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"betical order, sir?" He was sent to the principal, but he felt the quip was worth it. |
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Asimov finally gave up his mission to educate the masses. He traced his decision to a time when he was in the Army in Hawaii, waiting for the H-bomb tests at Bikini. A couple of soldiers in the barracks were listening to a third explain, inaccurately, how the atom bomb worked. |
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Wearily, I put down my book and began to get to my feet so I could go over and assume the smart man's burden and educate them. |
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Halfway to my feet. I thought: Who appointed you their educator? Is it going to hurt them to be wrong about the atom bomb? |
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And I returned, contentedly, to my book. |
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This does not mean I turned with knife-edge suddenness and became another man. It's just that I was a generally disliked know-it-all earlier in my life, and I am a generally liked person (I believe) who is genial and a nonpusher later in my life. . . . |
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Why? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps it was my surrender of the child-prodigy status. Perhaps it was my feeling that I had grown up, I had proved myself, and I no longer had to give everyone a headache convincing them that I was, too, smart. |
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One other way in which Asimov learned to cope socially was his adoption of a flirtatious attitude toward women all women what he called his "all-embracing suavity," by which he meant that he was willing to embrace any female within range and usually did. From a gauche, inexperienced, tentative young man he turned into a good-natured, public Casanova with a "penchant for making gallant suggestions to the ladies." Yet Asimov speculated about his behavior as an adult that "you don't really change much as you get older." The uncertain young man might still have been there inside the "all-embracing" older one. |
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Asimov denied being anything other than direct and clear in his writing, and that may apply to his personal life as well. Certainly he was open about his life, even on those matters that most people are most closed about: money and sex and, more important to Asimov, his writing. I asked him in our interview if his disclaimer of knowledge about the craft of writing wasn't a pose. Clearly, he had thought about it, I pointed out. He had criticized other people's stories in his teenage letters-to-the-editor days; he had noticed Clifford Simak's way of leaving space to indicate a break between scenes and, after having had it explained, had adopted it himself; he had even attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference a couple of times as a member of the faculty. Asimov responded that he did not deliberately set up a pose. He really thought he did not know much about writing, but, as he pointed out in |
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