by Isaac Asimov
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 s
cience 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.
