by Isaac Asimov
And, on top of that, I don’t see that having to chase after the Earth would fail to cost the usual amount of energy just because we’re doing it by way of the time dimension. Without calculating the energy, I am positive time-travel is insuperably difficult, quite apart from the theoretical considerations that make it totally impossible. So let’s eliminate it from serious consideration.
But not from science fiction! Time-travel stories are too much fun for them to be eliminated merely out of mundane considerations of impracticability, or even impossibility.
Part Three: On Writing Science Fiction
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.<
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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.”
