Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

Plotting

Every once in a while, an article about me appears in a newspaper, usually in the form of an interview. I don’t go looking for these things, because I hate the hassle of being photographed (which, these days, invariably goes with interviews) and I hate the risk of being misquoted or misinterpreted.

Nevertheless, I can’t always turn these things down because I’m not really a misanthrope, and because I do like to talk about myself. (Oh, you noticed?)

As a result of one such interview, an article about me appeared in the Miami Herald of August 20, 1988. It was a long article and quite favorable (the headline read “The Amazing Asimov”) and it had very few inaccuracies in it. It did quote me, to be sure, as saying that my book The Sensuous Dirty Old Man was “nauseating.” That is wrong. I said that the books it satirized, The Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man, were nauseating. My book was funny.

It also quoted me as saying that I considered “Nightfall” to be my best story. I don’t, not by a long shot. I said it was my “best-known “ story, a different thing altogether.

Usually any reporter who interviews me is willing to let it go at that, but the Miami Herald reporter was more enterprising. She asked questions of my dear wife, Janet, and of my brother, Stan, who’s a vice-president at the Long Island Newsday. Both said nice things, but then they both like me.

However, she also consulted someone who teaches a course in science fiction at Rutgers University. Her name is Julia Sullivan, and I don’t think I know her, though it is clear from what she is quoted as saying that she is a woman of luminous intelligence and impeccable taste.

She praised my clarity and wit, for instance, but I’m used to that. The thing is, she is also quoted as saying about me that “he surprises me. Sometimes I think he’s written himself out, and then he comes up with something really good…He has the greatest mind for plot of any science fiction writer.”

That’s nice!

I can’t recall anyone praising me for my plots before, and so, of course, it got me to thinking about the whole process of plotting.

A plot is an outline of the events of a story. You might say, for instance, “There’s this prince, see? His father has recently died and his mother has married his uncle, who becomes the new king. This upsets the prince who hoped to be king himself and who doesn’t like the uncle anyway. Then he hears that the ghost of his dead father has been seen-”

The first thing you have to understand is that a plot is not a story, any more than a skeleton is a living animal. It’s simply a guide to the writer, in the same way that a skeleton is a guide to a paleontologist as to what a long-extinct animal must have looked like. The paleontologist has to fill in the organs, muscles, skin, etc. all around the skeleton, and that’s not feasible except for a trained person. Hence, if you give the plot of Hamlet to a non-writer, that will not help him produce Hamlet or anything even readable.

Well, then, how do you go about building a story around the plot?

1) You can, if you wish, make the plot so detailed and so complex that you don’t have to do much in the way of “building.” Events follow one another in rapid succession and the reader (or viewer) is hurried from one suspense-filled situation to another. You get this at a low level in comic strips and in the old movie serials of the silent days. This is recognized as being suitable mainly for children, who don’t mind being rushed along without regard for logic or realism or any form of subtlety. In fact children are apt to be annoyed with anything that impedes the bare bones of the plot, so that a few minutes of love interest is denounced as “mush.” Of course, if it is done well enough, you have something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I enjoyed tremendously, even if there were parts that made no sense at all.

2) You can go to the other extreme, if you wish, and virtually eliminate the plot. There need be no sense of connected events. You might simply have a series of vignettes as in Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Or you might tell a story that is designed merely to create a mood or evoke an emotion or illuminate a facet of the human condition. This, too, is not for everyone, although, done well, it is satisfying to the sophisticated end of the reader (or viewer) spectrum. The less sophisticated may complain that the story is not a story and ask “But what does it mean?” or “What happened?” The plotless story is rather like free verse, or abstract art, or atonal music. Something is given up that most people imagine to be inseparable from the art form, but which, if done well (and my goodness, is it hard to do it well), transcends the form and gives enormous satisfaction to those who can follow the writer into the more rarefied realms of the art.

3) What pleases the great middle-people who are not children or semi-literate adults, but who are not cultivated esthetes, either-are stories that have distinct plots, plots that are filled-out successfully, one way or another, with non-plot elements of various types. I’ll mention a few.

3a) You can use the plot as a way of bringing in humor or satire. Read books by P. G. Wodehouse, or Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer or Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.

3b) You can use the plot to develop an insight into the characters of the individuals who people the story. The great literary giants, such as Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevksy, do this supremely well. Since human beings and their relationships with each other and with the universe are far more complex and unpredictable than are simple events, the ability to deal with “characterization “ successfully is often used as a way of defining “great literature.”

3c) You can use the plot to develop ideas. The individuals who people the story may champion alternate views of life and the universe, and the struggle may be one in which each side tries to persuade or force the other into adopting its own worldview. To do this properly, each side must present its view (ostensibly to each other, but really to the reader) and the reader must be enticed into favoring one side or another so that he can feel suspense over which side will win. Done perfectly, the two opposing views should represent not white and black, but two grays of slightly different shades so that the reader cannot make a clear-cut decision but must think and come to conclusions of his own. I go into greater detail on this version than on the other two, because this is what I do.

There are many other ways of dealing with plot, but the important thing to remember is that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A humorous novel can be full of quite serious ideas and develop interesting characters, for instance.

On the other hand, writers can, more or less deliberately, sacrifice some elements of plot buildups in their anxiety to do, in great detail, what it is they want to do. I am so intent on presenting my opposing ideas, for instance, that I make no serious attempt to characterize brilliantly or to drench the tale in humor.

As a result, much is made of my “cardboard characters” and I am frequently accused of being “talky.” But these accusations usually come from critics who don’t see (or perhaps lack the intelligence to see) what it is that I am trying to do.

But I’m sure that this is not what Ms. Sullivan meant when she said I had “the greatest mind for plot.”

I rather think she means that my stories (especially my novels) have very complicated plots that hang together and have no loose ends, that don’t get in the way of the ideas I present in my stories, and that are not obscured by those ideas, either.

Now, how is that done?

I wish I could tell you. All I’m aware of is that it takes a great deal of hard thinking, and that between the thinking and the writing that I must do, there is little time for me to do anything else.

Fortunately, I both think and write very quickly and with almost no dithering, so I can get a great deal done.

Which brings me to another part of the interview. The reporter speaks of my apartment as “filled with eclectic, utilitarian furniture chosen more for comfort than for style, much like Asimov’s wardrobe.

For a recent speaking engagement, he wore a Western tie, a too-big jacket, and a striped shirt with the kind of long wide collar that was popular in the 1970s.”

She’s absolutely right. As far as style is concerned, I’m a shambles. It doesn’t bother me, though.

To learn to live and dress with full attention to style would require hours upon umpteen hours of thought, of education, of decision-making, and so on. And that takes time I don’t want to subtract from my writing.

What would you rather have? Asimov, the prolific writer, or Asimov, the fashion plate? I warn you. You can’t have them both.

Metaphor

I received a letter from a fan the other day, one who had bought a copy of Agent of Byzantium by Harry Turtledove, which appeared in a series entitled “Isaac Asimov Presents.” (That’s why he wrote to me.)

The cover shows a man dressed, says my correspondent, “in a Romanesque military uniform, holding a Roman helmet in his left hand.” He also carried “a very large, very modern, very lethal-looking blaster rifle” and “an electronic scanning device.”

My correspondent was intrigued by the anachronism, bought the book, read it, and “enjoyed the book.” However, he found no place in the story where a man was holding such a rifle and scanning device, and he felt cheated. He had been lured into buying and reading the book by an inaccurate piece of cover art, and he wrote to complain.

So I thought about it. Now my knowledge of art is so small as to be beneath contempt, so naturally, I can’t be learned about it. There is, however, nothing I don’t understand about the word trade (fifty years of intimate, continuous and successful practice at it gives me the right to say that), and so I will approach matters from that angle.

I see the reader’s complaint as the protest of the “literalist” against “metaphor. “ The literalist wants a piece of art (whether word or picture) to be precise and exact with all its information in plain view on the surface. Metaphor, however, (from a Greek word meaning “transfer”) converts one piece of information into another analogous one, because the second one is more easily visualizable, more dramatic, more (in short) poetic. However, you have to realize there is a transfer involved and if you’re a “born-again literalist,” if I may use the phrase, you miss the whole point.

Let’s try the Bible, for instance. The children of Israel are wandering in the desert and come to the borders of Canaan. Spies are sent in to see what the situation is and their hearts fail them. They find a people with strong, walled cities; with many elaborate chariots and skilled armies; and with a high technology. They come back and report “all the people we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants…and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers and so we were in their sight.” Right! They were of “great stature” in the sense that they had a high technology. They were “giants” of technology and the Israelites were “grasshoppers” in comparison. There was as much chance, the spies felt, of the Israelites defeating the Canaanites as of a grasshopper defeating a man.

It makes perfect metaphoric sense. The use of “giants” and “grasshoppers” is d ramatic and gets across the idea. However, both Jewish and Christian fundamentalists get the vague notion that the Canaanites were two hundred feet tall, so that ordinary human beings were as grasshoppers in comparison. The infliction of literalism on us by fundamentalists who read the Bible without seeing anything but words is one of the great tragedies of history.

Or let’s turn to Shakespeare and the tragedy of Macbeth.

Macbeth has just killed Duncan and his hands are bloody and he is himself horror-struck at the deed. Lady Macbeth is concerned over her husband’s having been unmanned and gives him some practical advice. “Go,” she says, “get some water and wash this filthy witness from your hand.”

And Macbeth, his whole mind in disarray, says, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”

It’s a powerful figure, as you see a bloody hand dipped into the ocean and all the vast sea turning red in response, but, literally, it makes no sense. How can a few drops of blood turn the ocean red? All the blood in all the human beings on Earth if poured into the ocean would not change its overall color perceptibly. Macbeth might seem to be indulging in “hyperbole” (an extravagant exaggeration which sometimes makes its point, but usually reduces it to ridicule).

This, however, is not hyperbole, but metaphor. Consider! Macbeth has killed a man who had loved him and loaded him with honors, so he commits the terrible sin of ingratitude. Furthermore, the man he murdered was a guest in his house, so that Macbeth has violated the hallowed and civilized rules of hospitality. Finally, the man he murdered was his king and in Shakespeare’s time, a.king was looked upon as the visible representative of God on Earth. This triple crime has loaded Macbeth’s soul with infinite guilt.

The blood cannot redden the ocean, but the blood is not blood, it is used here as a metaphor for guilt. The picture of the ocean turning red gives you a violently dramatic notion of the infinite blackness that now burdens Macbeth’s soul, something you couldn’t get if he had merely said, “Oh, my guilt is infinite.”

A literalist who sets about calculating the effect on the ocean of a bloody hand is getting no value out of what he reads.

One more example. Consider Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “ In the fourteenth verse of the third part, there come the lines: “Till clomb above the eastern bar the horned Moon, with one bright star within the nether tip.”

The “horned Moon” is the crescent moon, of course, and there ca n’t be a bright star within the nether tip. The crescent is the lighted portion of the moon, but the rest of it, though out of the sunlight and dark, is still there. For a bright star to be within the nether tip is to have it shining through hundreds of miles of lunar substance. It is an impossibility, and I don’t know how many readers have snickered at Coleridge’s naivete in this.

But is it naïveté? The poem begins very simply and naturally till the Ancient Mariner kills the albatross, a lovable and unoffending bird. This itself is a metaphor. After all, human beings have killed lovable and unoffending birds since time immemorial. In this case, though, the killing represents all the callous and indifferent cruelty of the human species, and, as a result, the ship with its crew (who approved the Mariner’s deed) enters a strange world in which natural law is suspended and chaos is come again as God removes himself. The atmosphere of the poem becomes weird and unearthly and normality begins to return only after the Mariner involuntarily blesses all the living things in the ocean in a gush of love.

I have a feeling that Coleridge knew that a star could not shine within the nether tip of the crescent but merely used it as one more example of the chaos of a world in which human cruelty denies love, order, and God’s presence. It is only fitting that a star shine where no star could possibly shine.

To miss that point is to miss the point of the poem and to understand only its jigging meter and its clever rhyming-which is plenty, but far from enough. A literalist deprives himself of the best part of art.

Suppose we apply this way of looking at things to visual art. If you ask an artist to illustrate a piece of writing precisely, you make of him a slave to the literal word. You suppress his creativity and impugn the independence of his mind and ability. The better the artist, the less likely he is (barring an absolute need for money) to accept such a job.

An artist worth his salt does not illustrate the literal words, but the mood of a story. He tries, by virtue of his art and ability, to deepen and reinforce the meaning of a story and the intent of the writer.

Thus, in the mid-December 1988 issue, the cover of Asimov’s illustrates my story “Christmas Without Rodney.” It does not illustrate any incident in the story. Instead it shows in the foreground a boy with a sullen and self-absorbed expression. What’s more, the predominant color is red, which to my way of thinking symbolizes anger (a metaphor for the flushed face of a person in rage). This demonstrates the anger of a spoiled brat who does not instantly have his own way, and the anger he inspires in the narrator of the story. Behind the boy is an elaborate robot, with one metal hand to his cheek as though uncertain as to his course of action, something that fulfills one of the underlying themes of the story. The artist, Gary Freeman, does not illustrate the story, but adds to it and gives it a visual dimension. That is what he is supposed to do and what he is paid to do.

This brings us to the cover illustration of Agent of Byzantium. It is clearly the intent of the artist to illustrate the n ature of the story, not the story itself. Constantinople is in the background, identified by the gilded dome of Hagia Sophia. In the foreground is a soldier who has Byzantine characteristics. So far we have an historical novel. But he also possesses objects of high technology associated with modern western culture. Clearly it is an historical novel set in an alternate reality. And that is what the book deals with. The cover is precise, it tells us what we need to know, it satisfies the artist’s own cravings, and if the details of the technology are not precisely met in any incident in the book, that matters not a whit.

Ideas

Someone once asked Isaac Newton how he managed to reach solutions to problems that others found impenetrable. He answered, “By thinking and thinking and thinking about it.”

I don’t know what other answer people can possibly expect. There is the romantic notion that there is such a thing as “inspiration,” that a heavenly Muse comes down and plunks her harp over your head and, presto, the job is done. Like all romantic notions, however, this is just a romantic notion.

Some people may be better at solving problems and getting ideas than others are; they may have a livelier imagination, a more efficient way of grasping at distant consequences; but it all comes down to thinking in the end. What counts is how well you can think, and even more, how long and persistently you can think without breaking down. There are brilliant people, I imagine, who produce little, if anything, because their attention span to their own thoughts is so short; and there are less brilliant people who can plug away at their thoughts until they wrench something out of them.

All this comes up in my mind now because a friend of mine, a science fiction writer whose work I admire enormously, in the course of a conversation asked, in a very embarrassed manner, “How do you get your ideas?”

I could see what the problem was. He had been having a little trouble coming up with something and he thought that perhaps he had lost the knack of getting ideas, or had never really had it, and he turned to me. After all, I write so much that I must have no trouble getting ideas and I might even have some special system that others could use, too.

But I answered, very earnestly, “How do I get my ideas? By thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to jump out the window.”

“You, too?” he said, quite obviously relieved.

“Of course,” I said. “If you’re having trouble, all it means is that you’re one of us. After all, if getting ideas were easy, everyone in the world would be writing.”

After that, I put some serious thought into the matter of getting ideas. Was there any way I could spot my own system? Was there, in fact, any system at all, or did one simply think at random?

I went back over what happened in my mind before I wrote my most recent novel, Nemesis, which Doubleday published in October 1989, and I thought it might be helpful to aspiring writers, or even just to readers, if I described the preliminary thinking that went into the novel.

It started when my Doubleday editor, Jennifer Brehl, said to me, “I’d like your next novel not to be part of a series, Isaac. I don’t want it to be a Foundation novel or a Robot novel or an Empire novel. Write one that’s completely independent.”

So I started thinking, and this is the way it went, in brief. (I’ll cut out all the false starts and dead ends and mooning about and try to trace a sensible pathway through it all.)

The Foundation novels, Robot novels, and Empire novels are all interconnected and all deal with a background in which interstellar travel at super luminal speeds is well established. Of my previous independent novels, The End of Eternity deals with time-travel; The Gods Themselves with communication between universes; and Fantastic Voyage II with miniaturization. In none of these is there interstellar travel.

Very well, then, let me have a new novel which exploits an entirely new background. Let it deal with the establishment of interstellar travel, with the first interstellar voyages. Immediately I imagined a settled solar system, an Earth in decay, large numbers of space settlements in lunar orbit and in the asteroids. I imagined the space settlements as hostile to Earth and vice versa.

That gave me a reason for the drive to develop interstellar travel. Naturally, technological advances may be made for their own sake (as mountains are climbed “because they’re there”) but it helps to have a less exalted reason. A settlement might want to get away from the solar system to create a completely new society, profiting by past experience to avoid some of humanity’s earlier mistakes.

Good, but where do they go? If they have true interstellar flight, as in my Foundation novels, they can go anywhere, but that’s too much freedom. It introduces too many possibilities and not enough difficulties. If humanity is just developing interstellar flight, it might not be a very efficient process at first and a settlement trying to escape might find itself with a very limited range.

Now where do they go? The logical place is Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, but that is so logical that there’s no fun to it. Well, then, what if there’s another star only half as far as Alpha Centauri? That would be easier to reach.

But why haven’t we seen it, if it exists? Well, it’s a red-dwarf star and very dim, and besides there’s a patch of interstellar dust between it and ourselves and that dims it further so that it just hasn’t been noticed.

At that point, I remembered that a few years ago there was some speculation that the Sun might have a very distant red-dwarf companion that once in every revolution penetrated the comet cloud and sent some comets whizzing into the inner solar system where one or two might occasionally collide with Earth and produce the periodic waves of life-extinction. The red dwarf was called Nemesis.

The suggestion seems to have died down, but I made use of it. My characters would go to the nearby red dwarf, which I would call Nemesis, and then use that as the name for my novel. Of course, you can’t very well have a habitable planet circling a red dwarf star, but I wanted one. It would give me greater flexibility than simply to have the settlement go into orbit about the red dwarf. That meant I had to think up a set of conditions that (if you don’t question things too closely) would make it sound as though a habitable planet could exist. For that I had to invent a gas giant, with an Earth-sized satellite, and it would be the satellite that would be habitable.

Now I needed a problem. The obvious one would be that Nemesis was circling the Sun and would eventually pass through the comet cloud. I rejected that because it had been well discussed in the media and I wanted something a little less expected. So I decided that Nemesis was an independent star that happened to be en route to a relatively near miss of the solar system, with possibly dangerous gravitational effects.

That was a good problem, but I needed a plausible solution. That took some time but I finally thought one up. (Sorry, I won’t tell you what it is. For that you’ll have to read the book.)

What I needed next was a good character that would serve as the spinal column of the book, around whom everything would revolve. I chose a fourteen-year-old girl, with certain characteristics that I thought would make her interesting.

Then I needed a place to start the book. I would begin with my main character and have her do or say something that starts the chain of events that will take up the rest of the book. I made the choice and then waited no longer. I sat down and started the book.

But, you might point out that I didn’t yet have the novel. All I had was the social framework, a problem, a solution, a character and a beginning. When do I make up all the details that go into the characteristically involved plot of one of my novels (and Nemesis is quite involved).

I’m afraid that I make that up as I go along, but not without thought. Having worked out the first scene, I find that by the time I’ve finished that, I have the second scene in mind, at the conclusion of which I have the third scene, and so on all the way through to the ninety-fifth scene or so, which ends the novel.

To do that, I have to keep on thinking, on a smaller and more detailed scale all the time that I’m doing the book (which takes me nine months, perhaps). I do it at the cost of lots of lost sleep and lots of lack of attention to people and things about me (including an occasional blank stare even at my dear wife, Janet, who never fails to get the alarmed notion that “something’s wrong” each time I go into a spasm of thought).

But then isn’t it possible that two-thirds of the way through the book I realize that toward the beginning I made a wrong turn and am now beating my way down a blind alley. It is possible, but it’s never happened to me yet, and I don’t expect it to. I always build the next scenes on whatever it is I have already done and never consider any possible alternatives. I simply have no time to start over again.

However, I don’t mean to make the process sound simpler than it really is. You must take into account, in the first place, that I have a natural aptitude for this sort of thing, and, also, that I have been doing it for over half a century now, and experience counts.

Anyway, this is the closest I can come to explaining where I get my ideas.

Suspense

I have said over and over again that I write by instinct only and that there is nothing purposeful or deliberate in what I do. Consequently, I am always more or less puzzled by people who analyze my writing and find all sorts of subtle details in it that I don’t recall ever putting in but that I suppose must be there or the critic wouldn’t find them and pull them out.

Still, I have never been so puzzled as recently when I read a discussion of science fiction (where and by whom I do not remember for I threw it out in annoyance as soon as I came across the passage I’m about to tell you of). Getting to me, the essayist mentioned the fact that my style was clumsy, my dialog stilted, my characterization non-existent, but that there was no question that my books were “page-turners.”

In fact, he said, I was the most reliable producer of “page-turning” writing in science fiction.

It was only after I had thrown out the material and sworn a bit that I began to think of what I had read. What the essayist had said seemed to make no sense. Of course, he might be mad, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that he wasn’t. In that case, if I were utterly deficient in style, dialog, and characterization, how could my writings be “page-turners”? Why should any reader want to turn the page (that is, keep on reading) when what he read had nothing to recommend it?

What made a person want to keep on reading anything? The most obvious reason was “suspense,” which comes from Latin words meaning “to be hanging”; that is, “to be suspended.” The reader finds himself in a painful situation where he is uncertain as to what will happen next in his reading matter, and he wants desperately to find out.

Mind you, suspense is not an inalienable part of literature. No one reads Shakespeare’s sonnets in order to experience suspense. Nor do you read a P. G. Wodehouse novel for the sake of suspense. You know that Bertie Wooster will get out of the ridiculous fix in which he finds himself, and you don’t really care whether he does or not. You read on only because you enjoy laughing.

Most writing, however, especially in the less exalted realms of literature, is kept going by suspense. The simplest form of suspense is to put your protagonist into constant danger, and make it seem certain that he can’t possibly get out of it. Then get him out of it just so that you can plunge him into something even worse, and so on. Then, having carried it on as long as you can, you let him emerge victorious.

You get this in its purest simplicity in something like the Flash Gordon comic strip, where, for years, Flash ricocheted from crisis to crisis without ever getting time to wipe his brow (let alone go to the bathroom). Or consider the kind of movie serial typified by The Perils of Pauline, in which the perils continued for fifteen installments, each ending in a cliffhanger. (This was so-called because the protagonist was left hanging from a cliff or caught in some equally dangerous situation until the next episode of the serial a week later-a week spent by the kid-viewers in delicious agony-resolved the situation.)

This sort of suspense is ultra-simple. Whether Flash or Pauline survives matters really only to Flash or Pauline. Nothing of greater moment hinges on their survival.

We take a step forward in crime novels whereupon success or failure may hinge the smooth functioning of justice; or in spy novels whereupon success or failure may hinge the survival of the nation; or in science fiction whereupon success or failure may hinge the survival of the Earth itself, or even of the universe.

If we consider Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Space, which I read as a teenager with the same emotions that I viewed the movie serials half a decade earlier, we find the same unending danger about to destroy our beloved heroes an d the security of Earth along with them. That gives more meaning and more tension to the story.

Moving still farther up, then, we come to tales of unending danger that involve the great battle between good and evil, almost in the abstract. Surely the best example of this is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in which the forces of good, crystallized in the end into the person of brave, suffering little Frodo, must somehow defeat the all-but-omnipotent Satan-figure of Sauron.

Mind you, suspense is not all that is required to make a piece of writing totally effective. In most cases, it suffices only for one reading. Once you have seen The Perils of Pauline once, there is no need ever to see it again, because you know how she overcomes all her perils. That removes the suspense, and once the suspense is gone, nothing else remains.

Yet there are suspense-filled items you read over and over again long after the suspense has been knocked out of them. I suppose that it is possible for a person who is reading (or seeing) Hamlet for the first time to be caught up most of all in whether Hamlet will defeat his wicked uncle or not. But I have read and seen Hamlet dozens of times and I know every word of the play and yet I always enjoy it, because the beauty of the language is sufficient in itself, and the texture of the plot is so thick that one never runs out of different methods of producing the play.

In the same way, I have read The Lord of the Rings five times and enjoyed it more each time, because getting the suspense out of the way actually allows me to enjoy the writing and the texture of the book all the more.

Now I come to my own writing, but I can only discuss it if you who are reading it understand that I never did anything of what I am about to describe purposely. It all got done, every bit of it, instinctively, and I only understand it now after the fact.

I was interested, apparently, in going beyond the rather simplistic balance between good and evil; I didn’t want the hero adventuring with the reader always certain that he ought to win over the nasty villains, so that the nation or the society or the Earth or the universe could be saved.

I wanted a situation in which the reader could not be certain which side was good and which evil, or in which he might wonder if perhaps both sides contained mixtures of good and evil. I wanted a situation where the problem and the danger was itself uncertain, and where the resolution was not necessarily a true resolution because it might conceivably make things worse in the long run.

In short, I wanted to write fictional history in which there are no true endings, no true “they lived happily ever after,” but in which, even when a problem is apparently solved, a new one arises to take its place.

To this end, I sacrificed everything else. I made no attempt to indulge in anything but necessary description, so that I worked always on a “bare stage.” I forced the dialog to serve nothing more than as an indication of the progress of the problem (if there was one) toward the resolution (if there was one). I wasted no time on action for its own sake, or on characterization or on poetic writing. I made everything just as clear and as straightforward as I could, so that the reader could concentrate on (and drive himself mad over) all the ambiguities I would introduce.

(As you see, then, critics who complain that my books are too talky, and that they contain little or no action, miss the point completely.)

I do my best to present a number of characters, each of whom has a different world view and each of whom argues his case as cogently as possible. Each of them thinks he is doing the sensible thing, working for the good of humanity, or his part of it. There is no general agreement on what the problem might be, or even, sometimes, whether there is one at all, and when the story ends even the hero himself may not be satisfied with what he has done.

I worked this out little by little in my stories and novels, and it reached its peak in the Foundation series.

There is indeed suspense in the series on a simple scale. Will the small world of the First Foundation hold its own against the surrounding mightier kingdoms and, if so, how? Will it survive the onslaught of the Empire and of a mutant emotion-controller, and of the Second Foundation?

But that is not the prime suspense. Should the First Foundation survive? Should there be a Second Empire? Will the Second Empire just be a repetition of the miseries of the First? Are the Traders or the Mayors correct in their view of what the First Foundation ought to do?

In the two later volumes, the hero Golan Trevize spends the first in coming to an agonized decision, and the second in an agonized wonder as to whether his decision was right. In short, I try to introduce all the uncertainties of history, instead of the implausible certainties of an unrealistic fictional world.

And apparently it works, and my novels are “page-turners.”

But I have more to say and I will continue my discussion of suspense in next month ‘s editorial.

Serials

When is a writer not a writer?

When he is asked to write outside his specialty.

Writing is not a unitary matter. A person who is a skilled science writer, or who can turn out fascinating popular histories, may be hopeless when it comes to writing fiction. The reverse is also true.

Even a person like myself who is adept at both fiction and nonfiction and ranges over considerable variety in both subdivisions is not a universal writer. I can’t and won’t write plays, whether for the theater, motion pictures, or television. I don’t have the talent for it.

It is surprising, in fact, how thinly talent can be subdivided. The functions, advantages, and disadvantages of fiction differ so with subject matter that every writer is more at home in one kind of fiction than in another. I can do science fiction and mysteries, but I would be madly misjudging myself if I tried to do “mainstream “ fiction or even “new-wave” science fiction.

Oddly enough, even length counts. You might think that if someone is writing a story, it can be any length. If it finishes itself quickly, it is a short story; if it goes on for a long time, it is a novel; if it is something in between, it is a novelette or a novella.

That’s just not so. Length is not the sole difference. A novel is not a lengthy short story. A short story is not a brief novel. They are two different species of writing.

A novel has space in which to develop a plot leisurely, with ample room for subplots, for detailed background, for description, for character development, for comic relief.

A short story must make its point directly and without side issues. Every sentence must contribute directly to the plot development.

A novel is a plane; a short story is a line.

A novel which is too short and thus abbreviates the richness of its development would be perceived by the reader as skimpy and therefore unsatisfactory. A short story which is too long and allows the reader’s attention to wander from the plot is diffuse and therefore unsatisfactory.

There are writers who are at home with the broad swing of the novel and are not comfortable within the confinement of the short story. There are writers who are clever at driving home points in short stories and who are lost in the echoing chambers of the novel. And of course there are writers who can do both.

A magazine such as ours is primarily a vehicle in which the short story is displayed. It is important we fulfill this function for a variety of reasons:

1. Short stories are worth doing and worth reading. They can make concise points that novels cannot, in ways that novels cannot.

2. A group of short stories which, in length, take up the room of one novel, offers far more variety than a novel can; and there is something very pleasant about variety.

3. Those writers who are adept at the short story need a vehicle.

4. Beginning writers need a vehicle, too; and beginners are well-advised to concentrate on short stories at the start. Even if their true skill turns out to be in the novel, initial training had better be in the short story, which requires a smaller investment in time and effort. A dozen short stories will take no more time than a novel and offer much more scope for experimentation and “finding one’s self.”

When George, Joel, and I began this magazine, we were aware of all these points and were determined to make it a magazine devoted to the short story exclusively. And we are still so determined.

Yet it is not easy to be rigid. It is perhaps not even desirable to be rigid under all circumstances. There are times when the best of rules ought to be bent a little.

What are the forces, for instance, that drag us in the direction of length?

To begin with, there are (rightly or wrongly) more literary honors and monetary rewards for novels than for short stories, so that if a writer can handle any length, he usually finds himself gravitating toward the novel.

Naturally, since a novel requires a great investment of time and effort, it is the experienced writers of tried quality who are most likely to move in that direction. And once they’ve done that, they’re not likely to want to let go. It becomes difficult, in fact, to persuade them to take time out from their current novel in order to write a short story.

As long as we stick rigidly to short stories, therefore, we tend to lose the chance at picking up the work of some of the best practitioners in the field. Newcomers, however worthy, tend to have lesser experience and their writing tends to be less polished.

For the most part, this does not dismay us. We want the newcomers, and the freshness of concept and approach is quite likely to make up for what clumsiness of technique is brought about through inexperience. The clumsiness, after all, will smooth out with time-and at that point, the new talent will almost inevitably begin to write novels.

Occasionally, then, we bend. If a story comes along by an established writer that is unusually good but is rather long, we are tempted to run it. We have indeed run stories as long as 40,000 words in a single issue.

There are advantages to this. If you like the story, you can get deeply immersed in it and savor the qualities that length makes possible and that you can’t get otherwise. And there are disadvantages. If you don’t like the story and quit reading it, you have only half a magazine left and you may feel cheated.

George must judge the risk and decide when a long story is likely to be so generally approved of that the advantage will far outweigh the disadvantage.

But what do we do about novels? Ignore them?

Most novelists do not object to making extra money by allowing a magazine to publish part or all of the novel prior to its publication as a novel. And most magazines welcome the chance of running a novel in installments.

Consider the advantages to the magazine. If the first part of a serial is exciting, well written and grabs the reader, it is to be expected that a great many readers will then haunt the newsstands waiting for the next issue. If many serials prove to have this grabbing quality, readers will subscribe rather than take the chance of missing installments.

Magazine publishers do not object to this. Even Joel wouldn’t.

There are, however, disadvantages. Some readers actively dislike novels. Others may like novels but bitterly resent being stopped short and asked to wait a month for a continuation, and may also resent having to run the risk of missing installments.

We are aware of these disadvantages and also of our own responsibility for encouraging the short story, so we have sought a middle ground.

These days there are so many novels and so few magazines that there isn’t room to serialize them all. Many good novels are therefore available for the prior publication of only a chunk of themselves-some chunk that stands by itself. We have been deliberately keeping our eyes open for these.

It’s not always easy to find a novel-chunk that stands by itself. The fact that something goes afterward, or comes before, or both, is likely to give the reader a vague feeling of incompleteness. Sometimes, then, we try to run several chunks, each of which stands by itself, or almost does. This comes close to serialization, but if the second piece can be read comfortably without reference to the first, then it’s not. Again, George must use his judgment in such cases.

But then, every once in a long while, we are trapped by our own admiration of a novel and find ourselves with a chunk we would desperately like to publish, but that is too long to fit into a single issue and that can’t conveniently be divided into two independent chunks.

Then, with a deep breath, if we can think of no way out, we serialize. We hate to do this, and we hardly ever will. But hardly ever isn’t never!

When there’s no other way out, rather than lose out on something really first-class, we will have to ask you to wait a month.

But hardly ever.

The Name Of Our Field

In last issue's editorial, I talked of Jules Verne’s “extraordinary voyages” and that brings up the point of how difficult it was to find a name for the kind of items that are published in this magazine and others like it.

This magazine contains “stories”; and “story” is simply a shortened form of “history,” a recounting of events in orderly detail. The recounting could, in either case, be of real incidents or of madeup ones, but we have become used to thinking of a “history” as real and of a “story” as made-up.

A “tale” is something that is “told” (from the Anglo-Saxon) and a “narrative” is something that is “narrated “ (from the Latin). Either “tale” or “narrative” can be used for either a real or a made-up account. “Narrative” is the less common of the two simply because it is the longer word and therefore has an air of pretentiousness about it.

A word which is used exclusively for made-up items and never for real ones is “fiction,” from a Latin word meaning “to invent.”

What this magazine contains, then, are stories-or tales-or, most precisely, fiction. Naturally, fiction can be of different varieties, depending on the nature of the content. If the events recounted deal mainly with love, we have “love stories” or “love tales” or “love fiction.” Similarly, we can have “detective stories,” or “terror tales,” or “mystery fiction,” or “confession stories,” or “western tales,” or “jungle fiction.” The items that appear in this magazine deal, in one fashion or another, with future changes in the level of science, or of science-derived technology. Doesn’t it make sense, then, to consider the items to be “science stories,” or “science tales,” or, most precisely, “science fiction”?

And yet “science fiction,” which is so obvious a name when you come to think of it, is a late development.

Jules Verne’s extraordinary voyages were called “scientific fantasies” in Great Britain, and the term “science fantasy” is still sometimes used today. “Fantasy” is from a Greek word meaning “imagination” so it isn’t completely inappropriate, but it implies the minimal existence of constraints.

When we speak of “fantasy” nowadays, we generally refer to stories that are not bound by the laws of science, whereas science fiction stories are so bound.

Another term used in the 1920s was “scientific romance.” Romance was originally used for anything published in the “Romance languages,” that is, in the popular tongues of western Europe, so that it was applied to material meant to be read for amusement. More serious works were written in Latin, of course. The trouble is that “romance” has come to be applied to love stories in particular so “science romance” has a wrong feel to it.

“Pseudo-science stories” was sometimes used, but that is insulting. “Pseudo” is from a Greek word meaning “false,” and while the kind of extrapolations of science used in science fiction are not true science, they are not false science either. They are “might-be-true” science.

“Super-science stories,” still another name, is childish.

In 1926, when Hugo Gernsback published the first magazine ever to be devoted exclusively to science fiction, he called it Amazing Stories.

This caught on. When other magazines appeared, synonyms for “amazing” were frequently used. We had Astounding Stories, Astonishing Stories, Wonder Stories, Marvel Stories, and Startling Stories all on the stands, when the world and I were young.

Such names, however, do not describe the nature of the stories but their effect on the reader, and that is insufficient. A story can amaze, astound, astonish, and startle you; it can cause you to marvel and wonder; and yet it need not be science fiction. It need not even be fiction. Something better was needed.

Gernsback knew that. He had originally thought of calling his magazine “Scientific Fiction.” That is hard to pronounce quickly, though, chiefly because of the repetition of the syllable “fic.” Why not combine the words and eliminate one of those syllables? We then have “scientifiction.”

“Scientifiction,” though, is an ugly word, hard to understand and, if understood, likely to scare off those potential readers who equate the “scientific” with the “difficult.” Gernsback therefore used the word only in a subtitle: Amazing Stories: the Magazine of Scientifiction. He introduced “stf” as the abbreviation of “scientifiction.” Both abbreviation and word are still sometimes used.

When Gernsback was forced to give up Amazing Stories he published a competing magazine, Science Wonder Stories. In its first issue (June, 1929), he used the term “science fiction” and the abbreviation “S.F.”-or “SF” without periods-became popular. Occasionally, the word has been hyphenated as “science-fiction,” but that is only done rarely. The story, however, doesn’t end there.

As I said last issue, there is a feeling among some that the phrase “science fiction” unfairly stresses the science content of the stories. Since 1960 in particular, science fiction has tended to shift at least some of its emphasis from science to society, from gadgets to people. It still deals with changes in the level of science and technology, but those changes move farther into the background.

I believe it was Robert Heinlein who first suggested that we ought to speak of “speculative fiction“ instead; and some, like Harlan Ellison, strongly support that move now. To me, though, “speculative” seems a weak word. It is four syllables long and is not too easy to pronounce quickly. Besides, almost anything can be speculative fiction. A historical romance can be speculative; a true-crime story can be speculative. “Speculative fiction” is not a precise description of our field and I don’t think it will work. In fact, I think “speculative fiction” has been introduced only to get rid of “science” but to keep “s.f.”

This brings us to Forrest J. Ackerman, a wonderful guy whom I love dearly. He is a devotee of puns and word-play and so am I, but Forry has never learned that some things are sacred. He couldn’t resist coining “sci-fi” as an analog, in appearance and pronunciation, to “hi-fi,” the well-known abbreviation for “high fidelity.” “Sci-fi” is now widely used by people who don’t read science fiction. It is used particularly by people who work in movies and television. This makes it, perhaps, a useful term.

We can define “sci-fi” as trashy material sometimes confused, by ignorant people, with SF. Thus, Star Trek is SF while Godzilla Meets Mothra is sci-fi.

Hints

EVERY ONCE IN A SHORT WHILE I GET a letter from some eager young would-be writer asking me for some “hints” on the art of writing science fiction.

The feeling I have is that my correspondents think there is some magic formula jealously guarded

by the professionals, but that since I’m such a nice guy I will spill the beans if properly approached.

Alas, there’s no such thing, no magic formula, no secret tricks, no hidden short-cuts.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that it’s a matter of hard work over a long period of time. If you know

of any exceptions to this, that’s exactly what they are-exceptions.

_{There are, however, some general principles that could be useful, to my way of thinking, and here}

they are:

1) You have to prepare for a career as a successful science fiction writer-as you would for any other highly specialized calling.

First, you have to learn to use your tools, just as a surgeon has to learn to use his.

The basic tool for any writer is the English language, which means you must develop a good vocabulary and brush up on such prosaic things as spelling and grammar.

There can be little argument about vocabulary, but it may occur to you that spelling and grammar

are just frills. After all, if you write great and gorgeous stories, surely the editor will be delighted to correct your spelling and grammar.

Not so! He (or she) won’t be.

Besides, take it from an old war-horse, if your spelling and grammar are rotten, you won’t be writing a great and gorgeous story. Someone who can’t use a saw and hammer doesn’t turn out stately furniture.

Even if you’ve been diligent at school, have developed a vocabulary, can spell “sacrilege” and “supersede” and never say “between you and I” or “I ain’t never done nothing,” that’s still not enough. There’s the subtle structure of the English sentence and the artful construction of the English paragraph. There is the clever interweaving of plot, the handling of dialog, and a thousand other intricacies.

How do you learn that? Do you read books on how to write, or attend classes on writing, or go to writing conferences? These are all of inspirational value, I’m sure, but they won’t teach you what you

really want to know.

What will teach you is the careful reading of the masters of English prose. This does not mean condemning yourself to years of falling asleep over dull classics. Good writers are invariably fascinating writers-the two go together. In my opinion, the English writers who most clearly use the correct word every time and who most artfully and deftly put together their sentences and paragraphs are Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and P. G. Wodehouse.

Read them, and others, but with attention. They represent your schoolroom. Observe what they do and try to figure out why they do it. It’s no use other people explaining it to you; until you see it for

yourself and it becomes part of you, nothing will help.

But suppose that no matter how you try, you can’t seem to absorb the lesson. Well, it may be that you’re not a writer. It’s no disgrace. You can always go on to take up some slightly inferior profession like surgery or the presidency of the United States. It won’t be as good, of course; but we can’t all scale the heights.

Second, for a science fiction writing career, it is not enough to know the English language; you

also have to know science. You may not want to use much science in your stories; but you’ll have to know

it anyway, so that what you do use, you don’t misuse.

This does not mean you have to be a professional scientist, or a science major at college. You

don’t even have to go to college. It does mean, though, that you have to be willing to study science on your own, if your formal education has been weak in that direction.

It’s not impossible. One of the best writers of hard science fiction is Fred Pohl, and he never even finished high school. Of course, there are very few people who are as bright as Fred, but you can write considerably less well than he does and still be pretty good.

Fortunately, there is more good, popular-science writing these days than there was in previous

generations, and you can learn a great deal, rather painlessly, if you read such science fiction writers as L.

Sprague de Camp, Ben Bova, and Poul Anderson in their nonfictional moods-or even Isaac Asimov.

What’s more, professional scientists are also writing effectively for the public these days, as witness Carl Sagan’s magnificent books. And there’s always Scientific American.

Third, even if you know your science and your writing, it is still not likely that you will be able to put them together from scratch. You will have to be a diligent reader of science fiction itself to learn the

conventions and the tricks of the trade-how to interweave background and plot, for instance.

2) You have to work at the job.

The final bit of schooling is writing itself. Nor must you wait till your preparation is complete. The act of writing is itself part of the preparation.

You can’t completely understand what good writers do until you try it yourself. You learn a great deal when you find your story breaking apart in your hands-or beginning to hang together. Write from the

very beginning, then, and keep on writing.

3) You have to be patient.

Since writing is itself a schooling, you can’t very well expect to sell the first story you write. (Yes,

I know Bob Heinlein did it, but he was Bob Heinlein. You are only you.)

But then, why should that discourage you? After you finished the first grade at school, you weren’t through, were you? You went on to the second grade, then the third, then the fourth, and so on.

If each story you write is one more step in your literary education, a rejection shouldn’t matter.

[Editors don’t reject writers; they reject pieces of paper that have been typed on. Ed.] The next story will be better, and the next one after that still better, and eventually

But then why bother to submit the stories? If you don’t, how can you possibly know when you graduate? After all, you don’t know which story you’ll sell.

You might even sell the first. You almost certainly won’t, but you just might.

Of course, even after you sell a story, you may fail to place the next dozen, but having done it once, it is quite likely that you will eventually do it again, if you persevere.

But what if you write and write and write and you don’t seem to be getting any better and all you collect are printed rejection slips? Once again, it may be that you are not a writer and will have to settle for

a lesser post such as that of chief justice of the Supreme Court.

4) You have to be reasonable.

Writing is the most wonderful and satisfying task in the world, but it does have one or two insignificant flaws. Among those flaws is the fact that a writer can almost never make a living at it.

Oh, a few writers make a lot of money-they’re the ones we all hear about. But for every writer who rakes it in, there are a thousand who dread the monthly rent bill. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.

Take my case. Three years after I sold my first story, I reached the stage of selling everything I

wrote, so that I had become a successful writer. Nevertheless, it took me seventeen more years as a

successful writer before I could actually support myself in comfort on my earnings as a writer.

So while you’re trying to be a writer, make sure you find another way of making a decent living- and don’t quit your job after you make your first sale.

Writing For Young People

THERE IS AN EXCEEDINGLY USEFUL VOLUME entitled The Science Fiction Encyclopedia edited by Peter Nicholls (Doubleday, 1979) to which I frequently refer. Recently, as I leafed through its pages en route to looking up something, I came across the following passage:

“The intellectual level of a book is not necessarily expressed by a marketing label. Much adult sf,

the works of…Isaac Asimov, for example, is of great appeal to older children, and is to some extent directed

at them.”

The line of three dots in the above quotation signals the omission of a few words in which the writer specifies two other science fiction writers. I omit them because they may resent the original statement and may not feel I ought to give the remark further circulation.

As for me, I don’t object to the comment because, for one thing, I consider it true. I write my

“adult” novels for adults, but I have no objection whatsoever to young people reading them, and I try to write in such a way that my novels are accessible to them.

Why?

First, it is the way I like to write. I like to have the ideas in my novels sufficiently interesting and subtle to catch at the attention and thinking of intelligent adults, and, at the same time, to have the writing clear enough so as to raise no difficulties for the intelligent youngster. To manage the combination I

consider a challenge, and I like challenges.

Second, it is good business. Attract an adult and you may well have someone who is here today and gone tomorrow. Attract a youngster and you have a faithful reader for life.

Mind you, I don’t write as I do with the second reason in mind; I write as I do for the first reason I

gave you. Nevertheless, I have discovered that the second reason exists, and I have long lost count of the number of people who tell me they have an astronomical number of my books and that they “were at once hooked after reading my book, so-and-so, when they were ten years old.”

But if the same books can be read by both adults and youngsters, what is the distinction between truly adult books (ones that the writer of the item in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia would judge as possessing a high “intellectual level”) and truly juvenile books?

Let’s see. Can it be vocabulary? Do adult books have “hard words” while juvenile books have

“easy words”?

To some extent, I suppose that might be so. If an author makes a fetish of using unusual words, as

William Buckley does (or Clark Ashton Smith, to mention someone in our own line), then the writing

grows opaque for youngsters and adults alike, for it is my experience that the average adult does not have a vocabulary much larger, if any, than a bright youngster does.

On the other hand, if an author uses the correct words, hard or easy, then the bright youngster will guess the meaning from the context or look it up in a dictionary. I think the bright youngster enjoys having

his mind stretched and welcomes the chance of learning a new word. I don’t worry about my vocabulary,

for that reason, even when I am writing my science books for grade school youngsters. I may give the pronunciation of scientific terms they are not likely to have encountered before, and I sometimes define them, but I don’t avoid them, and after having given pronunciation and definition I use them freely.

Well, then, is it the difference between long sentences and short sentences?

That is true only in this sense: It is more difficult to make a long sentence clear than it is to make a short one clear. If, then, you are a poor writer and want to make sure that youngsters understand you, stick

to short sentences. Unfortunately, a long series of short sentences, like a long stretch of writing with no

“hard” words, is irritating to anyone intelligent, young or old. A youngster is particularly offended because

he thinks (sometimes with justice) that the writer thinks that because the youngster is young, he is therefore stupid. The book is at once discarded. (This is called “writing down,” by the way, something I try never to

_do.)

The trick is to write clearly. If you write clearly enough, a long sentence will hold no terrors. If you hit the proper mix of long and short, and hard and easy, and make everything clear, then, believe me,

the youngster will have no trouble. Of course, he has to be an intelligent youngster, but there are a larger percentage of those than of intelligent oldsters, for life hasn’t had a chance yet to dull the youngsters’ wits.

Is it a matter of subject matter? Do adult novels deal with death and torture and mayhem and sex

(natural and unnatural) and all kinds of unpleasantness, while juvenile novels deal with sweetness and

niceness?

You know that’s not so. Think of the current rash of “horror” films, which fill the screen with blood and murder and torture and are designed to frighten. Youngsters flock to them, and the gorier they are, the more they enjoy them.

Even censors don’t seem to mind the mayhem. When there are loud squawks from the righteous

who want to kick books out of school libraries, the objections are most often to the use of “dirty” words and

to sex. However, I have, in my time, lived half a block from a junior high school and listened to the youngsters going there and coming back. I picked up a lot of colorful obscenity, both sexual and scatological, in that way, for I had forgotten some of what I had learned as a youngster. I think the youngsters themselves would have no objection to books containing gutter language and sexual detail-or

fail to understand them, either. That distinction between adult books and juvenile books is not a natural one but is enforced by adult fiat.

(I admit that I use no gutter language or sex in my juvenile books, but then I use no gutter language and very little sex in my adult books.)

How about action, then? Adult books can pause for sensitive description of all kinds, or for a skillful and painstaking dissection of motivation, and so on. Juvenile books tend to deal entirely with

action. Is that right?

Actually, the distinction is not between adults and juveniles, but between a few people (both adult and juvenile) and most people (both adult and juvenile). Most people, of whatever age, are impatient with anything but action. Watch the popular adventure programs on television, subtract the action, and find out what you have left, and then remember that it is adults, for the most part, who are watching them.

On the other hand, my books contain very little “action” (hence no movie sales) and deal largely with the interplay of ideas in rather cerebral dialog (as many critics point out, sometimes with irritation)

and yet, says the Encyclopedia, I appeal to youngsters. Clarity, not action, is the key.

Can it be a question of style? Are adult books written in a complicated and experimental style, while juvenile books are not?

To be sure, a juvenile book written in a complicated and experimental style is more apt to be a commercial failure than one written in a straightforward style. On the other hand, this is also true of adult

books. The difference is that tortuous style is frequently admired by critics in adult books, but never in

juvenile books. This means that many adults, who are guided by critics, or who merely wish to appear chic, buy opaque and experimental books, and then, possibly, don’t read them, aside from any “dirty parts” they might have. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past springs to mind. My dear wife, Janet, is reading it, every word, for the second time but there are moments when I see the perspiration standing out, in great drops, on her forehead.

How about rhetorical tricks? Metaphors, allusions, and all the rest of it, depend upon experience, and youngsters, however bright they are, have not yet had time to gather experience.

For instance, my George and Azazel stories are pure fluff, but they are the most nearly adult stories I write. I use my full vocabulary, together with involved sentence structure, and never hesitate to rely on the reader to fill in what I leave out. I can refer to “the elusive promise of nocturnal Elysium “

without any indication of what I mean. I can speak of the Eiffel Tower as a “stupid building still under

construction “ and depend on the reader to know what the Tower looks like and therefore see why the

remark is wrong, but apt. Nevertheless, the stories are meant to be humorous and all the rhetorical devices contribute to that. The young person who misses some of the allusions nevertheless should get much of the humor and enjoy the story anyway.

In short, I maintain there is no hard and fast distinction between “adult” writing and “juvenile”

writing. A good book is a good book and can be enjoyed by both adults and youngsters. If my books appeal

to both, that is to my credit.

Names

We received an interesting letter some time ago from Greg Cox of Washington State. It is short and I will take the liberty of quoting its one sentence in full:

“I enjoyed very much the Good Doctor’s story in the May issue (“The Evil Drink Does”), but I have to ask: How did a young lady from such an allegedly puritanical background end up with the unlikely (if appealing) name of ‘Ishtar Mistik’???”

It’s a good question, but it makes an assumption. In the story, Ishtar remarks, “I was brought up in the strictest possible way. It is impossible for me to behave in anything but the most correct manner.”

From that you may suppose that Ishtar’s family were rigidly doctrinaire Presbyterians, or superlatively moral Catholics, or tradition-bound Orthodox Jews, but if you do, it’s an assumption. I say nothing about Ishtar’s religious background.

To be sure, Ishtar is the Babylonian goddess of love, the analog of the Greek Aphrodite, and it is therefore odd that such a name should be given a child by puritanical parents, if the puritanism is Christian or Jewish in origin. But who says it is? The family may be a group of puritanical Druids (even Druids may have strict moral codes, and probably do) who chose “Ishtar” for its sound.

But let’s go into the matter of names more systematically. Every writer has to give his characters names. There are occasional exceptions as when a writer may refer to a limited number of characters, in

Puckish fashion, as “the Young Man,” “the Doctor,” “the Skeptic,” and so on. P. G. Wodehouse, for example, in his golf stories, refers to the narrator as “the Oldest Member” and never gives him a name. He only need be referred to for a few paragraphs at the start, however, and then remains in the background as a disembodied voice. In my own George and Azazel stories, the first-person character to whom George speaks in the introduction and whom he regularly insults, has no name. He is merely “I. “ Of course, the perceptive reader may think (from the nature of George’s insults) that I’s name is Isaac Asimov, but again that is only an assumption.

Allowing for such minor exceptions then, writers need names.

You might think that this is not something that bothers anyone but apparently it does. I have received numerous letters (usually from young teenagers) who seem to be totally unimpressed by the ease with which I work up complex plots and ingenious gimmicks and socko endings but who say, “How do you manage to decide what names to give your characters?” That is what puzzles them.

In my attempts to answer, I have had to think about the subject.

In popular fiction intended for wide consumption, especially among the young, names are frequently chosen for blandness. You don’t want the kids to stumble over the pronunciation of strange names or to be distracted by them. Your characters, therefore, are named Jack Armstrong or Pat Reilly or Sam Jones. Such stories are filled with Bills and Franks and Joes coupled with Harpers and Andersons and Jacksons. That is also part of the comforting assumption that all decent characters, heroes especially, are of northwest European extraction.

Naturally, you may have comic characters or villains, and they can be drawn from among the “inferior” races, with names to suit. The villainous Mexican can be Pablo; the comic black, Rastus; the shrewd Jew, Abie; and so on.

Aside from the wearisome sameness of such things, the world changed after the 1930s. Hitler gave racism a bad name, and all over the world, people who had till then been patronized as “natives” began asserting themselves. It became necessary to choose names with a little more imagination and to avoid seeming to reserve heroism for your kind and villainy for the other kind.

On top of this science fiction writers had a special problem. What names do you use for non- human characters-robots, extraterrestrials, and so on?

There have been a variety of solutions to this problem. For instance, you might deliberately give extraterrestrials unpronounceable names, thus indicating that they speak an utterly strange language designed for sound-producing organs other than human vocal cords. The name Xlbnushk, for instance.

That, however, is not a solution that can long be sustained. No reader is going to read a story in which he periodically encounters Xlbnushk without eventually losing his temper. After all, he has to look at the letter-combination and he’s bound to try to pronounce it every time he sees it.

Besides, in real life, a difficult name is automatically simplified. In geology, there is something called “the Mohorovicic discontinuity” named for its Yugoslavian discoverer. It is usually referred to by non-Yugoslavians as “the Moho discontinuity.” In the same way, Xlbnushk would probably become “Nush.”

Another way out is to give non-human characters (or even human characters living in a far future in which messy emotionalism has been eliminated) codes instead of names. You can have a character called “21MM792,” for instance. That sort of thing certainly gives a story a science-fictional ambience. And it can work. In Neil Jones’ Professor Jameson stories of half a century ago, the characters were organic brains in metallic bodies, all of whom had letter-number names. Eventually, one could tell them apart, and didn’t even notice the absence of ordinary names. This system, however, will work only if it rarely occurs. If all, or even most, stories numbered their characters, there would be rebellion in the ranks.

My own system, when dealing with the far future, or with extraterrestrials, is to use names, not codes, and easily pronounceable names, too; but names that don’t resemble any real ones, or any recognizable ethnic group.

For one thing that gives the impression of “alienism” without annoying the reader. For another, it minimizes the chance of offending someone by using his or her name.

This is a real danger. The most amusing example was one that was encountered by L. Sprague de Camp when he wrote “The Merman” back in 1938. The hero was one Vernon Brock (not a common name) and he was an ichthyologist (not a common profession). After the story appeared in the December 1938, Astounding, a thunderstruck Sprague heard from a real Vernon Brock who was really an ichthyologist.

Fortunately, the real Brock was merely amused and didn’t mind at all, but if he had been a nasty person, he might have sued. Sprague would certainly have won out, but he would have been stuck with legal fees, lost time, and much annoyance.

Sometimes I get away with slight misspellings: Baley instead of Bailey; Hari instead of Harry; Daneel instead of Daniel. At other times, I make the names considerably different, especially the first name: Salvor Hardin, Gaal Dornick, Golan Trevize, Stor Gendibal, Janov Pelorat. (I hope I’m getting them right; I’m not bothering to look them up.)

My feminine characters also receive that treatment, though the names I choose tend to be faintly classical because I like the sound: Callia, Artemisia, Noys, Arcadia, Gladia, and so on.

I must admit that when I started doing this, I expected to get irritated letters from readers, but, you know, I never got one. It began in wholesale manner in 1942 with the first Foundation story and in the forty-plus years since, not one such letter arrived. Well, Damon Knight once referred to Noys in a review of The End of Eternity as “the woman with the funny name,” but that’s as close as it got.

Which brings me to the George and Azazel stories again. There I use a different system. The George and Azazel stories are intended to be humorous. In fact, they are farces, with no attempt at or pretense of realism. The stories are outrageously overwritten on purpose. My ordinary writing style is so (deliberately) plain that every once in a while, I enjoy showing that I can be florid and rococo if I choose.

Well, then, in a rococo story, how on Earth can I be expected to have characters with ordinary names, even though the stories are set in the present and (except for Azazel) deal only with Earth people, so that I can’t use nonexistent names?

Instead I use real names, but choose very unusual and pretentious first names. In my George and Azazel stories, characters have been named Mordecai Sims, Gottlieb Jones, Menander Block, Hannibal West, and so on. By associating the outlandish first name with a sober last name, I heighten the oddness of the first. (On second thought, I should have made Ishtar Mistik, Ishtar Smith.)

None of this is, of course, intended as a universal rule. It’s just what I do. If you want to write an SF story, by all means make up a system of your own.

Originality

Having published an editorial entitled “Plagiarism” in the August, 1985 issue of the magazine, it occurs to me to look at the other side of the coin. After all, if plagiarism is reprehensible, total originality is just about impossible. The thing is that there exists an incredible number of books in which an enormous variety of ideas and an even more enormous variety of phrases and ways of putting things have been included. Anyone literate enough to write well has, as a matter of course, read a huge miscellany of printed material and, the human brain being what it is, a great deal of it remains in the memory at least unconsciously, and will be regurgitated onto the manuscript page at odd moments. In 1927, for instance, John Livingston Lowes (an English professor at Harvard) published a six- hundred-page book entitled The Road to Xanadu, in which he traced nearly every phrase in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to various travel books that were available to the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I tried reading the book in my youth, but gave up. It could only interest another Coleridge scholar. Besides, I saw no point to it. Granted that the phrases already existed scattered through a dozen books, they existed for everybody. It was only Coleridge who thought of putting them together, with the necessary modifications, to form one of the great poems of the English language. Coleridge might not have been a hundred percent original but he was original en ough to make the poem a work of genius. You can’t overrate the skills involved in selection and arrangement. It was this that was in my own mind, once, when I was busily working on a book of mine called Words of Science back in the days when I was actively teaching at Boston University School of Medicine. The book consisted of 250 one-page essays on various scientific terms, giving derivations, meanings and various historical points of interest. For the purpose, I had an unabridged dictionary spread out on my desk, for I couldn’t very well make up the derivations, nor could I rely on my memory to present them to me in all correct detail. (My memory is good, but not t hat good.) A fellow faculty member happened by and looked over my shoulder. He read what I was writing at the moment, stared at the unabridged and said, “Why, you’re just copying the dictionary.” I stopped dead, sighed, closed the dictionary, lifted it with an effort and handed it to my friend. “Here,” I said. “The dictionary is yours. Now go write the book.”

He shrugged his shoulders and walked away without offering to take the dictionary. He was bright enough to get the point.

There are times, though, when I wonder how well any story of mine would survive what one might call the “Road to Xanadu “ test. (There’s no point in offending fellow writers by analyzing their originality, so I’ll just stick to my own stuff.)

The most original story I ever wrote in my opinion was “Nightfall,” which appeared back in 1941.

I had not quite reached my twenty-first birthday when I wrote it and I have always been inordinately proud of the plot. “It was a brand-new plot,” I said, “and I killed it as I wrote it, for no one else would dare write a variation of it.”

To be sure, it was John Campbell who presented me with the Emerson quote that began the story:

“If the stars would appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the City of God-” and it was Campbell who sent me home to write the reverse of Emerson’s thesis.

Allowing for that, the development and details of the story were mine-or were they?

In 1973, I was preparing an anthology of my favorite stories of the 1930s (the years, that is, before John Campbell’s editorship, so that I named the book Before the Golden Age) and I included, of course, Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun,” which had been published in 1934 and had, at that time, fascinated my fourteen-year-old self. I reread it, naturally, before including it and was horrified.

You see, it dealt in part with a cult whose members were furious at scientists for rationalizing the mystic tenets of the believers. In an exciting scene, the cultists attacked the scientists’ citadel at a very crucial moment and the scientists tried to hold them off long enough to get their task done.

I can’t deny having read that story. After all, I still remembered it with pleasure forty years later. Yet only six and a half years after reading it, I wrote “Nightfall” which dealt in part with a cult whose members were furious at scientists for rationalizing the mystic tenets of the believers. In an exciting scene, the cultists attacked the scientists’ citadel at a very crucial moment and the scientists tried to hold them off long enough to get their task done.

No, it wasn’t plagiarism. For one thing I wrote it entirely differently. However, the scene fit both stories and having been impressed by it in Jack’s story, I drew from memory, and used it in my own story automatically-never for one moment considering that I wasn’t making it up out of nothing but had earlier read something very like that scene.

I suppose that any thoroughgoing scholar who was willing to spend several years at the task could trace almost every quirk in “Nightfall” to one story or another that appeared in the science fiction magazines in the 1930s. (Yes, I read them all.) Naturally, he could do the same for any other story written by any other author.

Here’s something even more curious. In a note dated June 27, 1985, a reader sent me an enclosure-a photocopy of a short article from the October 1937 issue of the magazine Sky (now known as Sky and Telescope, I believe).

The article is entitled “If the Stars Appeared Only One Night in a Thousand Years.” It begins with the Emerson quotation and it is by M. T. Brackbill. The author describes what it might be like if the night on which the stars appear were coming. There might be “prostellarists” who believe the stars are coming; and “antistellarists “ who dismiss the whole thing as a fable. And then the night comes and everyone stares entranced at the stars and finally watches them disappear with the dawn, sadly realizing that for a thousand years they will never be seen again.

It’s rather touching, and about the only thing Brackbill misses, that I could see, was the certainty that on that particular night there was bound to be a heavy night-long overcast in various parts of the world, so that millions of people would invariably be disappointed.

The person who sent me the photocopy accompanied it with this note: “Dear Mr. Asimov-I happened to spot this article. I wonder if it was an inspiration for one of the greatest short stories ever written! “

Just an “inspiration“? If the article and “Nightfall” were carefully studied and compared, how many events and phrases in the story might seem to have been inspired or hinted at in the article. I haven’t the heart to do this myself and I hope no one else does.

Unfortunately, neither the name nor address of the person who sent me the article was on the note, and the envelope the whole thing had come in had not been saved. (Please, everyone, if you want an answer, put your name and return address on your letter and not just on the envelope. I frequently discard envelopes without glancing at them except to make sure they are addressed to me.)

In any case, I couldn’t answer him. So I must use this editorial as the only way of reaching him.

The truth is that I never saw the article; never had a hint that it existed until the day I received the note and enclosure from my unknown correspondent. It had not the slightest iota of direct influence on my story.

But John Campbell presented me with the Emerson quote and the request that I reverse it, only three years after the article had appeared. Had he seen it?

I wouldn’t be surprised if he had, and if, as soon as he had come across it or had had it drawn to his attention, copied down the quote and then waited for the first unwary science fiction writer to cross his threshold. (How thankful I am that it was I.)

Were he still alive (he would only be seventy-five today, if he were), I would ask him about it. I am quite sure, though, what his answer would be. It would be, “What difference does it make?”

So there arises the question: “If it is impossible to be completely original, how can you tell permissible influence from plagiarism?”

Well, it depends on the extent and detail of the borrowing. Based on that, it is possible to tell! It may not always be provable in a court of law, but, believe me, it is possible to tell!

Book Reviews

I have never made any secret of the fact that I dislike the concept of reviews and the profession of reviewing. It is a purely emotional reaction because, for reasons that are all too easy to work out, I strongly dislike having anyone criticize my stuff adversely.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. From my close observation of writers (almost all my friends are writers) they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

I’m class one. Most of my friends aim at class two and don’t quite make it and aren’t quite aware that they don’t make it.

Unfortunately, there’s no way in which one can get back at a reviewer. I have sometimes had the urge to do some fancy horsewhipping in the form of a mordant letter designed to flay the reptilian hide off the sub-moron involved; but, except in my very early days, I have always resisted. This is not out of idealism but out of the bitter knowledge that the writer always loses in such a confrontation.

Instead, then, I take to muttering derogatory comments about reviewing and reviewers in general.

But I’m in a bad spot here. This magazine (which is the apple of my eye) not only has a regular book review column, but has other items, less regularly included, that review one or another of the facets of the science fiction field. If I really despise reviewing so, why is it I allow reviewing in the magazine?

Because I don’t really despise reviewing and reviewers. That is an emotional reaction that I recognize as emotional, and therefore discount. I am a rational man; I like to think; and in any disagreement between my emotions and my rationality, I should hope it is rationality that wins out every time.

Now let’s get down to cases.

A publisher to whom I was beholden asked me to read a book by an important writer and to give them a quote that could be used on the cover. I tried to beg off, but they insisted that I at least read it, and give it a chance.

So I did. I tried to read it-and the gears locked tight long before I finished. It seemed to me so unsuccessful a book that there was no way in which I could give it the quote that was wanted. I felt awful, but I had to call the publisher and beg off.

Now, then, assuming my judgment was correct, should that book be reviewed? Why say unkind things about it?

In the case of an ordinary bad book, one might wonder. At the most, it might only be necessary to say, “This is a bad book because-” with a few unemotional sentences added. You don’t crack a peanut with a sledgehammer.

An unsatisfactory book written by an important writer, however, requires a detailed review to explain why it seems to have gone wrong and where and how. This is not so much to warn off readers, who will probably have bought the book in great numbers anyway by the time the review comes out. It is because even a flawed book by a good writer can be an important educational experience.

Its failure can be used as a way of sharpening the general taste for the literary good. It will educate (properly reviewed) not only the reader, but the writer as well, the veteran as well as the neophyte.

And yet despite the value of such a review, I could not in a million years review the book myself. There are emotional objections. How can I say unkind things about someone else when I detest having someone say unkind things about me? If I can’t take it, I have no right to dish it out. Then, too, how can I review a book by a friend (or, possibly, a rival) and be sure of being objective?

If that isn’t enough, there are technical objections. Even if everyone were to grant that I am a whizz at writing science fiction, that does n ot necessarily mean that I’m a whizz at understanding what makes science fiction good and bad. Even when I feel a story to be bad I don’t necessarily have the ability to point out just where and how and why the badness exists.

So we have Baird Searles reviewing books for us. He has the talent for saying what needs to be said and I am grateful that he has.

Now consider what a reviewer must do, if he is to be good at his job.

1) A reviewer must read the book carefully; every word of it, if possible; even if it seems to be very bad. This is an extraordinarily difficult job. It is the mark of an unsuccessful book if it is hard to read; if it is clumsy, wearying, uninteresting, dull, monotonous, insulting to the intelligence, predictable, repetitious, infelicitous-any or all of these things. When you and I read a book of this sort, we stop reading. A competent reviewer mustn’t. He must stick to it to give the book an utterly fair shake.

2) A reviewer must read with attention, marking passages perhaps, taking notes perhaps, so that he won’t have to work from memory alone in writing his review, so that he won’t make factual errors or unreasonable criticisms.

3) A reviewer must read with detachment and not allow his judgment of the book to be twisted by his judgment of the writer. He may know a writer to be an irritating boor and yet realize the writer’s book may be great. He may know a writer to be a saint, and yet realize the writer’s book may be awful. He must concentrate on the book and only on the book.

4) A reviewer must not only be a person of literary judgment, but he must have a wide knowledge of the field, so that he can exert his judgment of the book against the context of other books by the author, of books by other authors of similar experience or similar intent, and of the field in general.

5) A reviewer must be a competent writer himself, for the most literarily penetrating review ever written loses its point if it, itself, is so badly written that any reader grows bored, irritated, or confused.

6) Finally-and this is the point where even the cleverest reviewer (perhaps especially the cleverest reviewer) can come a cropper-the review must not be a showcase for the reviewer himself. The purpose of the review is not to demonstrate the superior erudition of the reviewer or to make it seem that the reviewer, if he but took the trouble, could write the book better than the author did. (Why the devil doesn’t he do it, then?) Nor must it seem to be a hatchet job in which the reviewer is carrying out some private vengeance. (This may not be so, you understand, but it mustn’t even seem to be so.)

These are not easy conditions to meet; and the fact is that though there are many reviewers, there are not many good reviewers.

And why not? Probably all reviewers will gladly accept Sturgeon’s Law (that ninety percent of everything is crud) with respect to the books they review-and it holds just as solidly for the reviews they write.

And is there anything a good book reviewer must receive from the editor for all that is expected of him? Certainly! In a word, independence.

When an editor hires a book reviewer, he doesn’t (or shouldn’t) buy a scribbler who has agreed to put the boss’s opinions into words. No, it is the book reviewer and his opinions that have been hired. The book reviews in this magazine do not necessarily express the opinions of George, Shawna, or myself- although they might. In fact, George, Shawna, and myself do not necessarily agree among ourselves as to the worth of a particular piece of writing.

But it is the reviewer’s opinions you want, not ours; and it is his you will get. He is the professional in this respect.

Baird Searles, in my opinion, is one of the good reviewers, and we are glad we have him, and we hope he stays with us a long time. He does not ask us for our views before he writes his column and if (inconceivably) he asked us, we wouldn’t tell him.

And it’s because reviewers can be like Baird Searles that we have a review column.

What Writers Go Through

Every once in a while I get a letter that strikes a chord. Jeanne s. King of Marietta, Georgia, suggested that I write an editorial on what writers go through. Her tender heart bled for writers and I think she has a point.

First, let me make it clear what I mean by “writers.” I don’t want to confine the word only to those who are successful, who have published bestselling books, or who crank out reams of published material every year (if not every day), or who make a lavish living out of their pens, typewriters, or word processors, or who have gained fame and adulation.

I also mean those writers who just sell an occasional item, who make only a bit of pin money to eke out incomes earned mainly in other fashions, whose names are not household words, and who are not recognized in the street.

In fact, let me go farther and say I even mean those writers who never sell anything, who are writers only in the sense that they work doggedly at it, sending out story after story, and living in a hope that is not yet fulfilled.

We can’t dismiss this last classification as “failures” and not “real” writers. For one thing, they are not necessarily failures forever. Almost every writer, before he becomes a success, even a runaway supernova success, goes through an apprentice period when he’s a “failure.”

Secondly, even if a writer is destined always to be a failure, and even if he is never going to sell, he remains a human being for whom all the difficulties and frustration of a writer’s life exist and, in fact, exist without the palliation of even an occasional and minor triumph.

If we go to the other extreme and consider the writer whose every product is an apparently sure sale, we find that the difficulties and frustrations have not disappeared. For one thing, no number of triumphs, no amount of approval, seem to have any carrying power at the crucial moment.

When even the most successful writer sits down before a blank piece of paper, he is bound to feel that he is starting from scratch and, indeed, that the Damoclean sword of rejection hangs over him. (By the way, when I say “he” and “him,” I mean to add “she” and “her” every time.)

If I may use myself as an example, I always wince a little when anyone, however sincerely and honestly, assumes that I am never rejected. I admit that I am rarely rejected, but between “rarely” and “never” is a vast gulf. Even though I no longer work on spec and write only when a particular item is requested, I still run the risk. The year doesn’t pass without at least one failure. It was only a couple of months ago that Esquire ordered a specific article from me. I duly delivered it; and they, just as duly, handed it back.

That is the possibility all of us live with. We sit there alone, pounding out the words, with our heart pounding in time. Each sentence brings with it a sickening sensation of not being right. Each page keeps us wondering if we are moving in the wrong direction.

Even if, for some reason, we feel we are getting it right and that the whole thing is singing with operatic clarity, we are going to come back to it the next day and reread it and hear only a duck’s quacking.

It’s torture for everyone of us.

Then comes the matter of rewriting and polishing; of removing obvious flaws (at least, they seem obvious, but are they really?) and replacing them with improvements (or are we just making things worse?). There’s simply no way of telling if the story is being made better or is just being pushed deeper into the muck until the time finally comes when we either tear it up as hopeless, or risk the humiliation of rejection by sending it off to an editor.

Once the story is sent off, no amount of steeling one’s self, no amount of telling one’s self over and over that it is sure to be rejected, can prevent one from harboring that one wan little spark of hope. Maybe-Maybe

The period of waiting is refined torture in itself. Is the editor simply not getting round to it, or has he read it and is he suspended in uncertainty? Is he going to read it again and maybe decide to use it, or has it been lost, or has it been tossed aside to be mailed back at some convenient time and been forgotten?

How long do you wait before you write a query letter? And if you do write a letter, is it subservient enough? Sycophantic enough? Groveling enough? After all, you don’t want to offend him. He might be just on the point of accepting; and if an offensive letter from you comes along, he may snarl and rip your manuscript in two, sending you the halves.

And when the day comes that the manila envelope appears in the mail, all your mumbling to yourself that it is sure to come will not avail you. The sun will go into eclipse.

It’s been over forty years since I’ve gone through all this in its full hellishness, but I remember it with undiminished clarity.

And then even if you make a sale, you have to withstand the editor’s suggestions which, at the very least, mean you have to turn back to the manuscript, work again, add or change or subtract material, and perhaps produce a finished product that will be so much worse than what had gone before that you lose the sale you thought you had made. At the worst, the changes requested are so misbegotten from your standpoint that they ruin the whole story in your eyes; and yet you may be in a position where you dare not refuse, so that you must maim your brainchild rather than see it die. (Or ought you to take back the story haughtily and try another editor? And will the first editor then blacklist you?)

Even after the item is sold and paid for and published, the triumph is rarely unalloyed. The number of miseries that might still take place are countless. A book can be produced in a slipshod manner or it can have a repulsive book jacket, or include blurbs that give away the plot or clearly indicate that the blurb writer didn’t follow the plot.

A book can be nonpromoted, treated with indifference by the publisher and therefore found in no bookstores, and sell no more than a few hundred copies. Even if it begins to sell well, that can be aborted when it is reviewed unsympathetically or even viciously by someone with no particular talent or qualifications in criticism.

If you sell a story to a magazine you may feel it is incompetently illustrated, or dislike the blurb, or worry about misprints. You are even liable to face the unsympathetic comments of individual readers who will wax merry, sardonic, or contemptuous at your expense-and what are their qualifications for doing so?

You will bleed as a result. I never met a writer who didn’t bleed at the slightest unfavorable comment, and no number of favorable or even ecstatic remarks will serve as a styptic pencil.

In fact, even total success has its discomforts and inconveniences. There are, for instance:

People who send you books to autograph and return, but don’t bother sending postage or return envelopes, reducing you to impounding their books or (if you can’t bring yourself to do that) getting envelopes, making the package, expending stamps, and possibly even going to the post office.

People who send you manuscripts to read and criticize (Nothing much, just a page-by-page analysis, and if you think it’s all right, would you get it published with a generous advance, please? Thank you.).

People who dash off two dozen questions, starting with a simple one like: What in your opinion is the function of science fiction and in what ways does it contribute to the welfare of the world, illustrating your thesis with citations from the classic works of various authors. (Please use additional pages, if necessary.)

People who send you a form letter, with your name filled in (misspelled), asking for an autographed photograph, and with no envelope or postage supplied.

Teachers who flog a class of thirty into each sending you a letter telling you how they liked a story of yours, and sending you a sweet letter of her own asking you to send a nice answer to each one of the little dears.

And so on

Well, then, why write?

A seventeenth-century German chemist, Johann Joachim Becher, once wrote: “The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poi sins and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that may I die if I would change places with the Persian King.”

Well, what goes for chemistry, goes for writing. I know all the miseries, but somewhere among them is happiness. I can’t easily explain where it is or what it consists of, but it is there. I know the happiness and I experience it, and I will not stop writing while I live-and may I die if I would change places with the President of the United States.

Revisions

When it comes to writing, I am a “primitive.” I had had no instruction when I began to write, or even by the time I had begun to publish. I took no courses. I read no books on the subject.

This was not bravado on my part, or any sense of arrogance. I just didn’t know that there were courses or books on the subject. In all innocence, I just thought you sat down and wrote. Naturally, I have picked up a great deal about writing in the days since I began; but in certain important respects, my early habits imprinted me and I find I can’t change.

Some of these imprinted habits are trivial. For instance, I cannot leave a decent margin. Editors have tried begging and they have tried ordering, and my only response is a firm “Never! “

When I was a kid, you see, getting typewriting paper was a hard thing to do for it required m-o-n-e-y, of which I had none. Therefore what I had, I saved-single-spaced, both sides, and typing to the very edge of the page, all four edges. Well, I learned that one could not submit a manuscript unless it was double-spaced on one side of the page only; and I was forced, unwillingly, to adopt that wasteful procedure. I also learned about margins and established them-but not wide enough. Nor could I ever make them wide enough. My sense of economy had gone as far as it would go and it would go no farther.

More important was the fact that I had never learned about revisions. My routine was (and still is) to write a story in first draft as fast as I can. Then I go over it, and correct errors in spelling, grammar, and word order. Then I prepare my second draft, making minor changes as I go and as they occur to me. My second draft is my final draft. No more changes except under direct editorial order and then with rebellion in my heart.

I didn’t know there was anything wrong with this. I thought it was the way you were supposed to write. In fact when Bob Heinlein and I were working together at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia during World War II, Bob asked me how I went about writing a story and I told him. He said, “You type it twice?

Why don’t you type it correctly the first time?”

I felt bitterly ashamed; and the very next story I wrote, I tried my level best to get it right the first time. I failed. No matter how carefully I wrote, there were always things that had to be changed. I decided I just wasn’t as good as Heinlein.

But then, in 1950, I attended the Breadloaf Writers’ conference at the invitation of Fletcher Pratt.

There I listened in astonishment to some of the things said by the lecturers. “The secret of writing,” said one of them, “is rewriting.”

Fletcher Pratt himself said, “If you ever write a paragraph that seems to you to sing, to be the best thing you’ve ever written, to be full of wonder and poetry and greatness-cross it out, it stinks! “

Over and over again, we were told about the importance of polishing, of revising, of tearing up and rewriting. I got the bewildered notion that, far from being expected to type it right the first time, as Heinlein had advised me, I was expected to type it all wrong, and get it right only by the thirty-second time, if at all.

I went home immersed in gloom; and the very next time I wrote a story, I tried to tear it up. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I went over it to see all the terrible things I had done, in order to revise them. To my chagrin, everything sounded great to me. (My own writing always sounds great to me.)

Eventually, after wasting hours and hours-to say nothing of spiritual agony-I gave it up. My stories would have to be written the way they always were-and still are.

What is it I am saying, then? That it is wrong to revise? No, of course not-any more than it is wrong not to revise.

You don’t do anything automatically, simply because some “authority” (including me) says you should. Each writer is an individual, with his or her own way of thinking, and doing, and writing. Some writers are not happy unless they polish and polish, unless they try a paragraph this way and that way and the other way.

Once Oscar Wilde, coming down to lunch, was asked how he had spent his morning. “I was hard at work,” he said.

“Oh?” he was asked. “Did you accomplish much?” “Yes, indeed,” said Wilde. “I inserted a comma.”

At dinner, he was asked how he had spent the afternoon. “ More work, “ he said. “Inserted another comma?” was the rather sardonic question.

“No,” said Wilde, unperturbed. “I removed the one I had inserted in the morning.”

Well, if you’re Oscar Wilde, or some other great stylist, polishing may succeed in imparting an ever-higher gloss to your writing and you should revise and revise. If, on the other hand, you’re not much of a stylist (like me, for instance) and are only interested in straightforward storytelling and clarity, then a small amount of revision is probably all you need. Beyond that small amount you may merely be shaking up the rubble.

I was told last night, for instance, that Daniel Keyes (author of the classic “Flowers for Algernon”) is supposed to have said, “The author’s best friend is the person who shoots him just before he makes one change too many.”

Let’s try the other extreme. William Shakespeare is reported by Ben Jonson to have boasted that he “never blotted a word.” The Bard of Avon, in other words, would have us believe that, like Heinlein, he got it right the first time, and that what he handed in to the producers at the Globe Theatre was first draft.

(He may have been twisting the truth a bit. Prolific writers tend to exaggerate the amount of nonrevision they do.)

Well, if you happen to be another Will Shakespeare, or another Bob Heinlein [Mr. Heinlein now admits to two or three drafts on his longer works.-Ed], maybe you can get away without revising at all. But if you’re just an ordinary writer (like me) maybe you’d better do some. (As a matter of fact, Ben Jonson commented that he wished Will had “blotted out a thousand,” and there are indeed places where Will might have been-ssh!-improved on.)

Let’s pass on to a slightly different topic.

I am sometimes asked if I prepare an outline first before writing a story or a book. The answer is: No, I don’t.

To begin with, this was another one of those cases of initial ignorance. I didn’t know at the start of my career that such things as outlines existed. I just wrote a story and stopped when I finished, and if it happened to be one length it was a short, and if it happened to be another it was a novelette.

When I wrote my first novel, Doubleday told me to make it 70,000 words long. So I wrote until I had 70,000 words and then stopped-and by the greatest good luck, it turned out to be the end of the novel.

When I began my second novel, I realized that such an amazing coincidence was not likely to happen twice in a row, so I prepared an outline. I quickly discovered two things. One, an outline constricted me so that I could not breathe. Two, there was no way I could force my characters to adhere to the outline; even if I wanted to do so, they refused. I never tried an outline again. In even my most complicated novels,

I merely fix the ending firmly in my mind; decide on a beginning; and then, from that beginning, charge toward the ending, making up the details as I go along.

On the other hand, P. G. Wodehouse, for whose writings I have an idolatrous admiration, always prepared outlines, spending more time on them than on the book and getting every event, however small, firmly in place before beginning.

There’s something to be said on both sides of course.

If you are a structured and rigid person who likes everything under control, you will be uneasy without an outline. On the other hand, if you are an undisciplined person with a tendency to wander allover the landscape, you will be better off with an outline even if you feel you wouldn’t like one.

On the third hand, if you are quick-thinking and ingenious, but with a strong sense of the whole, you will be better off without an outline.

How do you decide which you are? Well, try an outline, or try writing without one, and find out for yourself.

The thing is: Don’t feel that any rule of writing must be hard and fast, and handed down from Sinai. Try them all out by all means; but in the last analysis, stick to that which makes you comfortable. You are, after all, an individual.

Irony

It is well known that I know nothing about the craft of writing in any formal way. I say so myself-constantly. Being an editorial director, however, has its demands and duties. I must answer letters from readers, for instance, and take into account any unhappiness they may have with stories and editorial policy. And that means I am sometimes forced to think about writing techniques.

That brings me to the subject at hand, the matter of the use of irony by writers.

In the March 1984 issue, I discussed satire. The two are often lumped together, and, in fact, sometimes confused and treated as though they were synonymous. They are not!

Satire, as I explained, achieves its purpose of castigating the evils of humanity and society by exaggeration. It puts those evils under a magnifying glass with the intention of making them clearly visible.

Irony does it differently. You can get a hint from the fact that “irony” is from a Greek word meaning “dissimulation.” An ironist must pretend, and the classic ironist was Socrates, who in his discussions with others would relentlessly pretend ignorance and ask all kinds of naive questions designed to trap an overconfident adversary into rashly taking positions that then proved to be indefensible under further naive questioning by Socrates.

Naturally, Socrates was not ignorant and the questions were n ot naive, and his method of procedure is known as “Socratic irony.” You may well believe that those who suffered under his bland lash did not grow to love him, and I suspect he fully earned his final draught of hemlock.

Socrates set the fashion for irony for all time. He pretended to be ignorant when he was actually piercingly intelligent, and ever since then, ironists have pretended to believe and say the opposite of what they wanted the reader to understand. Instead of exaggerating the evils they are denouncing, they reverse them and call them good.

The satirist induces laughter by his exaggeration, the ironist induces indignation by his reversal.

The satirist is often good-natured, the ironist tends to be savage and bitter. Satire is a comparatively mild technique whose purpose is easily grasped. Irony is a difficult technique whose point is frequently missed, and the ironist may find he is holding a two-edged sword and is himself badly gashed.

Most satirists find themselves indulging in irony sometimes, and I know exactly where I first encountered irony. I was reading Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers for the first time (as a pre-teener) and in chapter two, I encountered Dickens’s description of Tracy Tupman’s zeal at “general benevolence.” Said Dickens, “The number of instances…in which that excellent man referred objects of charity to the houses of other members for left-off garments or pecuniary relief is almost incredible.”

I was astonished. I thought to myself that it wasn’t very kind of Mr. Tupman to send poor people to other members instead of giving them something himself, so how could he be benevolent? And after a while, the light dawned. He wasn’t benevolent. In fact, I decided indignantly, he was a stingy bum, and my liking for him was strictly limited for the rest of the book and ever since. I did not know that what I had just read was irony, but I understood the concept from that time on, and I eventually learned the word.

If you want a savage and prolonged bit of writing with a great deal of irony in it, I refer you to Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, which was not published till after he was safely dead. I warn you, though, it’s not pleasant reading. It certainly makes plain, however, Twain’s bitter feelings about humanity and the assorted evils that seemed (to Twain, at any rate) to be inextricably bound up with it. And it may, for a time at least, embitter you with humanity, too.

Even that, however, must take second place to the all-time high in caustic irony-a pamphlet by Jonathan Swift, published about 1730, entitled “ A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country and for Making them Beneficial to the Public. “ Swift served in Ireland and could see first-hand, and with enormous indignation, the manner in which the English brutally and callously ground the Irish into helpless and hopeless poverty.

He therefore pointed out that since the only thing the Irish were allowed to produce and keep for their own use were their children, it would supply them with needed money, and others with needed food, if those Irish children were sold in order to be fattened and slaughtered for sale at the butcher’s. With an absolutely straight face, and with incredible ingenuity, he pointed out all the advantages that would accrue from such cannibalism.

If anything could possibly have evoked shame and even reform from those responsible for the Irish plight, that pamphlet would have done it. Undoubtedly, many of those who read the pamphlet were shamed; some may even have altered their attitudes and behavior. By and large, however, the exploitation of the Irish continued unchanged for nearly two more centuries and the light that casts on humanity is not a good one.

And yet, you know, not everyone has a “sense of irony,” which is by no means the same as a “sense of humor.” I firmly believe that one can have one and not the other. It is possible to be confused by a pretense to believe the opposite of what you believe, as I was for a few minutes by Dickens’s description of Tupman as benevolent. Of course, I caught on, but if I had lacked a sense of irony, I suppose I wouldn’t have.

There were, actually, good and kindly people who read Swift’s pamphlet with indignation, not at the mistreatment of the Irish, but at Swift’s apparently callous and immoral advocacy of cannibalism. They thought he meant it, and denounced him with immeasurable vehemence.

And that finally brings me to Asimov’s for sometimes what we publish contains irony, and if irony is hard to handle even for the absolute master of the art, good old Swift, you can understand that it is a slippery tool for lesser mortals.

In the February 1984 issue, Tom Rainbow wrote a “Viewpoint” article entitled, “Sentience and the Single Extraterrestrial,” that dealt with the requirements for such things as intelligence, sentience, and self- awareness. He described the kind of extraterrestrials that might, or might not, possess such things.

From the title alone, you can tell that he is writing in the humorous mode, and indeed, when you read his essay, you will find that he is saying perfectly serious things in a deliberately funny way.

In one place, he uses irony. Having talked of the requirements of self-awareness in terms of brain/body ratios, he points out that women’s brains are smaller than men’s but so are their bodies, leaving the brain/body ratio nearly the same in both sexes. (Actually, if there’s an advantage it’s on the side of women.) With heavy irony, he says, “this reasoning leads to the somewhat startling conclusion that women must be self-aware.”

How can one believe that Rainbow really thinks the conclusion is “startling”? He’s using ironic dissimulation. He’s pretending to think it’s startling (and italicizing “self-aware” as a typographical indication of astonishment) in order for you to understand thoroughly that this is not startling and that people who consider women inferior beings are ignorant, and even stupid.

And to make it even plainer, he puts himself in the ironic position of these ignoramuses and says in the next sentence, “Heck, guys, if even girls can be self-aware, then there’s hope for Giant Dill Pickles.” The use of the adolescent term “Heck,” and the equally adolescent “guys,” and the shift from “women” to italicized “girls” all show that he is not speaking in his own persona and that he has nothing but contempt for the attitude. He is relying, poor fellow, on his readers having a sense of irony.

Well, they do-by and large.

But there are always exceptions, and a few women have written indignant letters to point out that this was insulting. One said that it wasn’t funny or cute.

No, indeed, Swift’s advocacy of cannibalism wasn’t funny or cute, either, but he was trying for something else.

To be sure, Swift’s entire pamphlet was aimed at his target and Rainbow was merely bringing in the matter of women’s brains as a side issue, and perhaps if he were doing it again, he might decide it would be more judicious not to indulge. But please, women, the man is on your side and tried to show it by the use of that two-edged sword, irony. You may think the irony didn’t work, but that doesn’t make

Rainbow any enemy of womankind.

Plagiarism

To the ancient romans, a “Plagiarius” was what we call a kidnapper, and to steal children is certainly a heinous crime. It appears to those who work with their minds and imagination, however, that to steal one’s brainchildren is almost as heinous a crime, and so “plagiarism, “ in English, has come to mean the stealing of the ideas, forms, or words by someone who then puts them forth as his or her own.

A scientist’s formulas, an artist’s paintings, an inventor’s models, a philosopher’s thoughts, might all be the subject of plagiarism, but common usage has come to apply the term, specifically, to the theft of a writer’s production.

Plagiarism is a horrid nightmare to writers in several different ways; and it is much more serious than nonwriters may realize.

If a writer, for any reason, commits plagiarism, copying some already published material, and if he gets away with it to the extent of getting the plagiarized material republished, he is bound to be caught sooner or later. Some reader, somewhere, will notice the theft. In that case, even if the plagiarist isn’t sued or punished in any way, you can be sure that no editor who knows of the plagiarism will buy anything from that writer again. If the plagiarist has a career, it is permanently ruined.

You may think that such a literary thief deserves a ruined career, and certainly I think so, but copying an already published item word for word is such a surefire failure that only an idiot or a complete novice would do it. What about the case where someone simply makes use of the central idea of the story, the series of events it contains, the climax, the emotional milieu, and so on, but does not repeat it word for word? What if he uses his (or her) own words entirely, changes the incidents in nonessential details, puts it in a different setting and so on?

In that case, it becomes more difficult to decide whether plagiarism has taken place. After all, it is possible to have the same ideas someone else has had.

Thus, Ted Sturgeon once wrote a story which he sent to Horace Gold of Galaxy and which was accepted. I wrote a story which I sent to Horace Gold while Ted’s story was still unpublished. There was no communication between us; we lived in different cities and had not exchanged phone calls or letters in months, nor had either of us discussed our stories with anyone. Nevertheless, not only did we both center our stories about a double meaning in the word “hostess,” but two of my characters were Drake and Vera, and two of his were Derek and Verna.

It was the purest of coincidences, for except for the double meaning and the character names that we shared, the stories were miles apart. Nevertheless, even the appearance of plagiarism must be avoided. I had to make enough changes in my story (because it was the later one received) to destroy the appearance. To do so spoiled the story in my opinion, but it had to be done anyway.

In the same way, when I am writing a story, I must be conscious that there have been other stories dealing with similar ideas or similar characters or similar events, and I must make every effort to dilute that similarity. When I wrote a story once called “Each an Explorer,” I never for a moment forgot John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” and spent more time trying to avoid his story than trying to write my own.

In the same way, when I wrote “Lest We Remember” (published in this magazine), I had to steer a mile wide of Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon.” It’s part of the game.

But I haven’t read every story ever written and many that I have read, I have completely forgotten, at least consciously. What if I duplicate important elements of stories I have never read, or have forgotten? It’s possible. I once wrote a short-short that ended with a certain dramatic climax in the last sentence. Eventually, I received a letter from another writer whose story had been published before I wrote my story and who had made use of the same dramatic climax in his last sentence. What’s more, I had his story in an anthology in my library. I did not remember reading it, but I had had the opportunity to do so. The two stories, except for the climaxes, were completely different, but I promptly wrote the other author and told him that although he had my word that there was no conscious imitation, I would withdraw the story from circulation and it would never again appear in any anthology, any collection, any form whatever-and it never has.

Fortunately, the other writer accepted this, but what protection do I (or any other writer) have against the accusation of plagiarism over what is a bit of unconscious recall, or, for that matter, an outright coincidence?

Actually, very little. I rely, to a large extent, on my prolificity and my unblemished record. No one as prolific as I would seem to have to depend on someone else’s ideas, and my own mental fertility is obvious to all. Secondly, I am cautious enough never to discuss my stories before they are published, nor will I listen to others who might want to discuss their stories. In fact, I won’t even read unsolicited manuscripts sent me by strangers. They go back at once, unread.

Even so, every established writer lives under an eternal Damocles’s sword of possible accusation of plagiarism. A casual reference, a small similarity, a nonessential duplication may be enough to produce such a suit. Such a suit, however unjustified, however certain of being thrown out of court, can be hurtful to an innocent writer. It is, after all, an expense. Lawyers must be paid, time must be lost and, invariably, one is urged to “payoff the kook.”

But what if you, the established writer, have been plagiarized? That has never happened to me to the extent of publication-that I know of. To be sure, there have been pastiches of me, deliberate imitations of my robot stories, or my Black Widowers mystery stories, and so on. These come under the heading of fun. The writer who turns them out makes no secret of it, and the editor knows that it’s a pastiche.

Sometimes, they send the manuscript to me to ask if I have any objection. I have always given permission. Then, too, there are stories that are bound to be similar to mine in some benign way. The Star Wars movies have some distant similarities to my Foundation stories, but, what the heck, you can’t make a fuss about such things.

Unpublished plagiarism is more common. An English professor once sent me a story written by a student in first-year English. It didn’t seem to her likely that the kid could have written that good a story and there were things in it that seemed reminiscent of me-like the Three Laws of Robotics. I went over the story and it was my “Galley Slave” word for word. I returned it to the professor and told her to (a) punish the student appropriately, and (b) not let me know anything about it. (I’m soft-hearted.)

And what if you’re an editor and get stuck with some material that might conceivably be plagiarized. In the first place-is it? A completely original, nonreminiscent story is possible, but very rarely met up with. Similarities with some particular published story are almost unavoidable. However, the more similarities there are, with the same previously published story, the greater the possibility of plagiarism.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to establish certainty if the copying isn’t word for word.

Should an editor refuse a story, however good, if there are too many similarities? Of course! Remember that I said even the appearance of plagiarism must be strictly avoided.

There is, however, a catch. An editor has not read every story that has been published. Sometimes an editor, being human, has not even read every famous story ever published. Or an editor has read many stories but some of them have completely gone from her mind. Such an editor may, in all innocence, therefore publish a doubtful story. He (or she) is then a victim and not an accomplice.

Just as honest, established writers must live, constantly, with the fear of being accused of plagiarism, or of themselves being plagiarized, so must honest, established editors live, constantly, with the fear of being victimized into publishing a doubtful story.

What does one do in such a case? One can’t entirely ignore the matter. For one thing, the similarity between the new story and an older story is sure to be seen by some readers. Even if the older story is very obscure, someone will have read it and remembered it. If it is a well-known story, letters will come in heaps.

One can ask the writer of the doubtful story for an explanation. If the explanation seems unconvincing, one can avoid buying stories from the writer again. One might warn other editors in the field to be careful. And one can try hard not to let it happen again-knowing full well that there is no way of stopping every piece of literary prestidigitation.

It is comforting to know, however, that if an editor lets something suspicious get into print, the fact will not remain unreported for long. We can be sure, then, that if no indignant reader has written within two weeks of the appearance of an issue, we have probably committed no ghastly mistakes of this nature in that issue.

Symbolism

To a child, a story is a story, and to many of us, as we grow older, a story remains a story. The good guy wins, the bad guy loses. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. We don’t want anything beyond that-at least to begin with.

The trouble is that if that’s all there is, one is likely to grow weary eventually. Children love to play tick-tack-toe, for instance, but it’s such a limited game that, after a while, most children don’t want to play it any more. In the same way, children, as they grow older, may stop wanting to read stories that are only stories.

Since writers get as tired writing stories that are only stories, as readers get tired reading them, it is only natural that writers begin to search for new and different ways to tell a story-for their own mental health, if nothing else.

A writer can try to find a new kind of plot, or he can indulge in stylistic experimentation, or he can strive for events that are ambiguous and conclusions that are inconclusive, or he can blur the distinction between good and evil, or between dream and reality. There are many, many things he can do and the one thing all these attempts have in common is that they annoy those readers who still are in the stage of wanting stories that are only stories.

Mind you, I don’t sneer at such readers. For one thing, I myself still write stories that are primarily stories, because that’s what I like. In my stories, there is a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a clear end, the good guy usually wins, and so on.

Nevertheless, you can’t blame writers and readers for wanting something more than that, and those of us (1 include myself, please note) who are suspicious of experimentation and fancy tricks ought to make some effort to understand what’s going on. We may fail to grasp it entirely, but we may at least see just enough to avoid an explosion of unreasonable anger.

One game that writers very commonly play is the one called “symbolism.” A story can be written on two levels. On the surface, it is simply a story, and anyone can read it as such and be satisfied. Even children can read it.

But the simple characters and events of the surface may stand for (or symbolize) other subtler things. Below the surface, therefore, there may be hidden and deeper meanings that children and unsophisticated adults don’t see. Those who can see the inner structure, however, can get a double pleasure out of it. First, since the inner structure is usually cleverer and more convoluted than the surface, it exercises the mind more pleasantly. Second, since it is not easy to detect, the reader has the excitement of discovery and the pleasure of admiring his own cleverness. (You can easily imagine what fun the writer has constructing such symbolic significance.)

I suppose the best example of something written on two levels is the pair of books popularly known as Alice in Wonderland. On the surface, it’s a simply written fantasy, and children love it. Some adults reading it, however, find themselves in an intricate maze of puns, paradoxes, and inside jokes. (Read Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, if you want to increase your pleasure in the book.)

Or take J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. On the surface, it is a simple tale of a dangerous quest. The small hobbit, Frodo, must take a dangerous ring into the very teeth of an all-powerful enemy and destroy it-and, of course, he succeeds. On a second, deeper level, it is an allegory of good and evil, leading us to accept the possibility that the small and weak can triumph where the (equally good) large and powerful might not; that even evil has its uses that contribute to the victory of the good, and so on.

But there is a third level, too. What is the ring that is so powerful and yet so evil? Why is it that those who possess it are corrupted by it and cannot give it up? Is such a thing pure fantasy or does it have an analogue in reality?

My own feeling is that the ring represents modern technology. This corrupts and destroys society (in Tolkien’s view) and, yet, those societies who gain it and who are aware of its evils simply cannot give it up. I have read The Lord of the Rings five times, so far, and I have not yet exhausted my own symbolic reading of it. I do not agree with, and I resent, Tolkien’s attitude and yet I get pleasure out of the intricacy and skill of the structure.

There is another important point to be made concerning symbolism.

A writer may insert it, without knowing he has done so; or else, a clever interpreter can find significance in various parts of a story that a writer will swear he had no intention of inserting.

This has happened to me, for instance. The middle portion of my novel The Gods Themselves, with its intricate picture of a trisexual society, has been interpreted psychiatrically and philosophically in ways that I know I didn’t intend, and in terms that I literally don’t understand. My Foundation series has been shown, by apparently careful analysis, to be thoroughly Marxist in inspiration, except that I had never read one word by Marx, or about Marx either, at the time the stories were written, or since.

When I complained once to someone who worked up a symbolic meaning of my story “Nightfall” that made no sense to me at all, he said to me, haughtily, “What makes you think you understand the story just because you’ve written it?”

And when I published an essay in which I maintained that Tolkien’s ring symbolized modern technology, and a reader wrote to tell me that Tolkien himself had denied it, I responded with, “That doesn’t matter. The ring nevertheless symbolizes modern technology.”

Sometimes it is quite demonstrable that an author inserts a deeper symbolism than he knows - or even understands. I have almost never read a layman’s explanation of relativity that didn’t succumb to the temptation of quoting Alice because Lewis Carroll included paradoxes that are unmistakably relativistic in nature. He did not know that, of course; he just happened to be a genius at paradox.

Well, sometimes this magazine publishes stories that must not be read only on the surface, and, as is almost inevitable, this riles a number of readers.

I am thinking, for instance, of the novella “Statues” by Jim Aikin, which appeared in our November 1984 issue, and which some readers objected to strenuously. There were statements to the effect that it wasn’t science fiction or even fantasy, that it had no point, that it was anti-Christian, and so on.

To begin with, the story, taken simply as a story, is undoubtedly unpleasant in spots. I winced several times when I read it, and I tell you, right now, that I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, write such a story. But I’m not the be-all and the end-all. The story, however difficult to stomach some of its passages may be, was skillfully and powerfully written. Even some of those who objected had to admit that.

And it was indeed a fantasy. Aikin made it clear toward the end that the statues were not pushed about, and that their apparent movement was not a delusion. They were on the side of the heroine and were cooperating with her, trying to rescue her from her unhappy life.

But that is only the surface. A little deeper and we see that it is a case of the old gods trying to save the young woman from the new. It is a rebellion against the rigid Pharisaic morality of some aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition and a harking back to the greater freedom of some aspects of paganism.

The story is in the spirit of that powerful line of A. C. Swinburne in his “Hymn to Proserpine”: “Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath.”

Looked at this way, the story is not anti-Christian (surely the “Christian“ characters in the story are not all there is to Christianity), but is against hypocrisy-in-the-name-of-religion, which I imagine no one favors, least of all Christians. The great French dramatist Moliere took up his cudgels against that same foe in his masterpiece Tartuffe and you can’t imagine the trouble he got into as a result.

But if you go deeper still, you will find the story is one more expression of the longing for the old.

In this story it is expressed by contrasting the frowning new god with the kindly old ones. In The Lord of the Rings it is expressed by contrasting the evil technology of the Dark Lord, Sauron, with the pastoral life of the simple hobbits. (Of course, it is much safer to make of the enemy a Devil-figure than a God-figure, so Tolkien got into no trouble at all.)

You can see the value of symbolism when you compare either of these with Jack Finney’s famous “The Third Level,” where he demonstrates his longing for the old by a straightforward contrast between 1950 and 1880. It leaves nothing to discover and, in my opinion, therefore, is a weak story.

But “Statues”-like it or not-is a strong story that makes an important point with great skill.

Prediction

There is a general myth among laymen that, somehow, the chief function of a science fiction writer is to make predictions that eventually come true.

Thus, I am frequently asked, “How does it feel to see all the predictions you have made coming true?”

To which I can only reply, “It feels great-in those very few cases in which something I have said actually came to pass.”

At other times, I am asked with utter confidence, “Can you give us a few of your predictions that have come true?”

I would love to be able to say, “Well, to name just a few: airplanes, radios, television, skyscrapers, and, in my early days, the wheel and fire.”

But I can’t bring myself to do that. The interviewers might actually print it, and they might try to give me a medal for predicting fire.

However, I came across a prediction I made once that I didn’t know I had made-that actually I didn’t know was a prediction. Nor did I discover it myself. Someone pointed it out to me.

In order to explain this, I’ll have to take the long way round. Please bear with me.

Back in 1952, I began to write a novel called The Caves of Steel. It was finished in 1953, was published in the October, November, and December 1953, issues of Galaxy as a three-part serial, and was published in book form by Doubleday in 1954.

It was a science fiction murder mystery that introduced my characters Elijah Baley and R. Daneel

Olivaw, whom some of you may have come across in your reading. Toward the end of The Caves of Steel, I needed a second murder for the sake of the plot, and that bothered me, for I don’t like murders and I rarely have them in my mysteries. When I do, there is only one and it is committed offstage, usually before the story begins. (I’m funny that way.)

The first murder in The Caves of Steel had been offstage before the story began, and the second murder would be offstage, also, but I didn’t want to kill a human being, so, instead, I killed a rather simple robot. But, again, I didn’t want to kill him brutally by smashing in his cranium or throwing him into a vat of melted lead. I preferred something more science fictional.

So here is a character in the story, a Dr. Gerrigel, describing the dead robot:

“‘In the robot’s partly clenched right fist,’ said Dr. Gerrigel, ‘was a shiny ovoid about two inches long and half an inch wide with a mica window at one end. The fist was in contact with his skull as though the robot’s last act had been to touch his head. The thing he was holding was an alpha-sprayer. You know what they are, I suppose?”‘

The nature of the alpha-sprayer was then explained for the sake of the reader. It was described as a device that sends out a beam of alpha particles through the mica window. The impingement of the alpha particles on the robot’s positronic brain was drastic. Or, as I put it: “Dr. Gerrigel said, ‘Yes, and his positronic brain paths were immediately randomized. Instant death, so to speak.”‘

Well, why not? Alpha particles are capable of knocking electrons out of atoms. It is because they do so, leaving electrically charged ions behind, that it was discovered, in 1911, that they could be detected in cloud chambers. The ions, with their electric charge, served as nuclei for tiny water droplets and those droplets marked out the path of the particle.

Positrons, which I use in robotic brain paths in order to make them sound science fictional, are precisely like electrons except for possessing a positive charge rather than a negative one. Alpha particles should shove them out of the way with equal ease, and if positrons make up the brain paths, shoving them away disrupts the brain paths and inactivates the robots.

There’s nothing ingenious about it at all. Perfectly humdrum.

And then a short time ago, I received a letter from a gentleman working with a corporation that deals with computers. It begins as follows:

“This letter is to inform you and congratulate you on another remarkable scientific prediction of the future; namely your foreseeing of the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) logic upset problem caused by alpha particle emission, first observed in 1977, but written about by you in Caves of Steel in 1957.” [Note: Actually, 1952.]

Apparently the corporation tracked down failures in memory devices and finally decided that:

“These failures are caused by trace amounts of radioactive elements present in the packaging material used to encapsulate the silicon devices which, upon radioactive decay, emit high energy alpha particles that upset the logic states of the semiconductor memory……

“I am writing you about this topic because in your book, Caves of Steel, published in the 1950s, you use an alpha particle emitter to ‘murder’ one of the robots in the story, by destroying (‘randomizing’) its positronic brain. This is, of course, as good a way of describing a logic upset as any I’ve heard.

“I get a great big kick out of finding out that our millions of dollars of research, culminating in several international awards for the most important scientific contribution in the field of reliability of semiconductor devices in 1978 and 1979, was predicted in substantially accurate form twenty years [Note: twenty-five years, actually] before the events took place! You may certainly with great pride add this phenomenon to your collection of scientific predictions.”

Well, you can easily imagine that I was delighted, but truth is mighty and will prevail. I instantly wrote to the gentleman who was so pleased at my prediction that I honestly was not aware that I was making a prediction, and that the whole thing was a tribute, not to my ingenuity, but to the good luck that constantly dogs my footsteps.

A much more intuitive and remarkable prediction was made by the science-fictional father of us all, H. G. Wells. First, a little background.

In 1913, the British chemist Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), advanced the “isotope concept” based on his studies of the elements produced in the course of radioactive decay. He proposed that a particular element might be made up of atoms identical in chemical properties but differing somewhat in atomic weight. Elements, then, instead of necessarily being made up of absolutely identical elements were actually mixtures of several almost identical “isotopes” differing in atomic weight.

This made so much sense, it was quickly accepted and has remained a cornerstone of chemistry and of atomic physics ever since.

But just the other day, I received a reprint of a paper by H. G. Wells, written on September 5,1896 (seventeen years before Soddy’s suggestion), in which he refers to some work done by a chemist the previous year, before radioactivity had even been discovered, and suggests that to explain that work, it is possible to suppose that “there are two kinds of oxygen, one with an atom a little heavier than the other.” By saying that, he is anticipating and predicting the existence of isotopes.

Furthermore, he points out that “the electric spark traversing the gas has a…selective action. Your heavier atoms or molecules get driven this or that way with slightly more force.” This is a pretty good description of a phenomenon first noted by the British physicist Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940), in 1912, sixteen years after Wells’s suggestion.

How’s that!

Naturally, I would like to point to something of my own that contained a bit of nice intuitive insight, and here it is. In 1966, I wrote a scientific essay, “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” which eventually appeared in the September 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

In it I wanted to speculate about the origin of the universe and I was anxious to rebut the favorite comment of some who would ask, “If the universe started as a ‘cosmic egg,’ where did the cosmic egg come from?” The hope was that if I were faced with that question I would have to admit the existence of a supernatural agency of creation.

I therefore postulated the existence of “negative energy” and supposed that energy was created in both negative and positive form so that there was no net creation. I went on to advance what I called “

Asimov’s Cosmogonic Principle” and wrote, “The most economical way of expressing the principle is ‘In the Beginning, there was Nothing.’”

Well, some ten years later, the theory of the “inflationary universe” was advanced. It was altogether different from anything I had suggested, but in one respect it was identical. The universe was pictured as starting as a quantum fluctuation in a vacuum, so that “In the Beginning, there was Nothing.”

That piece of insight I am really proud of.

Best-Sellers

In the December 1982 issue of this magazine, you may recall that the first two chapters of my novel, Foundation’s Edge, were presented as an excerpt, together with an essay of my own on the novel’s genesis and some pleasant comments from my friends and colleagues. I agreed to all this under strong pressure from the editorial staff, who thought it would be a Good Thing and who overrode my own objections that readers would complain that I was using the magazine for personal aggrandizement.

As it happened, my fears were groundless. Readers’ comments were generally friendly, and a gratifying number indicated their determination to get the book and finish reading it.

It may be that you are curious to know what happened after the book was published. (For those of you interested in Asimovian trivia, it was published on October 8, 1982.) I’d like to tell you, because what happened astonished me totally. The book proved to be a best-seller!

I don’t mean it was a “best-seller” in the usual publisher’s promotion way of indicating that it didn’t actually sink without a trace on publication day. I mean it appeared on the national best-seller lists and, as I write, it is in third place on both The New York Times and on the Publishers Weekly list of hardcover fiction. Maybe by the time this editorial appears, it will have disappeared from the lists, but right now it’s there.

In the past, in these editorials, I have promised to keep you up to date on my endeavors and I will do it now in the form of an invented interview:

Q. Dr. Asimov, is this your first best-seller?

A. For some reason, people find that hard to believe, perhaps because I’m so assiduous at publicizing myself, but Foundation’s Edge is my first best-seller. It is my 262nd book and I have been a professional writer for forty-four years, so I guess this qualifies me as something less than an overnight success.

Mind you, this is not my first successful book. Very few of my books have actually lost money for the publisher and many of them have done very well indeed over the years. The earlier books of the Foundation trilogy have sold in the millions over the thirty years they have been in print. Again, if you group all my books together and total the number of sales of “ Asimov” (never mind the titles) then I have a best-seller every year.

However, Foundation’s Edge is the first time a single book of mine has sold enough copies in a single week to make the best-seller lists, and in the eight weeks since publication (as I write), it has done it in each of eight weeks.

Q. And how do you feel about that, Dr. A.?

A. Actually, I have no room for any feeling but that of astonishment. After publishing two hundred and sixty-one books without any hint of best-sellerdom, no matter how many of them might have been praised,

I came to think of that as a law of nature. As for Foundation’s Edge in particular, it has no sex in it, no violence, no sensationalism of any kind, and I had come to suppose that this was a perfect recipe for respectable nonbest-sellerdom.

Once I get over the astonishment, though (if ever), I suppose I will have room for feeling great.

After all, Foundation’s Edge will earn more money than I expected, and it will help my other books to sell more copies, and it may mean that future novels of mine may do better than I would otherwise expect, and I can’t very well complain about any of that.

Then, too, think of the boost to my ego! (Yes, I know! You think that’s the last thing it needs.) People who till now have known I was a writer and accepted it with noticeable lack of excitement even over the number of books I have committed, now stop me in order to congratulate me, and do so with pronounced respect. Personally, I don’t think that being on the best-seller lists makes a book any the higher in quality and, all too often, it might indicate the reverse, but I must admit I enjoy the congratulations and all that goes with it.

Q. Are there any disadvantages to all this great stuff: Isaac?

A. Oddly enough, there are. For one thing, my esteemed publishers, Doubleday and Company, would like me to travel allover the United States pushing the book. (It is, at the moment, their only fiction best-seller and they are as eager as I am to have it stay on the lists forever.) They are putting considerable money into advertising and promotion and it would only be fair that I do my bit as well. However, I don’t like to travel, and so I have to refuse their suggestions that I go to Chicago, for instance. And it makes me feel guilty, and a traitor both to my publisher and my book. I have made a trip to Philadelphia, though.

There is also a higher than normal demand for interviews through visits or on the telephone. This doesn’t demand traveling on my part and I try to oblige (telling myself it’s good publicity for the book), but it does cut into my writing time, and I can’t allow too much of that.

Then, too, there’s an extraordinary demand for free copies. This is a common disease among writers’ friends and relations, who feel that there is no purpose in knowing a writer if you have to help support him. My dear wife (J. O. Jeppson), who is a shrewd questioner, has discovered the astonishing fact that some people think writers get unlimited numbers of free copies to give out. They don’t! Except for a certain very small number, they have to buy copies just as anyone else does. (Even if they did have unlimited numbers of free copies, giving them rather than selling them would ruin a writer, just as giving meat rather than selling it would ruin a butcher.)

What I have done is to resist firmly any temptation to hand out Foundation’s Edge. I have told everyone they must buy copies at a bookstore. If they insist, I will give them copies of other books, but those sales of Foundation’s Edge must be registered. Every little bit helps.

Q. Do you see any importance in this situation aside from personal profit and gratification?

A. I do, indeed. Soon after Foundation’s Edge was published, Arthur C. Clarke’s new novel, 2010: Odyssey Two was published, and it hit the best-seller lists, too. At the moment of writing it is in fifth place on The New York Times list. Earlier this year, Robert A. Heinlein made the list with Friday and Frank Herbert did so with White Plague.

I think this is the first year in which four different science fiction writers made the lists with straight science fiction books. I also think that in the case of Clarke and myself, this is the first time straight science fiction has landed so high on the lists.

This is gratifying to me as a long time science fiction fan. It indicates to me that, finally, science fiction is coming to be of interest to the general public and not simply to those few who inhabit the SF “ghetto.”

In fact, I wish to point this out to those SF writers who are bitter and resentful because they feel that their books are shoved into the background and disregarded merely because they have the SF label on them. Neither Foundation’s Edge nor 2010: Odyssey Two makes any effort to hide the fact that it is science fiction. The publishers’ promotion in each case utterly fails to obscure that fact. In the case of Foundation’s Edge, The New York Times carefully describes it as “science fiction “ each week in its best-seller listing.

And yet it continues to sell.

To be sure, there is a trace of the “ghetto” just the same. There is one thing that Arthur and I have in common, aside from bestselling books. As of the moment of writing, neither Foundation’s Edge nor 2010: Odyssey Two has been reviewed in The New York Times. I presume the paper hesitates to bestow that accolade on mere science fiction. Oh, well!

Q. And what are your present projects, Isaac?

A. Well, Doubleday has informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I am condemned to write one novel after another for life, and that I am not permitted to consider dying.

So I am working on another novel. This one is to be the third novel of the robot series. Both Lije BaIey and R. Daneel will reappear, and will complete the trilogy that began with The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. The third novel is called World of the Dawn.

After that, I am afraid that Doubleday expects me to do a fifth Foundation novel; and, apparently, so do the readers. For three decades they badgered me for a sequel to the Foundation trilogy and when I gave that to them, the ungrateful dogs responded by badgering me for a sequel to the sequel.

I’d complain, except that I love it.

Note:

On December 19,1982, The New York Times finally reviewed Foundation’s Edge, and very favorably too. On that day, the book had slipped to sixth place in the best-seller list (still not bad) but Clarke had climbed to second place.

Pseudonyms

It was quite fashionable, in earlier times, to refrain from putting one’s name to things one had written. The writer could leave himself unnamed (“anonymous”-from Greek words meaning “no name”), or else he could use a false name (“pseudonym”-from Greek words meaning “false name”). So common was the practice that a pseudonym is often referred to as a “pen-name,” or, to give it greater elegance by placing it in French, a “nom de plume.”

There were a variety of reasons for this. In most places in the world and at most times, it was all too easy to write something that would get you in trouble. The corruption, venality, and cruelty of those in power cried out for exposure, and those in power had the strongest objections to being exposed. For that reason, writers had to expect all sorts of governmental correction if caught-anywhere from a fine to death by torture.

The best-known example of this type of pseudonym was Voltaire, the eighteenth century French satirist, whose real name was Francois-Marie Arouet.

A second major reason was that any nonscholarly writing was looked upon as rather frivolous, and a decent person guilty of concocting such material might well be looked upon askance by society, and considered as having lost caste. A pseudonym, therefore, preserved respectability. This was especially true of women who were widely considered subhuman in mentality (by men) and who would have shocked the world by a too-open demonstration of the possession of brains. Mary Ann Evans, therefore, wrote under the name of George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte at first wrote under the name of Currer Bell.

One would think that neither reason would hold for the world of modern American science fiction.

Why should anyone fear punishment for writing science fiction in our free land, or why should anyone fear the loss of respectability if convicted of the deed. And yet

It is conceivable, particularly in the early days of magazine science fiction, that people in the more sensitive professions, such as teaching, would not have cared to have it known that they wrote “pseudoscientific trash “ and so would protect themselves from lack of promotion, or outright dismissal, by the use of a pseudonym. I don’t know of such cases definitely, but I suspect some.

It is even more likely that in the bad old days before the women’s movement became strong, women who wrote science fiction concealed their sex from the readers (and even, sometimes, from the editors). Science fiction was thought to be a very masculine pursuit at the time and I know two editors (no names, please, even though both are now dead) who insisted on believing that women could not write good science fiction. Pseudonyms were therefore necessary if they were to sell anything at all.

Sometimes, women did not have to use pseudonyms. Their first names might be epicene, and that would be protection enough. Thus, Leslie F. Stone and Leigh Brackett were women but, as far as one could tell from their names, they might be as masculine as Leslie Fiedler and Leigh Hunt. Editors and readers at first believed they were.

Or women might simply convert names to initials. Could you tell that A. R. Long owned up to the name of Amelia, or that C. L. Moore was Catherine to her friends?

There were other reasons for pseudonyms in science fiction. In the early days of the magazine many of the successful writers could only make a living by writing a great deal just as fast as they could, for a variety of pulp markets. They might use different names for different markets, creating separate personalities, so to speak, that wouldn’t compete with each other. Thus Will Jenkins wrote for the slicks under his own name, but adopted the pseudonym Murray Leinster when he wrote science fiction.

Sometimes, even within the single field of science fiction, particular writers wrote too many stories. They were so good that editors would cheerfully buy, let us say, eighteen stories from them in a particular year in which they only published twelve issues of their magazines. This meant (if you work out the arithmetic carefully) that it would be necessary to run more than one story by them in a single issue now and then, and editors generally have a prejudice against that. Readers would feel they were cheated of variety, or suspect that editors were showing undue favoritism, or who knows what. Therefore some of the stories would be put under a pseudonym.

The pseudonyms might be transparent enough. For instance, Robert A. Heinlein at the height of his magazine popularity wrote half his stories under the name of Anson MacDonald, but Bob’s middle initial A. stood for Anson, and MacDonald was the maiden name of his then-wife. Similarly, L. Ron Hubbard wrote under the name of Rene Lafayette, but the initial L. in Hubbard’s name was Lafayette, and Rene was a not-too-distant version of Ron. Still, as long as the readers were led to believe that not too many stories of one author were included in the inventory, all was well.

Sometimes, an author is so identified with a particular type of story, that when he writes another type of story, he doesn’t want to confuse the reader by false associations-so he adopts a new name. Thus, John w. Campbell was a writer of super-science stories of cosmic scope, and one day he wrote a story called “Twilight” which was altogether different. He put it under the name of Don A. Stuart (his then- wife’s maiden name was Dona Stuart, you see) and rapidly made that name even more popular than his own.

Sometimes, an author simply wants to separate his writing activities from his nonwriting activities, if they are of equal importance to him. Thus, a talented teacher at Milton Academy, who is named Harry C. Stubbs, writes under the name of Hal Clement. He’s not hiding. Hal is short for Harry, as all Shakespearian devotees know, and the C. in his full name stands for Clement.

Again, my dear wife has practiced medicine for over thirty years as Janet Jeppson, M.D. As a writer she prefers J. O. Jeppson. The earnings fall into two different slots as far as the I.R.S. is concerned and that makes it convenient for her bookkeeping.

In my own case, I have eschewed pseudonyms almost entirely; I am far too fond of my own name, and far too proud of my writing to want to sail under false colors for an y reason. And yet, in one or two cases…

Thus in 1951, I was persuaded to write a juvenile science fiction novel in the hope that it would be sold as the beginning of a long-lived television series. (Those were early days, and no one understood how television was going to work.) I objected, very correctly I think, that TV might ruin the stuff and make me ashamed of having my name associated with it. My editor said, “Then use a pseudonym.”

I did, plucking Paul French out of the air for the purpose, and eventually wrote six novels under that name. (Some people, with little knowledge of science fiction, assumed from this that all my SF was written under Paul French, a suggestion that simply horrified me.)

As soon as it was clear that TV was not interested in my juveniles, I dropped all pretense, and made use of the Three Laws of Robotics, for instance, which was a dead giveaway. Eventually, when it was time for new printings, I had my own name put upon it.

Again, in 1942, I wrote a short story for an editor who wanted it done under a pseudonym in order to give the impression that it was bya brand-new author. (The reason is complicated and I won’t bore you with it. You’ll find it in my autobiography.) I wrote it, reluctantly, under the name George E. Dale, but eventually included it in my book The Early Asimov as a story of my own.

Also, in 1942, I sold a story to the magazine Super Science stories which printed it under the pseudonym H. B. Ogden, for reasons I no longer remember. (Even my memory has its limits.) So little did I care for the story, and so unhappy was lover the nonuse of my name that I totally forgot about it, until nearly forty years later when I was going over my diary carefully in order to prepare my autobiography.

I was shocked to find there was a story of mine that I had forgotten and didn’t own in printed form. Fortunately, with the help of Forrest 1. Ackerman I got the issue and reprinted the story in the first volume of my autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, acknowledging it as my own. In 1971, I was persuaded to write a book entitled The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, in which I gently satirized sexual how-to books such as The Sensuous Woman. Since the latter book was written by a writer identified only as “1,” my editor felt the joke should be carried on by having my book written by “Dr. A.” Even before publication day, however, it was announced that I was the author and my identity was never a secret.

At the present moment, then, absolutely none of my writing appears under anything but my own name.

Which brings up one puzzle. The early pulps occasionally made use of “house names.” A particular magazine would use a pseudonym that was never used except in that magazine, but that pseudonym might be used by any number of different writers. I have never really understood why this was done and if any reader knows I would appreciate being told.

Dialog

Most stories deal with people and one of the surefire activities of people is that of talking and of making conversation. It follows that in most stories there is dialog. Sometimes stories are largely dialog; my own stories almost always are. For that reason, when I think of the art of writing (which isn’t often, I must admit) I tend to think of dialog.

In the romantic period of literature in the first part of the nineteenth century, the style of dialog tended to be elaborate and adorned. Authors used their full vocabulary and had their characters speak ornately.

I remember when I was very young and first read Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. How I loved the conversation. The funny passages were very funny to me, though I had trouble with John Browdie’s thick Yorshire accent (something his beloved Matilda, brought up under similar conditions, lacked, for some reason). What I loved even more though was the ornamentation-the way everyone “spoke like a book.”

Thus, consider the scene in which Nicholas Nickleby confronts his villainous Uncle Ralph. Nicholas’s virtuous and beautiful sister, Kate, who has been listening to Ralph’s false version of events, which make out Nicholas to have been doing wrong, cried out wildly to her brother, “Refute these calumnies.”

Of course, I had to look up “refute” and “calumny” in the dictionary, but that meant I had learned two useful words. I also had never heard any seventeen-year-old girl of my acquaintance use those words but that just showed me how superior the characters in the book were, and that filled me with satisfaction.

It’s easy to laugh at the books of that era and to point out that no one really talks that way. But then, do you suppose people in Shakespeare’s time went around casually speaking in iambic pentameter?

Still, don’t you want literature to improve on nature? Sure you do. When you go to the movies, the hero and heroine don’t look like the people you see in the streets, do they? Of course not. They look like movie stars. The characters in fiction are better looking, stronger, braver, more ingenious and clever than anyone you are likely to meet, so why shouldn’t they speak better, too?

And yet there are values in realism-in making people look, and sound, and act like real people.

For instance, back in 1919, some of the players on the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox were accused of accepting money from gamblers to throw the World Series (the so-called “Black Sox” scandal) and were barred from baseball for life as a result. At the trial, a young lad is supposed to have followed his idol, the greatest of the accused, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and to have cried out in anguish, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

That is a deathless cry that can’t be tampered with. It is unthinkable to have the boy say “Refute these calumnies, Joseph,” even though that’s what he means. Any writer who tried to improve matters in that fashion would, and should, be lynched at once. I doubt that anyone would, or should, even change it to “Say it isn’t so, Joe.”

For that matter, you couldn’t possibly have had Kate Nickleby cry out to her brother, “Say it ain’t so, Nick.”

Of course, during much of history most people were illiterate and the reading of books was very much confined to the few who were educated and scholarly. Such books of fiction as existed were supposed to “improve the mind,” or risk being regarded as works of the devil.

It was only gradually, as mass education began to flourish, that books began to deal with ordinary people. Of course, Shakespeare had his clowns and Dickens had his Sam Wellers, and in both cases, dialog was used that mangled the English language to some extent-but that was intended as humor. The audience was expected to laugh uproariously at these representatives of the lower classes.

As far as I know the first great book which was written entirely and seriously in substandard English and which was a great work of literature nevertheless (or even, possibly, to some extent because of it) was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which was published in 1884. Huck Finn is himself the narrator, and he is made to speak as an uneducated backwoods boy would speak-if he happened to be a literary genius. That is, he used the dialect of an uneducated boy, but he put together sentences and paragraphs like a master.

The book was extremely popular when it came out because its realism made it incredibly effective-but it was also extremely controversial as all sorts of fatheads inveighed against it because it didn’t use proper English.

And yet, at that, Mark Twain had to draw the line, too, as did all writers until the present generation.

People, all sorts of people, use vulgarisms as a matter of course. I remember my days in the army when it was impossible to hear a single sentence in which the common word for sexual intercourse was not used as an all-purpose adjective. Later, after I had gotten out of the army, I lived on a street along which young boys and girls walked to the local junior high school in the morning, and back again in the evening, and their shouted conversations brought back memories of my barracks days with nauseating clarity.

Yet could writers reproduce that aspect of common speech? Of course not. For that reason, Huck Finn was always saying that something was “blamed” annoying, “blamed” this, “blamed” that. You can bet that the least he was really saying was “damned.”

A whole set of euphemisms was developed and placed in the mouths of characters who wouldn’t, in real life, have been caught dead saying them. Think of the all the “dad-blameds.” and “goldarneds,” and “consarneds” we have seen in print and heard in the movies. To be sure, youngsters say them as a matter of caution for they would probably be punished (if of “good family”) by their parents if caught using the terms they had heard said parents use. (Don’t let your hearts bleed for the kids for when they grow up they will beat up their kids for the same crime.)

For the last few decades, however, it has become permissible to use all the vulgarisms freely and many writers have availed themselves of the new freedom to lend an air of further realism to their dialog. What’s more, they are apt to resent bitterly any suggestion that this habit be modified or that some nonvulgar expression be substituted.

In fact, one sees a curious reversal now. A writer must withstand a certain criticism if he does not make use of said vulgarisms

Once when I read a series of letters by science fiction writers in which such terms were used freely and frequently, I wrote a response that made what seemed to me to be an obvious point. In it, I said something like this:

“Ordinary people, who are not well educated and who lack a large working vocabulary, are limited in their ability to lend force to their statements. In their search for force, they must therefore make use of vulgarisms which serve, through their shock value, but which, through overuse, quickly lose whatever force they have, so that the purpose of the use is defeated.

“Writers, on the other hand, have (it is to be presumed) the full and magnificent vocabulary of the English language at their disposal. They can say anything they want with whatever intensity of invective they require in a thousand different ways without ever once deviating from full respectability of utterance. They have, therefore, no need to trespass upon the usages of the ignorant and forlorn, and to steal their tattered expressions as substitutes for the language of Shakespeare and Milton.”

All I got for my pains were a few comments to the effect that there must be something seriously wrong with me.

Nevertheless, it is my contention that dialog is realistic when, and only when, it reflects the situation as you describe it and when it produces the effect you wish to produce.

At rather rare intervals, I will make use of dialect. I will have someone speak as a Brooklyn-bred person would (that is, as I myself do, in my hours of ease), or insert Yiddishisms here and there, if it serves a purpose. I may even try to make up a dialect, as I did in Foundation’s Edge, if it plays an important part in the development of the story.

Mostly, however, I do not.

The characters in my stories (almost without exception) are pictured as being well educated and highly intelligent. It is natural, therefore, for them to make use of a wide vocabulary and to speak precisely and grammatically, even though I try not to fall into the ornateness of the Romantic Ear.

And, as a matter of quixotic principle, I try to avoid expletives, even mild ones, when I can. But other writers, of course, may do as they please.