I got my M.A. but it was strictly a consolation prize in my own eyes, for my test grades were not sufficient to allow me to go on for a Ph.D.

presume that the younger you are when you experience heartbreak, the milder the attack and the cleaner the recovery.

was rejected by all five while still in my junior year at college and when, the next year, I applied again, I was rejected even more rapidly.

On September 2, 1945, the war was over and the United States celebrated V-J Day with wild jubilation. On September 7, 1945, I received my draft notice.

The new group gave themselves a rather long and grandiloquent name but they are popularly known as the Futurians and they were certainly the most astonishing fan club that was ever founded. They consisted of a group of brilliant teenagers who, as nearly as I could tell, all came from broken homes and had led miserable or, at the very least,

On August 1, 1941, I came to Campbell with the idea and he caught fire. He wanted not a single story, but a long open-ended saga, of the fall of the Galactic Empire, the Dark Ages that followed, and the eventual rise of a Second Galactic Empire, all mediated by the invented science of “psychohistory,” which enabled skilled psychohistorians to

But outsideness simply didn’t bother me. I don’t recall ever mourning being left out. I don’t recall ever watching the other kids running about madly and wishing I could join them. Rather, I thought of the possibility with distaste.

As for the audience, knowing from experience they would not understand anything after the first five words, they were prepared only for suffering and attended only because they were expected to.

My failure at chess was really distressing. It seemed completely at odds with my “smartness,” but I now know (or at least have been told) that great chess players achieve their results by years and years of studying chess games, by the memorization of large numbers of complex “combinations.” They don’t see chess as a succession of moves but as a