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Page 13
while he told me stories") came at a difficult time: he was in the middle of second grade. Moreover, his father had admired his son's abilities from an early age. When Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five, his father asked him how he had done it, and Asimov replied that he just figured it out. "That gave my father the idea that there was something strange and remarkable about me; something he clung to for the rest of his life." But the high regard in which Asimov's father held his son's abilities meant that when the schoolboy brought home less than perfect marks from school, he could expect his father's disapproval for not living up to his potential. In his autobiography Asimov recalled many instances of his father's disapproval, few of his approval.
His mother also spent much of her time in the candy store with customers, or with her two younger children. She had a terrible temper, Asimov recalled, and unlike his father "raised her hand to me any time she felt she needed a little exercise. . . ." He also recalled, seemingly without rancor, being beaten with a rope his mother kept in her closet. When he mentioned it to his mother in later life, she did not remember it. His parents, though a devoted couple, were not demonstrative. There were few if any expressions of affection between them, and Asimov presents the births of three children as the only proof that there was. Certainly Asimov had reason to distrust emotion and to seek rational explanations for why he was deprived of parental closeness, perhaps even love.
Asimov, nevertheless, always knew that he was his parents' favorite, and his brother knew it as well, apparently without resentment. Asimov spoke bitterly about the series of candy stores but remembered his father and mother with great fondness. The family was always in close touch until the death first of his father (in 1969, at the age of 72) and then of his mother (in 1973, at the age of nearly 78), even though, because of his fear of flying, Asimov did not go to see his parents after they moved to Florida a year before his father's death.
In his typical rational way, he looked back upon his childhood as a generally happy period: "I know perfectly well it was a deprived one in many ways, but the thing was, you see, I never knew it at the time. No one is deprived unless and until he thinks he is."
A more general mystery than the origin of Asimov's traits and neuroses is why certain young people turn to reading, and sometimes writing, science fiction. Asimov is a case study. When he began reading science fiction, the number of readers was small Damon Knight has called science fiction the mass medium for the few but intensely involved.

 
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