Now THAT makes me jealous!
My claim to fame; I wrote to Isaac Asimov in 1981 or so, and received a typed postcard in response.
(Edited to add that his home address was listed in the Who’s Who book in the school library.)
Me too!! I wrote to him in 1984 or 1985 and also received a typed postcard in response with his signature. I put it somewhere to save it (probably in a book), but lost track of it when I went off to college.
He was my favorite author in high school, and I was inspired to write him after reading the first two volumes of his autobiography.
I prefer the Adventure series (Island of . . . ., Castle of . . . ., &c). Also liked the Malory Towers books.
I got to go on a picnic with him in 1970. He, and Harry Stubbs (Hal Clement) always came to the MITSFS picnic. That year was Asimov’s last, since he fled to NY for his divorce later that year.
A few years later when I was Picniccom I called him in NY to get a date for it. His superpower was that it never rained on the day he chose for the picnic, so we let him choose even after he left.
I read a TON of Happy Hollisters books as a kid. Every trip to the local library I’d come back with another one. Reading them as an adult they seem extremely sanded down and processed - any time things get anywhere close to interesting or exciting, that’s when the belt sander turns on.
Loved the Great Brain books, a good mix of historical fiction, relationship dynamics, adolescent growing pains, odd local Utah color (I knew what a Z.C.M.I. store was years before I ever set foot in Utah) and just enough wild west type action to keep things interesting. Also great Mercer Mayer illustrations. I’ve always wanted to read Fitzgerald’s adult memoir “Papa Married A Mormon,” but so far have not found a copy.
Alvin Fernald and his almost-workable inventions were fun, Encyclopedia Brown was entertaining, but the Mad Scientists Club was the real deal, confounding the local authorities at every turn by the simple application of raw science in the service of teenage mischief. Those books still hold up well today.
That’s really neat!
I also loved The Great Brain books for many of the same reasons—along with Tom’s exploits, of course. I got them all from the school library in 5th grade, but I located a complete set for my son when he got to be the same age. Not sure if he ever read them, though.
I’m sure I’ve heard of this before. I’ll have to be on the lookout for this as well.
He once said once that it was most upsetting to have some hulking college senior come up to him and say, “I’ve read everything you’ve written since I learned to read then I went back and read everything before I learned as well.”
When I was a freshman in high school, 1964, I found in the library a copy of Only a Trillion, a collection of ten of his science essays mostly, collected from Astounding. Judging by the lack of dates on the checkout slip, it was the first time it had left the library. I checked it out three more times, once a year and when I looked in the final weeks of my senior year, my four were still the only times it had beeb checked out.
I’m not sure why that would be upsetting to him, and it doesn’t actually sound like anything Asimov would say. Although the “hulking college senior” part sounds vaguely familiar to me for some reason.
Do you have any additional context for the story?
I was a freshman in high school twenty years later, and by then he had collected many of his science essays into books that were originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). He ultimately wrote nearly 400 columns for that publication between 1958 until his death in 1992.
Anyway, I loved the columns, and the collections. I can’t remember if I was the only one who checked them out of the school library, but I read every one I could find.
It made him feel old before he was ready to – if anybody ever is.
Oh, that makes sense. Although from what I saw, he always seemed to revel in his “grand old master” schtick.
I was always fond of Asimov’s The Prime of Life, where a fan come up and tells him that not only has this fan been reading him all his life, but so had his father, and his father before that.
And that piece was written in 1966. Time for two more generations of fans before he died.
Asimov had only been publishing for 27 years in 1966. So the grandfather definitely wasn’t reading him as a kid, as the anecdote implies.
I read all 399 of his F&SF articles, and dozens of additional books. Definitely fan territory. But I learned never to believe an anecdote.
Bumping because we watched a 1970s episode of the game show To Tell The Truth, and the mystery person was Leslie McFarlane, who wrote 21 Hardy Boys books. He stumped the panel.
If he’d used words like “My best chums”, “Golly” and “Gee willikers!” I’d’ve known…
Man, I love the Nancy Clue books, but alas, A Ghost in the Closet is the third and last of them. When I saw this I thought I had missed one, but no such luck.
And, as long as I am here, I wanted to call out one of my favorite boy’s books–the “Biggles” books by Capt W.E. Johns. James “Biggles” Bigglesworth was a WWI air ace who went on to have many adventures flying around the world. I recently found an omnibus copy of three of the early novels and re-read them–I thought they were surprisingly well-written, though pretty clearly written down to teen or pre-teen reading levels.
I also loved The Mad Scientists’ Club, and had the Adventures of… and New Adventures of… I recently learned that Bertrand Brinley had written a novel, that was published long after the others, called The Big Chunk of Ice. I had to get it and read it, but it was unfortunately terrible. Probably why it was unpublished so long.
Less well known but just as fun is Johns’ female WWII flying ace Worrals of the WAAF. Remarkably feminist for its era, though not entirely free from a lot of other contemporary prejudices.
Yep, third. She did two other parody books starring Jane Bond, and I must have conflated one.
I doublechecked on Wikipedia and found this in the bibliography:
May Contain Nuts: A Very Loose Canon of American Humor
That’s a humor anthology by Michael J. Rosen. A Maney piece in included but she is in no way the editor.
Bibliographies in Wiki are often very useful and sometimes just screwy.