Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  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 mu
tant 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.