Isaac Asimov - The Tyrannosaurus Prescription

To my dear wife, Janet, who makes every day a happy day.

It is my job, and has been for fifty years, to put my ideas and opinions on paper, and to get them published for the world (or for as much of it as may be interested) to read.

During the first three years of my efforts, I sent the products of my typewriter to various possible outlets in the faint hope that someone might be willing to offer them a home. More often than not, they came back to me. But some sold, and in 1941 1 published a story called "Nightfall," which made a hit. With that I must have found my voice, for the rejections stopped.

In the first fourteen years of my writing career I published science fiction only. I have never stopped writing science fiction and continue to write it, quite successfully, to this day, but in the early 1950s, I began to write nonfiction as well, first on science, and then on virtually anything.

My reputation grew as a writer who could turn out reliable material very quickly and on almost any subject. Consequently, I never had to peddle anything after "Nightfall." I wrote only on order. And eventually that began to keep me perpetually busy. I have now published well over four hundred books of all kinds (including science fiction, of course) and over three thousand shorter pieces of one sort or another.

Most people who commission essays from me are often content with relatively short ones, perhaps because they suspect that readers are impatient these days with so much else to occupy their minds-from sports, to television, to computer games. As a result, I have found that I have accumulated 101 pieces with an average length of about 1200 words (some shorter, of course, and some longer).

So it occurred to me that I would put them together as a kind of collection into which people could dip almost at random when they have some minutes to spare. Since the pleasant people at Prometheus Books always seem prepared to welcome a collection of miscellaneous essays from me (this is my third with them, after The Roving Mind and Past, Present, and Future), I sent it to them under the whimsical title, The Tyrannosaurus Prescription, and here it is.

Incidentally, I have tried to select the pieces in such a way as to avoid "thought duplication," but this is not always possible. I can't come up with a brand-new point of view for each essay; so, if I speak on two subjects that are somewhat allied, I am liable to repeat some of my points occasionally. Please forgive me when I do.

I have also tried to impose some sort of order on a collection of essays that, after all, I wrote without ever once worrying whether they could be strung together in some sensible way. Naturally, then, my imposed order is imperfect, but I have managed to put them into seven categories. If on reflection you decide that you could have made a better and more logical arrangement, you are probably right.

But I've tried.

As far as my nonfiction output is concerned, I am best known as a "futurist," so a good proportion of the requests I get are for some insight into one or another aspect of the future.

I don't pretend that my view of the future is necessarily correct. In fact, if the misadventures of past futurists are any guide, my vision will prove laughably incorrect. However, I am stuck with it, and, who knows, I may not be too far off the mark.

Incidentally, people who want me to write on the future usually want me to write on those subjects that interests them. I am never successful at convincing them that I don't know enough about a particular subject to write about it. In the first place, they refuse to believe me-they probably suspect that I'm just playing hard to get in order to raise my fee ... which I never do, honest! And, in the second place, how can I plead ignorance forcefully enough when I hate to puncture my own reputation as someone who "knows everything"? After all, I make my living out of that misconception.

As a result, I let myself be talked into doing essays on the future of handicrafts or the future of chemical engineering despite my pious wail that I don't even know anything about the present of chemical engineering. (Most frightening of all was contemplating the future of marriage.)

Any of you, by the way, are free to criticize anything I say. If you do, I may learn something.

The essay on the future of chemical engineering is, by the way, the longest one in the book: 5000 words long. I might not have included it were I not so pleased that I was able to write on the subject at all. (The people I wrote it for were pleased, too.)