Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  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.