Writing is easy now, and is ever more satisfying. I keep what amounts to a seventy-hour week, if you count all the ancillary jobs of proofreading, indexing, research and so on. I average seven or eight books a year, and this book, The Early Asimov, is my 125th book.
And yet, I must admit there has never been, since 1949, anything like the real excitement of those first eleven 'Campbell years,' when I wrote only in my spare time, and sometimes not even then, when every submission meant unbearable suspense, when every rejection meant misery and every acceptance ecstasy, and every fifty-dollar check was the wealth of Croesus.
And on July 11, 1971, John Campbell, at the still-early age of sixty-one, while watching television, died at 7.30 p.m. quietly and peacefully, without any pain at all.
There is no way at all to express how much he meant to me and how much he did for me except, perhaps, to write these books evoking, once more, those days of a quarter century ago.