by Isaac Asimov
I wrote an essay denouncing the idiot and sent it to a small fan magazine, feeling that I would get the bile out of me and that no one of importance would read it. Even that turned out to be disastrous, however. It is never safe to answer a critic, however incompetent and libelous his reviews might be. Everyone who read that fan magazine sent his copy to the editor of the magazine in which Bott’s review appeared, and the editor wrote an editorial denouncing me.
He offered to let me answer the editorial, but I decided to cut my losses and let it go, but then I read the next issue of the magazine. The infamous Bott reviewed Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids and gave it a favorable review because he didn’t know that I was Paul French. (It was the only favor a pseudonym ever did me.) I promptly wrote a letter to the magazine, thanking Bott for the review on French’s behalf, and didn’t mention that I was French till the last line. It effectively demolished the villain.
The editor of the magazine later admitted he was merely attempting to start a feud that would benefit the circulation. My neat ending spoiled that plan and the magazine eventually folded.
I must admit that in the early days of my book production I was asked to review some science fiction books and I acceded. However, I quickly stopped this for two reasons. First, I recognized that I had no talent as a critic and could not tell bad from good. Second, it seemed to me that it was unethical for me to review science fiction books. The writers were mostly friends of mine and there was too much danger of my leaning backward to avoid saying anything nasty. And even if the writer was unknown to me, he was, nevertheless, a competitor, and could I be sure of being fair to him?
Other science fiction writers seem not to be troubled by this ethical dilemma. I have read reviews of unmeasured vituperation written by one science fiction writer about a book written by another, and competing, science fiction writer. I have even been the victim of such reviews myself.
I can’t help remembering the names of those who wrote reviews of this sort. I do nothing about it, you understand—I never lift a finger or say a bad word against these wicked malefactors. However (I tell myself), someday one of these miserable worms will come to me for a favor and I’ll turn him down.
This has actually happened. A writer who in a review once accused me (wrongfully) of nepotism had the infernal gall some years later to ask a favor of me. —Favor requested; favor denied. That was the extent of my revenge.
the entire weekend at the Concord with a small notebook I had bought, scribbling jokes in it as fast as I could think of them. I even did it when we attended the nightclub (the largest in the world supposedly) and were afflicted with unbelievable noise. It was all that
Humor
One advantage of being prolific is that it reduces the importance of any one book. By the time a particular book is published, the prolific writer hasn’t much time to worry about how it will be received or how it will sell. By then he has already sold several others and is working on still others and it is these that concern him. This intensifies the peace and calm of his life.
Then, too, once enough books are published, a kind of “ever-normal granary” is established. Even if one book doesn’t do well, all the books, as a whole, are bringing in money, and one fall-short isn’t noticeable. Even the publisher can take that attitude.
It also makes it easier to experiment. If an experimental short story goes sour—well, what’s one story in hundreds?
An experiment I kept wanting to try was that of writing a funny science fiction story. I don’t really know why but I have this strong drive to make people laugh. I’m an excellent raconteur, as it happens, and I’ve even written a reasonably successful jokebook, containing not only 640 funny stories but endless advice about how to tell them, what to do, and what not to do. The book is Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor (Houghton Mifflin, 1971).
That book was written because Gertrude and I and another couple were driving to the Concord Hotel in the Catskills. As usual, I desperately didn’t want to go, even though it was just for the weekend, and in order to drown my sorrows, I told an endless series of jokes while we were driving. The other woman said, “You’re very good, Isaac. Why don’t you write a jokebook?”
I started to say, “Who’d publish it?” but choked it off, because I realized any of my publishers would publish it. Consequently, I spent helped me survive that miserable place.
It was only natural, then, that I should have the desire to write a funny story. At the very beginning of my career, I attempted humor with “Ring Around the Sun” (Future Fiction, March 1940), “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” (Amazing, February 1942), and “Christmas on Ganymede” (Startling, January 1942). The humor in all three stories was quite infantile and, in quality, they stand very close to the bottom of the list of my stories.
The trouble was that I was trying to imitate the slapsticky humor I found in other science fiction stories and I wasn’t good at that. It was not until I realized that my favorite humorist was P. G. Wodehouse and that the proper way for me to be humorous was to imitate him—
use my full vocabulary and say silly things with a straight face—that I began to write successful humor.
My first Wodehousian story was “The Up-to-Date Sorcerer” (F&SF, July 1958). Thereafter, things were easier for me. In the 1980s, I began to write a whole series of stories about a tiny demon named Azazel, who was constantly being asked to help people and who did as he was told—but always with disastrous results. A number of these stories were collected in Azazel (Doubleday, 1988) and they were just as Wodehousian as I could possibly make them.
I’m not ashamed of being “derivative” in this respect and I never try to hide the fact that I am. Sam Moskowitz, who has written many historical accounts of science fiction, says, with some bitterness, that I am the only science fiction writer who will admit to being influenced. All the others, he says, imply that their writing is the original production of a mind that owes nothing to anyone.
I have to allow for Sam’s exaggeration in this respect. I’m sure that any writer, if pressed, will admit to being influenced by some other writer whom he admires (usually it’s Kafka, Joyce, or Proust, although with someone as humble as I am it’s Cliff Simak, P. G. Wodehouse, and Agatha Christie). And why not? Why not take someone worthy as a model? And no imitation is truly slavish. I’m sure that no matter how Wodehousian a story I write may be, I can’t prevent it from being somewhat Asimovian as well. (As an example, my humor is distinctly more cruel than Wodehouse’s is.)
It is, of course, difficult to tell why there should be this strong drive to write humor, not only in myself but in many other writers as well. After all, humor is difficult. Other kinds of stories don’t have to hit the bull’s-eye. The outer rings have their rewards too. A story can be fairly suspenseful, moderately romantic, somewhat terrifying, and so on.
This is not the case with humor. A story is” either funny or it is not funny. Nothing in between. The humor target contains only a bull’seye.
Then, too, humor is entirely subjective. Most people will agree on the suspense content of a story, on the romantic nature, on the mystery or horror of it. But over humor there is bound to be violent disagreement. What is howlingly funny to one person is merely stupid to another, so that even my best humorous stories are often skewered by readers who dismiss them as silly. (Of course, they are dull, humorless clods to whom I pay no attention.)
Having said all that, let me get back to the realm of spoken humor. I have said I am a good raconteur, and in this my fiction writing is of great help. I have a fund of a number of complex stories that are actually mini-short stories that have to be told with skill, because I must make sure that humor exists throughout the narrative. It is possible for me to talk anywhere from five to ten minutes, holding audience interest, before exploding the final punch line.
I love these stories because the people who listen to them can never repeat them with success. If they want to hear one again, they have to come to
me. And every once in a long while (for I won’t repeat these jokes too often) they prevail on me to tell it again. They know the punch line but they just want to hear the story.
And where do I get such a story from? Why, from someone who told it to me in bald, abbreviated form, which I then elaborate into a short story. I once watched a person listen with delight to a story I was telling, and when I was done, I said to him, “But you told me that joke.” And he replied, still laughing, “Not like that.”
Sometimes my facility with jokes gets me into trouble. I was on television once with the great humorist Sam Levenson, and he said to me, “Do you know the joke about the Jewish astronaut?” That was my cue to say, “No, Sam, tell me the joke about the Jewish astronaut,” so that he could tell it. But, of course, I had forgotten I was on television, and I said, “Yes, I heard it.”
Sam threw himself back pettishly and said, “Then you tell it.”
I was thunderstruck. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t even sure I had the same joke, but I said, “An Israeli said to an American, ‘Do you think reaching the Moon was such a big thing? We Jewish astronauts are going to land on the Sun.’ The American protested, ‘You can’t. The heat! The radiation!’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ said the Israeli. ‘Do you think we’re fools? We’re going to go at night.’ “
That was the joke and I got the laugh, but I perspired a lot.
My tendency to overlook little things like microphones and cameras showed up again about half a year ago during a radio interview at the Hotel Algonquin. Along with me was a musician who was accompanied by his gorgeous wife. One of the questions was whether sex interfered with the creative process. I answered in the negative, of course, and rather disdainfully at that. The musician also answered in the negative but admitted that on the night before a big concert, he usually abstained from sex.
Whereupon, I stage-whispered to the gorgeous wife, “Give me a call on those nights,” and then realized I had stage-whispered directly into the microphone. A look of horror crossed my face but, fortunately, the interview was not live and that line could be edited out.
Literary Sex and Censorship
Despite my prolificity, one thing I never experimented with was vulgarity and sex.
In the days when I started writing, writers, whether for the printed or the visual media, found it impossible to use vulgar language or even some proper words. It was for this reason that cowboys were always saying, “You gol-darned, dag-nabbed, ding-busted varmint,” when undoubtedly no cowboy ever said anything like that. We know what they really said but it was unprintable and unusable.
Words like “virgin,” “breast,” and “pregnant” were also unprintable and unsayable. It was even impossible, in some quarters, to say, “He died.” One had to say, “He passed away,” or “He went to his reward,” or “He was gathered unto his fathers.”
This type of prissiness was a great bother to writers, who found themselves unable to present the world as it was, and there was enormous relief in the 1960s when it became possible to use vulgarisms in writing, and even, to an extent, on television. The prissy were horrified, but they live in some never-never land and I am in no mood to worry about them.
And yet, despite all that, I have not joined the revolution. This is not out of prissiness of my own. I have published five books of naughty limericks that I constructed myself and that are quite satisfactorily obscene. What’s more, they are not hidden under a pseudonym. They appear under my own name.
Those, however, are limericks. In my other writing, sex and vulgarity are absent. In fact, my early stories usually excluded women altogether. Even as late as 1952, when I wrote “The Martian Way” {Galaxy, November 1952) I omitted women. The plot did not require them. Horace Gold stated, in his irascible way, that I had to include a woman or he would not take the story. “Any sort of woman,” he said.
So I gave one of my characters a shrewish wife. Horace objected, of course, but I shook my head. “A deal is a deal,” I said, so he had to take it. However, he misspelled my name on the cover, giving Asimov a double “s.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it on purpose.
I did introduce women in a few early stories, but my first successful female character was Susan Calvin, who appeared in some of my robot stories. Her first appearance was in “Liar” (ASF, May 1941). Susan Calvin was a plain spinster, a highly intelligent “robopsychologist” who fought it out in a man’s world without fear or favor and who invariably won. These were “women’s lib” stories twenty years before their time, and I got very little credit for that. (Susan Calvin was very similar, in some ways, to my dear wife, Janet, whom I didn’t meet until nineteen years after I had invented Susan.)
Despite Susan Calvin, my early science fiction stories were sometimes considered sexist because of the absence of women. A few years
ago, a feminist wrote to excoriate me for this. I replied gently, explaining my utter inexperience with women at the time I began to write. “That’s no excuse,” she replied angrily, and I dropped the matter.
Clearly, there is no percentage in arguing with fanatics.
As my writing progressed, I became more successful with women characters. In The Naked Sun, I introduced Gladia Delmarre as a romantic interest, and I think I did her well.
She appeared again in The Robots of Dawn (Doubleday, 1983), where she was even better, in my opinion. In The Robots of Dawn I even made it clear that the hero and heroine had sex (adulterous sex at that, for the hero was a married man), but I gave no clinical details and the episode was absolutely essential to the plot. It was not included for titillation.
In fact, in my last few novels, I have made it a practice to exclude not only all vulgarisms but all expletives of any kind. I exclude even “dear me” and “gee whiz.” It is difficult to do this, for people use such expressions (and much worse) almost routinely. I do it partly out of deliberate rebellion against the literary freedom of today and partly as an experiment. I was curious to see if any readers would notice. Apparently, they do not. (Do you notice that in this book there are no vulgarisms and no expletives?)
Nevertheless, I have had trouble with censorship. I’m not talking about my books of naughty limericks. I never had any trouble with them because they were never sent to libraries or schools. They never had much of a sale either, because my readers are not the dirty-limerick type. I wrote those books entirely for my own amusement.
My Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor received some lumps. All through the book, I stressed the desirability of not using vulgarisms unnecessarily. They were likely to embarrass some in the audience and did not add to the humor of the story. In fact, I pointed out, the humor was more effective when the ribaldry was merely hinted at. The listener fills in the lacunae in his mind according to his own tastes, and I give several examples of jokes where the wicked details are left out to the improvement of the tale.
The last two jokes in the book, however, were examples of cases where the use of vulgarisms was necessary. The last joke, in fact, illustrated the manner in which overuse of a particular vulgarism deprives it of all meaning.
Somewhere in Tennessee, the Treasury of Humor was violently attacked. An attempt was made to indicate that the last two jokes were typical of the book as a whole, and no mention was made of my strictures against the use of vulgarisms.
This is not surprising. Bluenose censors, in their attempt to cut off anything they don’t like, do not hesitate to distort, deceive, and lie. In fact, I think they would rather. They failed, however. The Treasury of Humor was removed from the junior high school shelf but remained in the town library. I hope the publicity meant that more students read it, though they must have been disappointed if they expected real obscenity.
(What strikes me in this is that the junior high school kids, if they are like all the junior high school kids I’ve ever known, know and freely use the wicked word found in those last two jokes. So, I suspect, do the censors themselves, for they are undoubtedly steeped in every possibl
e aspect of hypocrisy.)
The Robots of Dawn also took its lumps. Parents in some town in the state of Washington found themselves appalled by the book and demanded it be withdrawn from the school library. Some who made this demand admitted they didn’t read the book, because they wouldn’t read “trash.” It was enough to call it trash and burn it.
One school board member actually had the guts to read the book. He said he didn’t like it (having to stay on the side of the angels if he wanted to keep his job) but actually had the surprising courage to say that he found nothing in it that was obscene. So it stayed.
At a time when obscene books are published without remark and are openly read by young women on buses, the fact that anyone, anywhere, can waste their time over my harmless volumes amazes me. Sometimes, though, I wish that the people who did this weren’t the pitiful and petulant pipsqueaks they are and that they made a real stink over some book of mine. How that would improve sales!
Doomsday
Something else I have avoided in my prolific fiction writing has been the “doomsday” scenario (with one small exception I’ll get to).
Humanity has been damaging the planet and its ecological balance since it learned how to develop stone weapons and to band together to hunt down the larger herbivores. There is no question in my mind that human hunting bands are responsible for the disappearance of the magnificent mammoths and the other large mammals that roamed the Earth twenty thousand years ago.
Ten thousand years ago, human beings devised the techniques of agriculture and herding and slowly began the process of destroying the environment by overgrazing and by overfarming.