by James Gunn
Gunn: It wouldn't have been as difficult.
A.: Yes. But in those days, there were no novels, no books. Everything appeared in magazines.
Gunn: This is one thing I want to deal with in my book, the influence of the medium of communication on the things that were not written they obviously influenced what was written.
A.: Well, yes. Another thing was it was ephemeral. In other words, you expected a story to appear in a magazine and be there for a month, and then be gone forever, except for those who collected the magazines, and well, you know, that meant you were paid once for it. In fact, there was no concept of subsidiary sales. Never heard of such a thing. You sold a story, you got some money for it, a penny a word or whatever, and that was it, forever. So that the emphasis was writing it fast, on trying not to have to revise, because you wanted to write more and make more money, if you were trying to make a living. That was what enforced pulp writing, which is essentially first-draft writing and sure-fire writing. It gave the stories a lot of action. When you write nowadays, even for the magazines, you know there are going to be anthologizations, there are going to be collections and so on. You can afford to take your time and do a little better, because you know that there's going to be considerably more money involved than just that initial sale.
Gunn: In my own case I am convinced that the harder I work on something the more successful it eventually is. That isn't universal in all cases, but it generally pays off today to do as good a job of writing as you can, irrespective of how long it takes.
A.: Um-hum.
Gunn: To get back to the fact that the mystery may be your mode of writing fiction, perhaps this develops rather naturally from the fact that your writing generally shows the triumph of reason or the struggle of reason to triumph over various kinds of circumstances including emotional reactions to situations that are existing. So that, if this is true, if reason is going to eventually emerge triumphant, the mystery is the natural form in which it will be exercised. Does that make sense to you?
A.: Yes, it does.
Gunn: The solution to problems is the way in which reason demonstrates its desirability.
A.: Yes, it does make sense. And it reminds me that my villains generally are as rational as my heroes. In other words, it's not even a triumph of rationality over irrationality or over emotion, at least not in my favorite stories. It's generally the conflict between rationalities and the superior winning. The good guys, so to speak. In other words, if it were a western where everything depended upon the draw of the gun, then it would be very unsatisfactory if the hero shot down a person who didn't know how to shoot. In fact . . .
Gunn: It has to be an equal balance.
A.: That's right, where the measure of superiority is very small, where there is some question as to whether the hero will win. And occasionally, very occasionally, I have the side win in whom I don't believe, in other words there is a story I wrote called . . . oh, hell, what's the story called? . . . ''In a Good Cause," that's it. . . . "In a Good Cause," where the person who at the very end wins out is the person whom I consider the villain. What happened was that as I wrote the story, the winding paths of rationality made him win out against my will. (Laughter) Doesn't often happen; generally I'm in better control and the side I favor wins.
Gunn: It seems to me also that your fact articles, your science articles, are often written the same way your fiction is. You present a mystery. How did this happen, how did somebody come to this conclusion? And then you show the reason it worked out that way, again, almost as if it were a mystery story.
A.: Well, now, I'm glad you said that, because this is not something I have myself spent time thinking of, but I think you're right now that you present it. The way I almost invariably explain anything is historically. I start at the beginning and carefully describe how various people have added elements of knowledge to a particular problem and the way I explain it to myself is that it's important people understand how a problem is solved and exactly the way it was indeed solved, rather than have them think that scientific knowledge is something handed down from Sinai. Furthermore, the easiest way of making sense out of it is to follow the path of what actually happened, because you follow that path along the line of gradual elimination, and there is probably no alternate path that is as illuminating. But that invariably means the unspoken question is how was this discovered? How was this problem solved? And, in fact, in the essay I have most recently written, which is about the neutrino emissions by the sun, I start off saying that I always begin at the beginning and this sometimes annoys my editors but I have written a book on the neutrino in which before I ever said a word about the neutrino I carefully described how the concept of natural laws of conservation were worked out, the significance of it, the apparent violation of no less than three of those laws. The necessity of inventing a particle that could save all three of those laws, and the fact that you could save all three with a single particle, is a very strong suggestion that the particle did in fact exist. And it wasn't until the book was exactly half over that I got to the point where I introduced the particle. And so chapter 7 was entitled "Enter the Neutrino." And Walter Bradbury wrote in the margin "at last." And yet I wouldn't have dreamed of doing it any other way, because it would have spoiled the suspense. In fact, as I said in my autobiography, my dissertation was spoiled for me, absolutely spoiled for me, because my professor insisted I explain what the symbol M stood for, despite the fact that I told him it would spoil the suspense.
Gunn: To go back for a minute to psychohistory, I noticed something in your autobiography that perhaps you may or may not have been aware of the fact that there was a great deal of commentary, kind of footnoted commentary, which suggests a belief in determinism. You make continual references to the fact that as the boy was, so is the man, that "I was imprinted by this at an early age," "because I had to eat hurriedly as a youngster, now I still eat hurriedly," "because I did things that way then, I do them this way now" I wonder if you feel that that's an explanation in a sense as to why psychohistory became a congenial notion with which you could deal whether the fact that this notion of early determinism fits in with the notion of psychohistory.
A.: Well, I'm trying to think now, you see, I was only 21 when I started writing the Foundation stories and then I had the general notion in my head, and I didn't change that general notion. Now at the time I was 21 I had not had time to notice, I think, that I had developed habits that dated back to an early age. Now I'm old enough to see that there isn't a reason in the world why I have to eat fast. But, no, I don't think that's why I'll have to go back to what I said before. When I was 21, I was doing graduate school, I had taken physical chemistry physical chemistry was important to me, because I had to pass it with a B in order to stay in school. More than any other course I ever took, that one sort of hovered over me with its fangs and claws extended, so that I worked harder on that course than any other course I'd ever taken. And one of the things that particularly impressed me was the careful working out of the laws of gases. Partly because, I suppose, it was so difficult for me to understand, but I got it firmly fixed in my head that you arrive at certainty through uncertainty. That even though every atom or molecule thinks it has a free will, it doesn't, because on the whole it doesn't, and mind you, this was also at a time when I'd been living through the Hitler era in the 1930s, where no matter what anyone did, Hitler kept winning victories, and the only way that I could possibly find life bearable at the time was to convince myself that no matter what he did, he was doomed to defeat in the end. That he couldn't win.
Gunn: Psychohistory is against it.
A.: That's right. And as a matter of fact, we started with the Foundation bound to win, no matter what the forces arrayed against it. I suppose that that was my literary response to my own feelings, which have no basis, I suppose, except that it made me feel better. To the inevitable victory of the anti-Nazi causes, although they seemed to be steadily losing. And, you know, the first
two stories of The Foundation Trilogy were written in 1941, which was just about Hitler's peak. They were published in 1942. I think that might be the way it worked out.
Gunn: In the last portion of Second Foundation there is a kind of ambivalent attitude toward the Second Foundation, that the psychologists are going to establish eventually a new kind of society in which mental science is going to be more important than physical science and in essence are going to be the new rulers. And that seems to me to be not a great idea! (Laughter)
A.: What my thoughts were as I was writing it you see, whenever I wrote a Foundation story I didn't spend too much time thinking about what the next ones would be, but on the other hand, I didn't want to write anything that would make it impossible to write any more, because I was interested in keeping the series going.
Gunn: Even though you were determined to end it with Second Foundation.
A.: Nevertheless, in case I ever wanted to continue, I needed sufficient ambiguity so that I could write more stories. I honestly wasn't sure as I wrote Second Foundation how the Second Foundation was going to be different from the Mule; the Mule was ruling, so to speak, by mental science, and the Second Foundation would be ruled by mental science. Wouldn't the Second Foundation be sort of Mule by committee?
Gunn: There is this element in it, I think, and I suppose there was a possibility of writing a sequel in which some kind of more democratic force overcomes the coercive and elitist Second Foundation.
A.: Well, that was exactly the sort of dim thought I had that in the end, by God, it was going to be the First Foundation that would triumph even over the Second Foundation.
Gunn: Well (laughter).
A.: I hadn't the faintest idea how that would work, but I was sure that was what was going to happen.
Gunn: Some criticism attempts to deal with The Foundation Trilogy as if it were conceived and written in one flash of inspiration or one continuous effort. It seems to me that this is misguided, that one has to assume that this was written piece by piece and the only reasonable criticism is one which assumes that you solve this problem and then later you come back and you say, now where do I go, and put another problem on top of that which I can solve, and so rather than dealing with the Trilogy as a kind of total mental exercise, it represents a kind of exercise in ingenuity.
A.: You're perfectly right. In fact I've been planning to write, under extreme pressure, another Foundation novel and I even wrote eight pages, and this time it is going to be a novel and not a series of short pieces it's going to be a full-length novel, unitary, and I was going to have my characters searching for the Second Foundation. Now the people in the First Foundation do not know it was the Second Foundation which saved them. The whole purpose of the Second Foundation was to remain undercover, to not let people know as soon as people know the Second Foundation is taking care of them, the very equations the Second Foundation uses lose their validity. And yet we have one character who is convinced that the Second Foundation does exist and is going to search, but it is going to take an entire novel. I imagine I can do it, but I also have this horrible feeling that I'm no longer in my twenties, that The Foundation Trilogy was coterminus with my twenties. I started writing the stories at the age of 21 and I finished it at the age of 29. And now I can write much more skillfully than I could then. I am technically more proficient, but I also somehow lack some of that energy, you know? And I'm going to end up with a book which reads much more smoothly and somehow grabs people much less, I'm sure.
Gunn: You are going to do it?
A.: Well, if I ever get around to it, but I dread it. I really dread it. I fear, I fear people saying, "The Foundation Trilogy is great, but don't read that fourth volume." (Laughter)
Gunn: Let me get to a particular point of a particular story that seems anomalous in "Green Patches."
A.: Yes.
Gunn: If I read it correctly, the story talks about the little multipliers in the darkness, which apparently are bacteria, green-patch bacteria the attempt to solve the problem has failed. And I wondered that's one of the few cases, I think if that reading is correct where reason and the exercise of common caution and so forth fails in one of your stories. Is that a correct reading?
A.: Well, you know, I don't remember. The only thing I remember about that story is that I was demoralized in the middle. I had gotten halfway through and I suddenly realized that I was writing an infinitely inferior what was the name of John's story that I liked so much? oh, "Who Goes There?" I was writing an infinitely inferior "Who Goes There?" And I was halfway through it when I realized it and I called up John and I said what I was writing and I said, John, it's just like your story "Who Goes There?" Oh, well I said, Mr. Campbell now I say John, but in those days I always said "Mr. Campbell,'' to the very end. And he never said, he never said, call me "John," either. He always called me "Asimov" not "Mr. Asimov," just "Asimov." Anyway
Gunn: Proper teacher and student relationship.
A.: Right. Absolutely, absolutely. Now I say "John," and when I think back, I always describe myself as saying "John" (laughter) but I never said that. As a matter of fact my college professor, Dr. Dawson, whom I always called "Dr. Dawson" I was there at a luncheon celebrating his retirement and I'm his most prominent pupil, and I finally could bring myself to say "Charlie," always with a little hesitation. (Laughter). Anyway, I called up Campbell and told him about this, and he said, "Oh, don't worry about it, Asimov, you go right ahead; no two stories are exactly the same when a competent writer writes them." So I went ahead, but it was with a broken spirit.
Gunn: And then of course eventually it was sold to Galaxy, wasn't it?
A.: Yes, it was. But I don't know what I originally intended to do all I know is that when I got to the middle point, I tried desperately to make it as unlike "Who Goes There?" as possible, and probably would have abandoned the story, but it had been ordered by Gold. He had asked me to write a story for his first issue and I did "Darwinian Pool Room," which is a very poor story, and he took it, because he had to have a story for that first issue, there was a hole that had to be filled. And I felt very guilty, because I knew it was a poor story, and so he said, would you write me another one, and I was determined to write this other one, no matter what. And then my heart broke in the middle when I realized what I was doing, but I had to keep on writing anyway, instead of tearing it up. And so I don't remember what I had originally planned, but it's a very atypical story.
Gunn: But the little multipliers in the darkness were supposed to be bacteria?
A.: Well, not necessarily, they could be anything. They can infect bacteria, but they can also infect human beings.
Gunn: Well, green patches certainly could, but I was wondering about the meaning.
A.: Oh, I see what you mean. You're talking about the significance.
Gunn: At the end you comment about the "little multipliers in the darkness. . . ."
A.: I forgot that. . . .
Gunn: I presume that the creature that was destroyed nevertheless had stimulated within human bodies bacteria, the creation of bacteria, which were products of the green patches, and now although it had been wiped out, the people were going to go ahead on to earth carrying the seeds of their destruction, and probably the destruction of life on Earth, within their bodies.
A.: Do you know . . . that's completely, I swear I never thought of that I'll have the re-read the story myself.
Gunn: I was wondering, now, what was it you meant by little multipliers in the darkness?
A.: I don't know, I'll have to reread the story. Oh my goodness, I didn't even recognize the phrase, frankly. When you said "little multipliers in darkness" I didn't know you were quoting me.
Gunn: Yes, it was a direct quote and the phrase is ambiguous and it's kind of strange, because I think most of your stories do not carry that kind of ambiguity, I mean that kind of coyness about naming names. I wasn't sure exactly what. . . .
A.: Well, I'll re-read the story and then I'll w
rite you on that. [He never did, and the ambiguity remains. J.G.]
Gunn: In his book, Joseph Patrouch wrote that you have not written about what you are most concerned about that is pollution, overpopulation and so forth in your fiction but it seems to me that you show people living with these problems and solving them in your fiction. In The Caves of Steel there is the problem of overpopulation, but it's something the people are living with people are adaptable. But it seems to me that in talks and in your science articles you exhibit a kind of an alarm about our public position, about our situation what I call your public despair as contrasted to your fictional optimism.
