Asimov on Writing Essays

I have now written over one thousand blog posts about Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. That’s a lot of posts; one a week for over 18 years (albeit with an accelerated rate of five per week during the first few months of the Covid pandemic). I’ve come to think of these posts as mini-essays. I have two roll models: Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a monthly essay about evolution for the magazine Natural History; and my hero Isaac Asimov, who wrote monthly about science in general for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was Asimov who I read as a teenager when I was deciding if I should be a scientist. And it was Asimov who sparked my interest in all the different branches of science, which is one factor that led me to an interdisciplinary subject like physics applied to medicine and biology.

Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright, by Isaac Asimov.

Asimov wrote almost 400 essays for The Magazine of F&SF between 1958 and 1992. I didn’t read these essays in the magazine itself. Instead, he republished collections of them as books and it was these books I devoured my senior year of high school. Here is what Asimov says in the introduction to one of those books, Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977).

When I first began to write my monthly science piece for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction… I thought of them as “science articles.” Gradually, however, there came a shift in my thinking and I began to consider them not articles but “science essays”…

An essay is distinguished from more formal expository works by the personal touch. The author does not hesitate to put himself into the essay; in fact, it would scarcely be an essay if he did not…

If you want to write an essay yourself, you will have to:

1. Have something to say. 
2. Cultivate the knack of saying it informally, but saying it. 
3. Learn to be unself-conscious so that you can get yourself into the essay without blushing or shuffling about uneasily.

Though it’s rather troublesome to get the knack of the essay, once you have it, it is just about the most pleasurable writing there is. 

Science, Numbers, and I, by Isaac Asimov.

Each of Asimov’s essay collections includes 17 of the F&SF essays. In his 1968 book Science, Numbers, and I, he explains

This is my sixth book of science essays taken from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and published by Doubleday, and in each of these six I have exactly seventeen essays. The question therefore arises—why seventeen?…

Back in 1949, when I set about writing my very first novel, Pebble in the Sky, I asked my editor, Walter I. Bradbury, how long to make it.

He said, “Make it seventy thousand words.”

So I did. Ever since, I have considered 70,000 words as, somehow, the ideal length of a book…

Again, when I started writing science essays for the magazine, I asked Robert P. Mills, then its editor, how long he wanted them. He said, “Oh, about four thousand words.”

So I did that too, and that remains the ideal length in my mind for essays.

Well, then, when I collect my essays into a book, I ask myself: How many 4000-word essays will fit into a 70,000-word book? And I answer myself: Seventeen.

I own many of these F&SF essay collections, and they sit on the bookshelf right behind me as I write this. My copies are paperbacks that I bought used, often at garage sales. The paper is yellowing and the spines are cracking, but I treasure them nevertheless. I don’t have them all. Much to my annoyance, I don’t own the very first one, Fact and Fancy, although I remember reading a library copy. Now that I’m older and wealthier than when I was 17, I’m thinking of tracking down and buying copies of the ones I’m missing. It would be my way of honoring and thanking Asimov.

The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.

I’ll end with one more Isaac Asimov quote. In his 1988 collection The Relativity of Wrong, he bemoans the poor quality of the science reported in the mainstream media, the rise of pseudoscience, and the imbalance between good science writing and bad. Then he says

Under the circumstances, anything anyone can do to redress the imbalance even slightly is important. Heaven knows that for all the high quality of my readership, its absolute number is relatively low; that my own efforts to educate reach perhaps one person out of 2,500.

However, I continue to try and I continue, indefatigably, to reach out. There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference—but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort. I have to make my life worthwhile—to myself if to no one else—and writing these essays is one of the chief ways in which I accomplish the task.