Gold

by Isaac Asimov

  For that matter, what if we went back in time and found that the biblical Jesus never existed?

  The mere existence of time-travel makes all these speculations irresistible, so is it possible that very religious people might object to time-travel themes, and call them blasphemous, simply because of the possibilities they give rise to?

  The correspondent says in his letter, “Dr. Asimov, I know that you are an atheist—” and there may be the implication that because of this I am insensitive to the feelings of religionists, or perhaps even anxious to make them seem ridiculous.

  As a matter of fact, I have frequently, in my writings, made it clear that I have never encountered any convincing evidence of the existence of the biblical God, and that I am incapable of accepting that existence on faith alone. That makes me an atheist, but, although this may surprise some Americans, the Constitution safeguards my right to be one and to proclaim myself one.

  Nevertheless, although I am an atheist, I am not a proselytizing one; I am not a missionary; I do not treat atheism as a kind of true faith that I must force on everyone. After all, I have published more than almost anyone, about 20,000,000 words so far, and I have frequently discussed controversial problems. You are free to go through my writings and search for any sign that I ridicule religion as such. I have opposed those people who attack legitimate scientific findings (evolution, as an example) in the name of religion, and who do so without evidence, or (worse yet) with distorted and false evidence. I don’t consider them true religionists, however, and I am careful to point out that they disgrace religion, and are a greater danger to honest religion than to science.

  And suppose I weren’t an atheist. My parents were Jewish and I might have been brought up an Orthodox Jew, or become one of my own volition. Might it then be argued that I would naturally favor any story burlesquing Christianity?

  Or suppose I were a Methodist; would I therefore look for stories that burlesqued Judaism, or Catholicism—or atheism?

  If I were in the mood to run this magazine in such a way as to offend “any substantial religious group” I wouldn’t have to be an atheist. I could do it if I were anything at all, provided only that I were a bigot, or an idiot, or both.

  In actual fact, I am neither and again, I offer my collected writings as evidence. As for Shawna, she doesn’t have a similar body of written works to cite but, if I may serve as character witness, I can tell you right now she is certainly not a bigot, and a hundred times certainly not an idiot.

  Needless to say, I am sorry that our correspondent was upset by “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis.” If we lived in an ideal world, we would never publish any story that upset anyone. In this case, though, we had to choose. On the one hand, we had a remarkable story that considered, quite fearlessly, an important idea, and we felt that most readers would recognize this point—if not at once then upon mature consideration. On the other hand, we had a story that might offend some of our readers.

  We made the choice. We put quality and importance ahead of the chance of some offence. We hope that our angry correspondent will consider the matter again and see that the story is far more than a burlesque. He might even give Bishop points for skill and courage.

  Time-Travel

  I have often said, in speaking and in writing, that the qualified science fiction writer avoids the scientifically impossible. Yet I can’t bring myself to make that rule an absolute one, because there are some plot devices that offer such dramatic possibilities that we are forced to overlook the utter implausibilities that are involved. The most glaring example of this is time-travel.

  There are infinite tortuosities one can bring to plot development if only you allow your characters to move along the time axis, and I, for one, can’t resist them, so that I have written a number of time-travel stories, including one novel, The End of Eternity.

  You can get away with a kind of diluted time-travel story, if you have your character move in the direction we all move—from present to future—and suspend the usual consciousness that accompanies the move by having him (please understand that, for conciseness I am using “him” as a shorthand symbol for “him or her”) sleep away a long period of time, as Rip van Winkle did, or, better, having him frozen for an indefinite period at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Better still, you might make use of relativistic notions and have your character move into the future by having his subjective-time slowed through motion at speeds close to that of light, or motion through an enormously intense gravitational field.

  These are plausible devices that do not do damage to the structure of the Universe, but they are one-way motions, with no return possible. I did it in Pebble in the Sky although I made use of an unknown (and unspecified) natural law involving nuclear fission, which was then quite new. This was a weakness in the plot, but I got past it in the first couple of pages and never brought it up again so I hoped no one would notice it. (Alas, many did.)

  The same device can be used to make repeated jumps, always into the future, or to bring someone from the past into the present.

  Once you have a device that sends someone into the future, however, it is asking too much of writer-nature not to use some device—such as a blow on the head—to send a person into the past. (Mark Twain does it in “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.”) For that, there is some scientific justification at the subatomic level, where individual particles are involved and entropy considerations are absent. For ordinary objects, where entropy is involved, there is none.

  But all one-shot changes in either direction are only devices to start the story, which then usually proceeds in a completely time-bound fashion. That’s not the true, or pure, time-travel story. In true time-travel, the characters can move, at will, back and forth in time. Nor is it fair if this is done through supernatural intervention as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It must be done by an artificial device under the control of a human being.

  The first true time-travel story was H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895. Wells, who was probably the best science fiction writer of all time,1 carefully explained the rationale behind it. It requires four dimensions to locate an object: it is somewhere on the north-south axis, somewhere on the east-west axis, somewhere on the up-down axis, and somewhere on the past-future axis. It exists not only in a certain point of three-dimensional space but at a certain instant of time. A merely three-dimensional object is as much a mathematical abstraction as is a two-dimensional plane, or a one-dimensional line, or a zero-dimensional point. Suppose you considered the Great Wall of China as existing for zero time and therefore consisting of three dimensions only. It would then not exist at all and you could walk through its supposed position at any time.

  Since duration is a dimension like height, width, and thickness, and since we can travel at will north and south, east and west, and (if only by jumping) up and down, why shouldn’t we also travel yesterward and tomorrowward as soon as we work out a device for the purpose?

  That was 1895, remember, and Wells’s analysis at that time had some shadow of justification. But then, in 1905, came Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and it became clear that time is a dimension but it is not like the three spatial dimensions, and it can’t be treated as though it were.

  And yet Wells’s argument was so winning and the plots it made possible so enticing that science fiction writers generally just ignore Einstein and follow Wells. (I do so myself in The End of Eternity.)

  The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the well-known “paradoxes” it entails. The classic example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” In that case, you see, the murderer was never born, so who killed the little boy?

  But you don’t need anything so drastic. What if you go back and change any of the many small items that made it possible for your father and mother to meet, or to fall in love after they met, or to marry after they fall in l
ove. Suppose you merely interfered with the crucial moment of sex and had it happen the next evening, or perhaps just five minutes later than it did, so that another sperm fertilized the ovum rather than the one that should have. That, too, would mean the person committing the act would never come into existence, so who would commit the act?

  In fact, to go into the past and do anything would change a great deal of what followed, perhaps everything that followed. So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes that follow, so wholesale is the annihilation of any reasonable concept of causality, that the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible.

  However, any discussion of this gets so philosophical that I lose patience and would rather consider something simpler.

  Suppose you get into a time machine and travel twenty-four hours into the future. The assumption is that you are traveling only in the time dimension, and that the three spatial dimensions are unchanged. However, as is perfectly obvious, Earth is moving through the three dimensions in a very complex way. The point on the surface on which the time-machine is located is moving about the Earth’s axis. The Earth is moving about the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, and also about the center of gravity of the Earth-Sun system; is accompanying the Sun in its motion about the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy in its undefined motion relative to the center of gravity of the Local Group and to the center of gravity of the universe as a whole if there is one.

  You might, of course, say that the time-machine partakes of the motion of the Earth, and wherever Earth goes, the time-machine goes, too. Suppose, though, we consider the Earth’s motion (with the solar system generally) around the galactic center. Its speed relative to that center is estimated to be about 220 kilometers per second. If the time-machine travels twenty-four hours into the future in one second, it travels 220 kilometers × 86,400 (the number of seconds in a day), or 19,008,000 kilometers in one second. That’s over sixty-three times the speed of light. If we don’t want to break the speed-of-light limit, then we must take not less than twenty-three minutes to travel one day forward (or backward) in time.

  What’s more, I suspect that considerations of acceleration would have to be involved. The time-machine would have to accelerate to light speed and then decelerate from it, and perhaps the human body could only stand so much acceleration in the time direction. Considering that the human body has never in all its evolution accelerated at all in the time direction, the amount of acceleration it ought to be able to endure might be very little indeed, so that the time-machine would have to take considerably more than an hour to make a one-day journey—say, at a guess, twelve hours.

  That would mean we could only gain half a day per day, at most, in traveling through time. Spending ten years to go twenty years into the future, would not be in the least palatable. (Can a time machine carry a life-support system of that order of magnitude?)

  And, on top of that, I don’t see that having to chase after the Earth would fail to cost the usual amount of energy just because we’re doing it by way of the time dimension. Without calculating the energy, I am positive time-travel is insuperably difficult, quite apart from the theoretical considerations that make it totally impossible. So let’s eliminate it from serious consideration.

  But not from science fiction! Time-travel stories are too much fun for them to be eliminated merely out of mundane considerations of impracticability, or even impossibility.

  Part Three

  On Writing

  Science Fiction

  Plotting

  Every once in a while, an article about me appears in a newspaper, usually in the form of an interview. I don’t go looking for these things, because I hate the hassle of being photographed (which, these days, invariably goes with interviews) and I hate the risk of being misquoted or misinterpreted.

  Nevertheless, I can’t always turn these things down because I’m not really a misanthrope, and because I do like to talk about myself. (Oh, you noticed?)

  As a result of one such interview, an article about me appeared in the Miami Herald of August 20, 1988. It was a long article and quite favorable (the headline read “The Amazing Asimov”) and it had very few inaccuracies in it. It did quote me, to be sure, as saying that my book The Sensuous Dirty Old Man was “nauseating.” That is wrong. I said that the books it satirized, The Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man, were nauseating. My book was funny.

  It also quoted me as saying that I considered “Nightfall” to be my best story. I don’t, not by a long shot. I said it was my “best-known” story, a different thing altogether.

  Usually any reporter who interviews me is willing to let it go at that, but the Miami Herald reporter was more enterprising. She asked questions of my dear wife, Janet, and of my brother, Stan, who’s a vice-president at the Long Island Newsday. Both said nice things, but then they both like me.

  However, she also consulted someone who teaches a course in science fiction at Rutgers University. Her name is Julia Sullivan, and I don’t think I know her, though it is clear from what she is quoted as saying that she is a woman of luminous intelligence and impeccable taste.

  She praised my clarity and wit, for instance, but I’m used to that. The thing is, she is also quoted as saying about me that “he surprises me. Sometimes I think he’s written himself out, and then he comes up with something really good…. He has the greatest mind for plot of any science-fiction writer.”

  That’s nice!

  I can’t recall anyone praising me for my plots before, and so, of course, it got me to thinking about the whole process of plotting.

  A plot is an outline of the events of a story. You might say, for instance, “There’s this prince, see? His father has recently died and his mother has married his uncle, who becomes the new king. This upsets the prince who hoped to be king himself and who doesn’t like the uncle anyway. Then he hears that the ghost of his dead father has been seen—”

  The first thing you have to understand is that a plot is not a story, any more than a skeleton is a living animal. It’s simply a guide to the writer, in the same way that a skeleton is a guide to a paleontologist as to what a long-extinct animal must have looked like. The paleontologist has to fill in the organs, muscles, skin, etc. all around the skeleton, and that’s not feasible except for a trained person. Hence, if you give the plot of Hamlet to a non-writer, that will not help him produce Hamlet or anything even readable.

  Well, then, how do you go about building a story around the plot?

  1) You can, if you wish, make the plot so detailed and so complex that you don’t have to do much in the way of “building.” Events follow one another in rapid succession and the reader (or viewer) is hurried from one suspense-filled situation to another. You get this at a low level in comic strips and in the old movie serials of the silent days. This is recognized as being suitable mainly for children, who don’t mind being rushed along without regard for logic or realism or any form of subtlety. In fact children are apt to be annoyed with anything that impedes the bare bones of the plot, so that a few minutes of love interest is denounced as “mush.” Of course, if it is done well enough, you have something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I enjoyed tremendously, even if there were parts that made no sense at all.

  2) You can go to the other extreme, if you wish, and virtually eliminate the plot. There need be no sense of connected events. You might simply have a series of vignettes as in Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Or you might tell a story that is designed merely to create a mood or evoke an emotion or illuminate a facet of the human condition. This, too, is not for everyone, although, done well, it is satisfying to the sophisticated end of the reader (or viewer) spectrum. The less sophisticated may complain that the story is not a story and ask “But what does it mean?” or “What happened?” The plotless story is rather like free verse, or abstract art, or atonal music. Something is given up that most people imagine to be inseparable
from the art form, but which, if done well (and my goodness, is it hard to do it well), transcends the form and gives enormous satisfaction to those who can follow the writer into the more rarefied realms of the art.

  3) What pleases the great middle—people who are not children or semi-literate adults, but who are not cultivated esthetes, either—are stories that have distinct plots, plots that are filled-out successfully, one way or another, with non-plot elements of various types. I’ll mention a few.

  3a) You can use the plot as a way of bringing in humor or satire. Read books by P. G. Wodehouse, or Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, or Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.

  3b) You can use the plot to develop an insight into the characters of the individuals who people the story. The great literary giants, such as Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevksy, do this supremely well. Since human beings and their relationships with each other and with the universe are far more complex and unpredictable than are simple events, the ability to deal with “characterization” successfully is often used as a way of defining “great literature.”

  3c) You can use the plot to develop ideas. The individuals who people the story may champion alternate views of life and the universe, and the struggle may be one in which each side tries to persuade or force the other into adopting its own world-view. To do this properly, each side must present its view (ostensibly to each other, but really to the reader) and the reader must be enticed into favoring one side or another so that he can feel suspense over which side will win. Done perfectly, the two opposing views should represent not white and black, but two grays of slightly different shades so that the reader cannot make a clear-cut decision but must think and come to conclusions of his own. I go into greater detail on this version than on the other two, because this is what I do.