Foundation’s Friends

Fifty Years
by Isaac Asimov

I’ve got to start by expressing thanks. I want to thank Martin H. Greenberg for having the idea of memorializing my fifty years in science fiction in this fashion. I want to thank Tor Books for publishing the book. I want to thank all my fellow writers who have contributed stories to this book, and who have, in this way, demonstrated the fact that they feel friendly toward me and kindly toward my works. And I want to thank Janet for contributing, too, in all the ways she does and has.

This is all more than I deserve, for it means I have made my way through life making so many friends and so remarkably few enemies that I must have done something right by accident, and I’m grateful for that more than anything else.

But it’s fifty years! That’s why all this is happening! Fifty years! Half a century!

So let’s see what thoughts this gives rise to

1. Fifty years. It’s a reasonably long time. Merely to live for fifty years is not terribly unusual these days, but many great people have not managed. Joan of Arc died at nineteen. Of the great poets: John Keats died at twenty-six; Percy Bysshe Shelley died at thirty; George Gordon Noel Byron died at thirty-six; Edgar Allan Poe died at forty. Of the great scientists, Sadi Carnot died at thirty-six; Heinrich Rudolf Hertz died at thirty-six; James C. Maxwell died at forty-eight.

When you pass the half-century mark, with all this in mind, you can’t help but feel a bit hangdog about it. The Greeks visualized the three Fates: Clotho (“spinner”), who formed the thread of life; Lachesis (“determiner by lot”), who measured its length; and Atropos (“unswervable”), who cut it, in the end. I thank them all as well. I thank Clotho for spinning such a good life; Lachesis for spinning one that is longer than those of many others far more deserving than myself; and to Atropos for withholding her formidable shears for as long as she has.

2. Fifty years of professional work. But it’s not just fifty years. It’s fifty years in a single profession, that of writing. My first story appeared in 1939 and there has been a regular procession of stories, essays, and books of all sorts ever since.

When Charles Dickens died at fifty-eight, he had been publishing for only thirty-five years. When Alexandre Dumas died at fifty-eight, he had been publishing for only forty-one years. William Shakespeare, who died at fifty-two, turned out all his professional works over a period of only thirty years.

Mind you, I am only talking length of professional life here; I am not talking quality. Anyone work of these gentlemen-DavidCopperfield, The Count of Monte Cristo, or Hamlet is worth innumerable times my entire oeuvre. I know that, so don’t bother writing to inform me of this matter.

Rather, I am merely telling you this in order to explain how grateful I am that I have been allowed a full fifty years at my profession-and still going. Nothing I write can be within light-years of Shakespeare, but this I will maintain as loudly as I can, and to my dying day. Everything I write has given me as much pleasure as anything Shakespeare wrote could have given him, so is not length of professional life something to be grateful for?

3. Fifty years as a science fiction writer. But it’s not just fifty years of professional life, either. It’s this particular professional life. Just think what the last fifty years has meant to a science fiction writer. When I began writing, robots were pure fantasy. So I wrote robot stories freely out of my own imagination. The first one was written in June 1939. I have lived long enough to see robots (in very simple form) become real, and to have my Three Laws of Robotics taken seriously.

Flights to the moon were sheer fantasy in 1939, and my first story in Astounding dealt with attempted rocketry to the moon. I lived to see that become real.

Think of other science fictional standbys that have become real (even if I didn’t particularly write about them myself). There were no computers in 1939, and no television either, though both existed in science fiction. Science was also overflowing with ray-guns, and we have lived to see laser beams.

How fortunate I was to have started when I did and to have lived as long as I have.

—But it all comes full circle. More important than anything else are one’s friends. Foundation’s friends are all my friends, whether they have written for the book, or published it, or bought it or borrowed it. My friends are all those who have read my stuff over the last half-century and have enjoyed it.

I thank you all. I cannot thank you enough.