[Isaac Asimov] is fluent, possessed of meticulous records and journals going back to the days of childhood, impressively organized in his thinking, and apparently tireless. This and more is all apparent at the surface of his massive two-volume autobiography [In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt], which we hope will someday be at least three. Nor is he a stranger to any F&SF reader. Nor, in fact, is it possible to believe that anyone with the slightest interest in SF, in science, or for that matter any portion of the universe of intellection, doesn't already have some depth of friendship with him.

That, I think, is the outstanding one of all of Asimov's qualities as a writer. He is the reader's friend. His concern for your clear understanding of his message, his fondness for you and his trust in your ability to make good use of his message—that gestalt of qualities rises warmly from every paragraph he writes, whatever the mode or the subject.

He is at times bumptious. At times, he does something in his autobiography that he has rarely done elsewhere—he goes on too long after a particular point has been fully made. He displays one or two other less than impeccable aspects of behavior. But he is your friend, and he is paying you the highest compliment of all.

No fool at all, he knows—he knew from the beginning of the project—that no man can be the perfect hero of his honest autobiography, and he trusts you to understand that. You want to know about him, or you wouldn't have opened the book. All right—a wordsmith of his skills could readily have devoted his effort to some dazzling footwork. He could have sailed off on glittering flights of generality and statesmanly pontification, as many do. Or he could have danced an intellectual fan dance with you, replete with enigmatic references to dark nights of the soul, quasi-confidences about famous names whose privacy he could (Ho! Ho!) compromise, delicious scandals he would retail if he weren't so discreet, might retail at some future time…. You know how that goes; you've seen the technique often enough. It's a species of orchestrated performance.

Asimov doesn't do that. He tells you about the events in his life, his responses to them, day after day, plateau after plateau of development, and it's all there. Make of it what you will; there he stands, your friend, paradoxically in the limelight yet, in all this wordage, never "on stage."… He could have done us a tour de force novel about his life, and few of us would have been the wiser. Instead, he hands us his diary.

Oh, some of the pages are glued together lightly. Again paradoxically, although he uses hundreds of thousands of words, some of them devoted to confidences, he eschews gossip. He has apparently made a meticulous effort never to say anything for the sake of poking fun, to make a "harmless" joke at the expense of an uninvolved party, to titillate us with the sort of anecdote that's the stuff of life for the late-night party.

It's not party time in these books. We sit in the afternoon sunlight coming through the windows of a conservatively furnished parlor; we sip tea, and our host responds to our query. Therefore, since life itself sometimes pokes fun, sometimes juxtaposes us with circumstances that are inherently salacious in some sense, there are things our friend does not detail. Given the choice between not telling us the whole of the truth or including even the appearance of deliberate gossip-mongering, he gives us a sufficient outline of the truth and goes on to the next thing in detail. (pp. 68-9)

Let me tell you what I wanted to know. I wanted to know what goes on inside a genius. What I got, of course, is what a genius is willing to say about what he thinks is going on inside himself. This is all anyone can ever get from such a source. But because Asimov has chosen this diarist's approach, standing back and letting us form our own judgments from the proferred data, he has made his essential self fruitlessly accessible in the sense that he rebuts hardly any synthesis one might arrive at. There he is, make of him what you will, and the acuity of whatever you make must depend entirely on its own internal logic. You're dealing with a man who has deliberately drawn no conclusions of his own. So yours have nothing to push against, and had better be self-supporting….

His technical accomplishment in the construction of these books is awesome to me, and few things are truly awesome. (p. 70)

Despite having read [these books],… I still know nothing about his creative methods or about his actual writing procedures.

He tells us about sitting down at the typewriter and working hard; about looking things up in reference books; about editorial conferences in which projects are shaped…. The man sits down, begins to type, continues to type, and when the manuscript is complete, lo, it has effective form and purpose which the mind, through some automatic mechanism of synthesis, imposed on the forebrain which was selecting the particular words and paragraphs. A mind which has produced over 200 books certainly ought to be able to do that.

But what a mind in any case, because look at the result: A structure which is the only structure a multiplex person like Asimov could have used without getting lost in himself, and the only structure which can be friendly and yet preserve our friend's essential core of privacy.

Did he do it that way consciously? Of course he did! A mind of this caliber, doing the thing for which it is particularly trained, does not kid itself. A mind may avoid or distort responses to conscious self-examination—slippery mind—but some totally rectitudinous portion of it delivers an objective running report on what is going on, and I'm sure that Isaac is in excellent contact with all facets of his personality. (p. 71)

[Read his column in the September, 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.] Chatty, informative, witty, useful; you are getting what you came for. The professional writer has delivered what was wanted. He has gone out and examined some external aspect of the universe, and brought back a description of it which we can all handily take away with us. Point to anything—anything at all, in or under the starry sky—express interest, and he will satisfy that interest. Or he will, alternatively, come to you and say "I noticed this aspect of reality, and I thought you might like to hear about it. Now, look where I'm pointing … you see that?… let me tell you what that is."

Not this time. Not this one time, of all the times he has written for us, our friend. There is nothing we can point to, in the infinite reaches of the human mind, that does not first have to be located for us by utterances from the person possessed of that mind. It has no objective reality; all the evidence for its existence is circumstantial. Similarly, he can tell us he is pointing to it, but there is no way we can confirm that. Again, similarly, the very nature of the mind is such that not even the person most intimately connected with it can be objectively sure that what he sees in it now is the way it was.

How much easier, how much more comfortable, how much more satisfactory it would have been for us if someone who was not Isaac Asimov, but in all other respects exactly like Isaac Asimov, had been given the assignment of writing these volumes on Isaac Asimov! But then, of course, we would have been nagged by the thought that this was, after all, only a biography; we would have wanted to hear the same events, or almost certainly more accurate descriptions of those same events, recounted by Asimov himself.

The paradoxes are inescapable, and spiralling, because Asimov could not have helped but know from the very beginning that though there was tremendous interest in having a life of Asimov, once we had it there could only be heightened interest in really having a life of Asimov, no matter how real he made it.

And he did it anyway.

What would you like to know? Would you like to know how it sounds?

It sounds like an earnest, meticulous, ultramethodical person bumping through life…. It sounds like a person directing all his intelligence and energy toward forging places for himself in a sometimes circumstantially obstinate universe. It sounds like a man attaining conditions which ought by all prior logic [to] be happy conditions, but reveal themselves not to be. Or, conversely, benefiting from unpredictable fortune.

It sounds, in other words, like a human being's story. But this is not any other human being. This is a public figure whose stature is founded on public intellection. (pp. 71-2)

[We] don't read a life of Asimov to find out how to write 200 books. The chances of any of us writing 200 books are worse than our chances of landing on the Moon. Nor is writing 300 or 400 books the objective of Asimov's life. The objective of Asimov's life is to think. And, as it happens, to communicate. But there is no one particular thing he thinks about, or even one particular area. He is not a philosopher, not primarily a scientist in the common understanding of that term, not except incidentally a titled expert, not any of the classifiable things. He is, when you come down to it, a child in a room full of unlabelled objects and unexplained events; a room so huge that the walls, the ceiling, and even the floor are immensely far away and lose their features in shadow. He is like us. But he has more energy. Those who preceded us in the room sent out search parties, explorers and librarians who, channeling their energies as they must, proceeded along defined paths and send back messages only about what those paths intersected. The messages come back at us from all sides, linear, narrow, each claiming priority. We don't know what to make of it.

Isaac tells us. Bounding happily from one thing to another, his caracolings intersecting path after path, he puts things together for us. Others tell us what is on the paths. Isaac tells us what is in the room.

And of course that is what we all desperately want to know. So Isaac is valuable to us, rightly held in great esteem, and fully entitled to the rewards we ungrudgingly give him. (pp. 72-3)

Algis Budrys, "The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov" (reprinted by permission of the author), in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 59, No. 3, September, 1980, pp. 68-73.