Isaac Asimov and Psychohistory

My friendship with Isaac Asimov was episodic. We met at science-fiction conventions and corresponded from time to time, though that tapered off as his answers came back so quickly I began to feel that I was taking time from his work. We had met first at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in 1953, where I remember him (and his first wife Gertrude) as part of a group that went out to dinner at a local restaurant, and I was impressed by his wit and cordiality as well as by his reputation. He had been publishing science fiction since 1939 and had been a star since 1941 when “Nightfall” was published as a cover story in Astounding Science Fiction. His place in the science fiction firmament had been confirmed by his robot stories and by his Foundation Trilogy, which had become one of the central building blocks of science fiction. Perhaps our longest companionship was when Isaac and I joined several others for a car trip from New York to the Cleveland World Science Fiction Convention of 1955, where Isaac was guest of honor. We seemed to spend a good deal of time together at the Convention. “Why do we spend our lives among strangers, who don’t know what we do or care, so that we can spend three or four days a year among the people we love?” he told me then. Whenever we met after that at occasional conventions or in New York when I was visiting editors or attending science fiction functions, Isaac would hug me and tell me how I didn’t look any older, and I would respond that my novel The Immortals (Gunn 1962) had been autobiographical.