Here’s a post that I’ve been holding for a while. It’s another excerpt from Asimov’s autobiography, this one from 1965.

The photo is from a 1967 New York convention. That’s Isaac’s daughter Robyn at the left and I think that’s his son David with his back to the camera. His wife Gertrude is the brunette next to Isaac.

We were home late on the night of November 7, and at 5:21 p.m. on the evening of November 9 the electricity blanked out in our house. Gertrude had just finished cooking dinner (I’ve always had dinner early, a holdover from the Navy Yard days when work was finished at 4:30 p.m.), and she was in fact going to the table with plates of food when it happened.

We had candles in the house, thank goodness, thanks to the big hurricanes of a decade before, and we ate by candlelight in the gathering dusk as I waited for the lights to go on.

I quickly grew annoyed. There was no storm; it was a beautiful night with a full Moon rising; yet night fell completely and the lights did not turn on. It was clearly not our house alone, for the street lights were not on and the other houses in the neighborhood were dark as well.

I called the electric company, with no luck. The line was busy, and it stayed busy.

I thought a sizable section of the city might be out and I was certain that if I could only listen to the radio I’d find out what was happening, but the radios we had all ran on house current, which was out, and we had no battery radios.

Gertrude and the children didn’t mind. They had lit a number of candles and were playing cards, and the fact that they didn’t mind simply increased my own irritation.

Then I had a brilliant idea. I went down to the garage, started the car, and turned on the radio.

For some reason I had trouble finding a station. There was nothing but feeble static. I searched the bands in growing mystification and finally got a very weak voice that spoke of the electricity being off in all New England and New York.

I was horrified, and could imagine only one cause. I turned off the radio and the car engine, walked upstairs, and calmly blew out every candle but one.

I then called Gertrude to one side and said in a low voice, “The electricity is out all over New England and New York and I don’t know where else. This may be a nuclear attack. There’s nothing to do but wait for instructions.”

So we waited all through the first part of the night of the Great Blackout of 1965, fearing that at any moment soldiers might come through ordering us to evacuate or that the glow of a mushroom cloud might appear on the horizon.

But, of course, it was just a failure of the power grid, and at 12:45 a.m. the power returned, having been off for 7½ hours. In New York City, the power did not return till dawn (though the Blugermans had no loss of power at all in their section of the city).

The next day, when everyone swapped stories, Gertrude and the children were furious with me. It seemed that everyone else had had a wonderful and exciting time, having fun in the darkened city—and only we had cowered under the threat of nuclear devastation.

“Who told you to be a science-fiction writer?” demanded David.

— In Joy Still Felt by Isaac Asimov