by Isaac Asimov
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 ab
out 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 showc
ase 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.
