Humble to the Core : I. ASIMOV: A Memoir, <i> By Isaac Asimov (Doubleday: $25; 562 pp.)</i>

Isaac Asimov was by anyone’s standards a bit of an eccentric. His fiction chronicled the fate of galaxies. Yet he had fantasies of owning a subway newsstand and living within it. He was a rationalist and yet deathly afraid of air travel. The memory of a stray cat he had to chloroform in college, and the guilt, haunted him all his life. His idea of a good time was to sit in a windowless room and write all day. He insisted that he was self-centered. Yet the sole virtue he would claim for himself as a writer was that he was prolific.

Born in Russia, Asimov was brought to Brooklyn by his parents at age 4. As a child he soon realized that his prodigious intellect set him apart. He only had to hear a fact once to know it forever. At age 5 he taught himself to read. He began writing at 11 and by 15 had graduated from high school.

But then his brilliant promise began to sour. In college he found himself only one bright student among many. His grades slipped into mediocrity. He married, not happily. World War II interrupted his education (he was by his account a less-than-competent researcher for the Navy.) When he returned, he found that the nature of chemistry had changed beyond his understanding. He had to struggle to obtain his doctorate.

In 1949 he reached nadir. He had a family to support, a degree that nobody wanted, a poor record as a researcher and he could not find a job. He was, in his own estimation, an abject failure.

Ironically, though he did not know it then, his fortune was already made. Eleven years before, as a brash 18-year-old, he had walked into the office of John W. Campbell, editor of “Astounding” and a man who saw untapped potential in the despised genre of science fiction. In Asimov, a fiendishly bright youngster who read omnivorously and loved 19th-Century novels to the near exclusion of contemporary literature, he found the precise tool for his purposes.

Under Campbell’s tutelage, Asimov produced works of enormous importance to the evolution of the genre. He wrote “Nightfall,” an archetypal tale of a planet whose orbital mechanics brought nightfall only once every thousand years, whereupon society collapsed in violence and madness. He wrote the ingeniously logical robot stories with their famous Three Laws of Robotics. Most of all, he wrote the “Foundation” trilogy, about the fall of a galactic empire and the millennium-long struggle to shorten the Dark Ages through the science of “psychohistory.”

When Asimov first met Campbell, science fiction was a pulp genre distinguished largely by the wretched quality of its prose. Eleven years later, though recognition lagged, science fiction was no longer an inferior version of “real” literature. It was something different, a separate literary line with aims and virtues that more respectable literature lacked. The callow young Asimov would have been perfectly willing to write pulp. Campbell raised his sights and gave him a task worthy his talents. Together they made a revolution.

It never occurred to Asimov that he might someday make a living as a writer, however. In those 11 amazing years, he had earned just $7,700.

Through a fan of his fiction, he obtained a position at Boston University. There, he made two discoveries that were to change his life. The first was that he was a natural-born speaker, a man who could rouse a roomful of bored undergrads to laughter and applause. The second was that he had an astounding facility with nonfiction. He could explain anything to anybody and make it entertaining. Either talent was enough to earn him a living. Together, they made him famous.

I was once at a Science Fiction Writers of America banquet where the keynote speaker, displaying an alarming ignorance of her audience, began by praising “Star Trek” and then wasted several hours on New Age pseudoscience. Asimov was scheduled to speak second. He got up before a hostile and resentful audience and made a beautifully timed joke about his own vanity. Everyone laughed. He then spoke for three witty minutes and sat down. The applause was thunderous. The evening was saved.

It was a glorious demonstration of skill. And it was--the good doctor’s protestations to the contrary--not the act of a vain man.

If anything, Asimov undervalued himself. In “I. Asimov” he wrote that “Nightfall” was not his idea, that it was poorly written, that he didn’t think it was a very good story, but that if it was a good story then he was writing over his head. One of the most popular writers in science fiction, he refrained from writing novels for 15 years, convinced the times had passed him by. Then, when “The Gods Themselves” won both acclaim and awards, it was another 10 years before he could be persuaded to try again. Editors would coax work from him by appealing to his strong sense of loyalty. He invariably claimed that he’d responded to flattery.

Perhaps what Asimov mistook for conceit was gregariousness. He took a child’s delight in praise. When Doubleday held a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his first book, an untimely heart attack threatened to keep him away. He contrived to escape the hospital and presided over the affair from a wheelchair. Still, it’s telling how little of the praise lavished on him over the decades he cared to include in his memoirs, and how much he had for others. “I shall never cease marveling,” he wrote, “over my good fortune in meeting so many wonderful people in the course of my life.”

A brilliant mind, great ambition, and early failure is a sure recipe for a curmudgeon. And what a curmudgeon Asimov could have been! His wit and skill at repartee were legendary. But he (consciously, I suspect) chose to go the other way--toward friendship, loyalty, warmth and affection.

He was quick to forgive, and ready to see the best in anyone. He hated bigotry in all forms. He loved to laugh and joke and sing in public. He never forgot a favor. He doted on his second-and-final wife, Janet, and on his daughter Robyn. He seems to have been a genuinely nice guy.

Asimov believed that the source of his success as a science writer was that he was a generalist, someone who knew a considerable amount about almost everything. But I think his respect for people of all stripes was equally important. In all his hundreds of books, he never condescended to his readers. He liked them. They were his friends, and he knew it, and so did they.

“I. Asimov” is organized in rough chronological order, by topic, which makes it particularly well suited for those who like to dip in and out of a book. It includes a complete listing of his many novels, collections, anthologies and volumes of nonfiction. And it is quintessential Asimov. Those who enjoyed his chatty, lucid and intelligent style elsewhere can buy this book with total confidence. Those who valued his company when he was alive can find solace here and the comfort of the one thing he had which he knew was worth leaving to his friends, both met and unmet--his words.