there is real fantasy now. There are, for instance, the Lord of the Rings, that trilogy. There is the Tokyo one. Watership Down Right Now is an excellent fantasy by a fellow called Adams. People who want that can still find it undiluted. No, I think science fiction refers to different societies which are connected to ours through scientific and technological change. There's always that feeling that we are heading right now rapidly into changing societies. People who are young people today know that when they're middle aged, life will be nothing like what it is now. And science fiction gives them an opportunity to try on different societies. It's the only thing that's relevant. Anything which deals with the world of today is going to have no meaning to young people of today when, say, 30 years from now. A personal note, Dr. Asimov, it's been known to your friends for years that you were almost totally allergic to travel and that you don't like airplanes. In fact, you don't ride on airplanes. Yes, I'm afraid that's so. Everyone thinks it's very funny because in my stories, I go to the ends of the galaxy and yet I won't get into an airplane. Well, there's the question of one of the most eloquent advocates of technology refusing or resisting one of the most common products of it. Well, there may be a connection. I mean, going to the ends of the galaxy, I feel a sort of anticlimactic to fly to another city. Actually, I'm not very brave and I'm afraid of airplane crashes and I don't like to travel anyway. It keeps me away from my typewriter. Dr. Asimov, most people when they think about the future try to reach out to the year 2000, let's try 500 years from now. What kind of planet do you see? One of two, depending on what happens by the year 2000. If by the year 2000 we have not solved the problems that face us today, then I would say 500 years we'll see a world containing a technological civilization and ruins. In which there will be a relatively small number of human beings sort of surviving and with New York City as the most magnificent ruin in the history of the human race. If we succeed in solving our problems today, then 500 years now we can well be living in a kind of utopia, a world with a relatively small population, carefully husbanding their resources, with a working colony on the moon and perhaps on Mars reaching out to the entire solar system, taking advantage of advances in technology we now can't even imagine, living under conditions which when they look back on the present, they will be horrified and wonder how we could have survived. Thank you Dr. Asimov. I am Simon Borgen.