Gold

by Isaac Asimov

  A scientist’s formulas, an artist’s paintings, an inventor’s models, a philosopher’s thoughts, might all be the subject of plagiarism, but common usage has come to apply the term, specifically, to the theft of a writer’s production.

  Plagiarism is a horrid nightmare to writers in several different ways; and it is much more serious than non-writers may realize.

  If a writer, for any reason, commits plagiarism, copying some already published material, and if he gets away with it to the extent of getting the plagiarized material republished, he is bound to be caught sooner or later. Some reader, somewhere, will notice the theft. In that case, even if the plagiarist isn’t sued or punished in any way, you can be sure that no editor who knows of the plagiarism will buy anything from that writer again. If the plagiarist has a career, it is permanently ruined.

  You may think that such a literary thief deserves a ruined career, and certainly I think so, but copying an already published item word for word is such a surefire failure that only an idiot or a complete novice would do it. What about the case where someone simply makes use of the central idea of the story, the series of events it contains, the climax, the emotional milieu, and so on, but does not repeat it word for word? What if he uses his (or her) own words entirely, changes the incidents in nonessential details, puts it in a different setting and so on?

  In that case, it becomes more difficult to decide whether plagiarism has taken place. After all, it is possible to have the same ideas someone else has had.

  Thus, Ted Sturgeon once wrote a story which he sent to Horace Gold of Galaxy and which was accepted. I wrote a story which I sent to Horace Gold while Ted’s story was still unpublished. There was no communication between us; we lived in different cities and had not exchanged phone calls or letters in months, nor had either of us discussed our stories with anyone. Nevertheless, not only did we both center our stories about a double meaning in the word “hostess,” but two of my characters were Drake and Vera, and two of his were Derek and Verna.

  It was the purest of coincidences, for except for the double meaning and the character names that we shared, the stories were miles apart. Nevertheless, even the appearance of plagiarism must be avoided. I had to make enough changes in my story (because it was the later one received) to destroy the appearance. To do so spoiled the story in my opinion, but it had to be done anyway.

  In the same way, when I am writing a story, I must be conscious that there have been other stories dealing with similar ideas or similar characters or similar events, and I must make every effort to dilute that similarity. When I wrote a story once called “Each an Explorer,” I never for a moment forgot John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” and spent more time trying to avoid his story than trying to write my own. In the same way, when I wrote “Lest We Remember” (published in this magazine), I had to steer a mile wide of Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon.” It’s part of the game.

  But I haven’t read every story ever written and many that I have read, I have completely forgotten, at least consciously. What if I duplicate important elements of stories I have never read, or have forgotten? It’s possible. I once wrote a short-short that ended with a certain dramatic climax in the last sentence. Eventually, I received a letter from another writer whose story had been published before I wrote my story and who had made use of the same dramatic climax in his last sentence. What’s more, I had his story in an anthology in my library. I did not remember reading it, but I had had the opportunity to do so. The two stories, except for the climaxes, were completely different, but I promptly wrote the other author and told him that although he had my word that there was no conscious imitation, I would withdraw the story from circulation and it would never again appear in any anthology, any collection, any form whatever—and it never has.

  Fortunately, the other writer accepted this, but what protection do I (or any other writer) have against the accusation of plagiarism over what is a bit of unconscious recall, or, for that matter, an outright coincidence?

  Actually, very little. I rely, to a large extent, on my prolificity and my unblemished record. No one as prolific as I would seem to have to depend on someone else’s ideas, and my own mental fertility is obvious to all. Secondly, I am cautious enough never to discuss my stories before they are published, nor will I listen to others who might want to discuss their stories. In fact, I won’t even read unsolicited manuscripts sent me by strangers. They go back at once, unread.

  Even so, every established writer lives under an eternal Damocles’s sword of possible accusation of plagiarism. A casual reference, a small similarity, a nonessential duplication may be enough to produce such a suit. Such a suit, however unjustified, however certain of being thrown out of court, can be hurtful to an innocent writer. It is, after all, an expense. Lawyers must be paid, time must be lost and, invariably, one is urged to “pay off the kook.”

  But what if you, the established writer, have been plagiarized? That has never happened to me to the extent of publication—that I know of. To be sure, there have been pastiches of me, deliberate imitations of my robot stories, or my Black Widowers mystery stories, and so on. These come under the heading of fun. The writer who turns them out makes no secret of it, and the editor knows that it’s a pastiche. Sometimes, they send the manuscript to me to ask if I have any objection. I have always given permission. Then, too, there are stories that are bound to be similar to mine in some benign way. The Star Wars movies have some distant similarities to my Foundation stories, but, what the heck, you can’t make a fuss about such things.

  Unpublished plagiarism is more common. An English professor once sent me a story written by a student in first-year English. It didn’t seem to her likely that the kid could have written that good a story and there were things in it that seemed reminiscent of me—like the Three Laws of Robotics. I went over the story and it was my “Galley Slave” word for word. I returned it to the professor and told her to (a) punish the student appropriately, and (b) not let me know anything about it. (I’m soft-hearted.)

  And what if you’re an editor and get stuck with some material that might conceivably be plagiarized. In the first place—is it? A completely original, nonreminiscent story is possible, but very rarely met up with. Similarities with some particular published story are almost unavoidable. However, the more similarities there are, with the same previously published story, the greater the possibility of plagiarism. Nevertheless, it is difficult to establish certainty if the copying isn’t word for word.

  Should an editor refuse a story, however good, if there are too many similarities? Of course! Remember that I said even the appearance of plagiarism must be strictly avoided.

  There is, however, a catch. An editor has not read every story that has been published. Sometimes an editor, being human, has not even read every famous story ever published. Or an editor has read many stories but some of them have completely gone from her mind. Such an editor may, in all innocence, therefore publish a doubtful story. He (or she) is then a victim and not an accomplice.

  Just as honest, established writers must live, constantly, with the fear of being accused of plagiarism, or of themselves being plagiarized, so must honest, established editors live, constantly, with the fear of being victimized into publishing a doubtful story.

  What does one do in such a case? One can’t entirely ignore the matter. For one thing, the similarity between the new story and an older story is sure to be seen by some readers. Even if the older story is very obscure, someone will have read it and remembered it. If it is a well-known story, letters will come in heaps.

  One can ask the writer of the doubtful story for an explanation. If the explanation seems unconvincing, one can avoid buying stories from the writer again. One might warn other editors in the field to be careful. And one can try hard not to let it happen again—knowing full well that there is no way of stopping every piece of literary prestidigitation.

  It is comforting to know, however, that if an edit
or lets something suspicious get into print, the fact will not remain unreported for long. We can be sure, then, that if no indignant reader has written within two weeks of the appearance of an issue, we have probably committed no ghastly mistakes of this nature in that issue.

  Symbolism

  To a child, a story is a story, and to many of us, as we grow older, a story remains a story. The good guy wins, the bad guy loses. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. We don’t want anything beyond that—at least to begin with.

  The trouble is that if that’s all there is, one is likely to grow weary eventually. Children love to play tick-tack-toe, for instance, but it’s such a limited game that, after a while, most children don’t want to play it any more. In the same way, children, as they grow older, may stop wanting to read stories that are only stories.

  Since writers get as tired writing stories that are only stories, as readers get tired reading them, it is only natural that writers begin to search for new and different ways to tell a story—for their own mental health, if nothing else.

  A writer can try to find a new kind of plot, or he can indulge in stylistic experimentation, or he can strive for events that are ambiguous and conclusions that are inconclusive, or he can blur the distinction between good and evil, or between dream and reality. There are many, many things he can do and the one thing all these attempts have in common is that they annoy those readers who still are in the stage of wanting stories that are only stories.

  Mind you, I don’t sneer at such readers. For one thing, I myself still write stories that are primarily stories, because that’s what I like. In my stories, there is a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a clear end, the good guy usually wins, and so on.

  Nevertheless, you can’t blame writers and readers for wanting something more than that, and those of us (I include myself, please note) who are suspicious of experimentation and fancy tricks ought to make some effort to understand what’s going on. We may fail to grasp it entirely, but we may at least see just enough to avoid an explosion of unreasonable anger.

  One game that writers very commonly play is the one called “symbolism.” A story can be written on two levels. On the surface, it is simply a story, and anyone can read it as such and be satisfied. Even children can read it.

  But the simple characters and events of the surface may stand for (or symbolize) other subtler things. Below the surface, therefore, there may be hidden and deeper meanings that children and unsophisticated adults don’t see. Those who can see the inner structure, however, can get a double pleasure out of it. First, since the inner structure is usually cleverer and more convoluted than the surface, it exercises the mind more pleasantly. Second, since it is not easy to detect, the reader has the excitement of discovery and the pleasure of admiring his own cleverness. (You can easily imagine what fun the writer has constructing such symbolic significance.)

  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 Molière 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 exp
ression 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.