In these stories, though, I remember that in every case before I sat down to write, I had to have an idea. There had to be some real concept: an actual thing from which the story was built. It must always be possible to say, “Did you read the story about—” and then capsulize what it was about. If the essence ofsfis the idea (as Dr. Willis McNelly maintains), if indeed the idea is the true “hero,” then the sf story probably remains the sf form par excellence, with the sf novel a fanning out, an expansion into all ramifications. Most of my own novels are expansions of earlier stories, or fusions of several stories—superimpositions. The germ lay in the story; in a very real sense, that was its true distillate. And some of my best ideas, which meant the most to me, I could never manage to expand into novel form. They exist only as stories, despite all my efforts.
1976
The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories Page 52
