Gold

by Isaac Asimov

  Is it a matter of subject matter? Do adult novels deal with death and torture and mayhem and sex (natural and unnatural) and all kinds of unpleasantness, while juvenile novels deal with sweetness and niceness?

  You know that’s not so. Think of the current rash of “horror” films, which fill the screen with blood and murder and torture and are designed to frighten. Youngsters flock to them, and the gorier they are, the more they enjoy them.

  Even censors don’t seem to mind the mayhem. When there are loud squawks from the righteous who want to kick books out of school libraries, the objections are most often to the use of “dirty” words and to sex. However, I have, in my time, lived half a block from a junior high school and listened to the youngsters going there and coming back. I picked up a lot of colorful obscenity, both sexual and scatological, in that way, for I had forgotten some of what I had learned as a youngster. I think the youngsters themselves would have no objection to books containing gutter language and sexual detail—or fail to understand them, either. That distinction between adult books and juvenile books is not a natural one but is enforced by adult fiat.

  (I admit that I use no gutter language or sex in my juvenile books, but then I use no gutter language and very little sex in my adult books.)

  How about action, then? Adult books can pause for sensitive description of all kinds, or for a skillful and painstaking dissection of motivation, and so on. Juvenile books tend to deal entirely with action. Is that right?

  Actually, the distinction is not between adults and juveniles, but between a few people (both adult and juvenile) and most people (both adult and juvenile). Most people, of whatever age, are impatient with anything but action. Watch the popular adventure programs on television, subtract the action, and find out what you have left, and then remember that it is adults, for the most part, who are watching them.

  On the other hand, my books contain very little “action” (hence no movie sales) and deal largely with the interplay of ideas in rather cerebral dialog (as many critics point out, sometimes with irritation) and yet, says the Encyclopedia, I appeal to youngsters. Clarity, not action, is the key.

  Can it be a question of style? Are adult books written in a complicated and experimental style, while juvenile books are not?

  To be sure, a juvenile book written in a complicated and experimental style is more apt to be a commercial failure than one written in a straightforward style. On the other hand, this is also true of adult books. The difference is that tortuous style is frequently admired by critics in adult books, but never in juvenile books. This means that many adults, who are guided by critics, or who merely wish to appear chic, buy opaque and experimental books, and then, possibly, don’t read them, aside from any “dirty parts” they might have. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past springs to mind. My dear wife, Janet, is reading it, every word, for the second time but there are moments when I see the perspiration standing out, in great drops, on her forehead.

  How about rhetorical tricks? Metaphors, allusions, and all the rest of it, depend upon experience, and youngsters, however bright they are, have not yet had time to gather experience.

  For instance, my George and Azazel stories are pure fluff, but they are the most nearly adult stories I write. I use my full vocabulary, together with involved sentence structure, and never hesitate to rely on the reader to fill in what I leave out. I can refer to “the elusive promise of nocturnal Elysium” without any indication of what I mean. I can speak of the Eiffel Tower as a “stupid building still under construction” and depend on the reader to know what the Tower looks like and therefore see why the remark is wrong, but apt. Nevertheless, the stories are meant to be humorous and all the rhetorical devices contribute to that. The young person who misses some of the allusions nevertheless should get much of the humor and enjoy the story anyway.

  In short, I maintain there is no hard and fast distinction between “adult” writing and “juvenile” writing. A good book is a good book and can be enjoyed by both adults and youngsters. If my books appeal to both, that is to my credit.

  Names

  We received an interesting letter some time ago from Greg Cox of Washington State. It is short and I will take the liberty of quoting its one sentence in full:

  “I enjoyed very much the Good Doctor’s story in the May issue (“The Evil Drink Does”), but I have to ask: How did a young lady from such an allegedly puritanical background end up with the unlikely (if appealing) name of ‘Ishtar Mistik’???”

  It’s a good question, but it makes an assumption. In the story, Ishtar remarks, “I was brought up in the strictest possible way. It is impossible for me to behave in anything but the most correct manner.”

  From that you may suppose that Ishtar’s family were rigidly doctrinaire Presbyterians, or superlatively moral Catholics, or tradition-bound Orthodox Jews, but if you do, it’s an assumption. I say nothing about Ishtar’s religious background.

  To be sure, Ishtar is the Babylonian goddess of love, the analog of the Greek Aphrodite, and it is therefore odd that such a name should be given a child by puritanical parents, if the puritanism is Christian or Jewish in origin. But who says it is? The family may be a group of puritanical Druids (even Druids may have strict moral codes, and probably do) who chose “Ishtar” for its sound.

  But let’s go into the matter of names more systematically. Every writer has to give his characters names. There are occasional exceptions as when a writer may refer to a limited number of characters, in Puckish fashion, as “the Young Man,” “the Doctor,” “the Skeptic,” and so on. P. G. Wodehouse, for example, in his golf stories, refers to the narrator as “the Oldest Member” and never gives him a name. He only need be referred to for a few paragraphs at the start, however, and then remains in the background as a disembodied voice. In my own George and Azazel stories, the first-person character to whom George speaks in the introduction and whom he regularly insults, has no name. He is merely “I.” Of course, the perceptive reader may think (from the nature of George’s insults) that I’s name is Isaac Asimov, but again that is only an assumption.

  Allowing for such minor exceptions then, writers need names.

  You might think that this is not something that bothers anyone but apparently it does. I have received numerous letters (usually from young teenagers) who seem to be totally unimpressed by the ease with which I work up complex plots and ingenious gimmicks and socko endings but who say, “How do you manage to decide what names to give your characters?” That is what puzzles them.

  In my attempts to answer, I have had to think about the subject.

  In popular fiction intended for wide consumption, especially among the young, names are frequently chosen for blandness. You don’t want the kids to stumble over the pronunciation of strange names or to be distracted by them. Your characters, therefore, are named Jack Armstrong or Pat Reilly or Sam Jones. Such stories are filled with Bills and Franks and Joes coupled with Harpers and Andersons and Jacksons. That is also part of the comforting assumption that all decent characters, heroes especially, are of northwest European extraction.

  Naturally, you may have comic characters or villains, and they can be drawn from among the “inferior” races, with names to suit. The villainous Mexican can be Pablo; the comic black, Rastus; the shrewd Jew, Abie; and so on.

  Aside from the wearisome sameness of such things, the world changed after the 1930s. Hitler gave racism a bad name, and all over the world, people who had till then been patronized as “natives” began asserting themselves. It became necessary to choose names with a little more imagination and to avoid seeming to reserve heroism for your kind and villainy for the other kind.

  On top of this science fiction writers had a special problem. What names do you use for non-human characters—robots, extraterrestrials, and so on?

  There have been a variety of solutions to this problem. For instance, you might deliberately give extraterrestrials unpronounceable names, thus indicating that
they speak an utterly strange language designed for sound-producing organs other than human vocal cords. The name Xlbnushk, for instance.

  That, however, is not a solution that can long be sustained. No reader is going to read a story in which he periodically encounters Xlbnushk without eventually losing his temper. After all, he has to look at the letter-combination and he’s bound to try to pronounce it every time he sees it.

  Besides, in real life, a difficult name is automatically simplified. In geology, there is something called “the Mohorovicic discontinuity” named for its Yugoslavian discoverer. It is usually referred to by non-Yugoslavians as “the Moho discontinuity.” In the same way, Xlbnushk would probably become “Nush.”

  Another way out is to give non-human characters (or even human characters living in a far future in which messy emotionalism has been eliminated) codes instead of names. You can have a character called “21MM792,” for instance. That sort of thing certainly gives a story a science-fictional ambience. And it can work. In Neil Jones’ Professor Jameson stories of half a century ago, the characters were organic brains in metallic bodies, all of whom had letter-number names. Eventually, one could tell them apart, and didn’t even notice the absence of ordinary names. This system, however, will work only if it rarely occurs. If all, or even most, stories numbered their characters, there would be rebellion in the ranks.

  My own system, when dealing with the far future, or with extraterrestrials, is to use names, not codes, and easily pronounceable names, too; but names that don’t resemble any real ones, or any recognizable ethnic group.

  For one thing that gives the impression of “alienism” without annoying the reader. For another, it minimizes the chance of offending someone by using his or her name.

  This is a real danger. The most amusing example was one that was encountered by L. Sprague de Camp when he wrote “The Merman” back in 1938. The hero was one Vernon Brock (not a common name) and he was an ichthyologist (not a common profession). After the story appeared in the December 1938 Astounding, a thunderstruck Sprague heard from a real Vernon Brock who was really an ichthyologist. Fortunately, the real Brock was merely amused and didn’t mind at all, but if he had been a nasty person, he might have sued. Sprague would certainly have won out, but he would have been stuck with legal fees, lost time, and much annoyance.

  Sometimes I get away with slight misspellings: Baley instead of Bailey; Hari instead of Harry; Daneel instead of Daniel. At other times, I make the names considerably different, especially the first name: Salvor Hardin, Gaal Dornick, Golan Trevize, Stor Gendibal, Janov Pelorat. (I hope I’m getting them right; I’m not bothering to look them up.)

  My feminine characters also receive that treatment, though the names I choose tend to be faintly classical because I like the sound: Callia, Artemisia, Noÿs, Arcadia, Gladia, and so on.

  I must admit that when I started doing this, I expected to get irritated letters from readers, but, you know, I never got one. It began in wholesale manner in 1942 with the first Foundation story and in the forty-plus years since, not one such letter arrived. Well, Damon Knight once referred to Noÿs in a review of The End of Eternity as “the woman with the funny name,” but that’s as close as it got.

  Which brings me to the George and Azazel stories again. There I use a different system. The George and Azazel stories are intended to be humorous. In fact, they are farces, with no attempt at or pretense of realism. The stories are outrageously overwritten on purpose. My ordinary writing style is so (deliberately) plain that every once in a while, I enjoy showing that I can be florid and rococo if I choose.

  Well, then, in a rococo story, how on Earth can I be expected to have characters with ordinary names, even though the stories are set in the present and (except for Azazel) deal only with Earth people, so that I can’t use nonexistent names?

  Instead I use real names, but choose very unusual and pretentious first names. In my George and Azazel stories, characters have been named Mordecai Sims, Gottlieb Jones, Menander Block, Hannibal West, and so on. By associating the outlandish first name with a sober last name, I heighten the oddness of the first. (On second thought, I should have made Ishtar Mistik, Ishtar Smith.)

  None of this is, of course, intended as a universal rule. It’s just what I do. If you want to write an SF story, by all means make up a system of your own.

  Originality

  Having published an editorial entitled “Plagiarism” in the August 1985 issue of the magazine, it occurs to me to look at the other side of the coin. After all, if plagiarism is reprehensible, total originality is just about impossible.

  The thing is that there exists an incredible number of books in which an enormous variety of ideas and an even more enormous variety of phrases and ways of putting things have been included. Anyone literate enough to write well has, as a matter of course, read a huge miscellany of printed material and, the human brain being what it is, a great deal of it remains in the memory at least unconsciously, and will be regurgitated onto the manuscript page at odd moments.

  In 1927, for instance, John Livingston Lowes (an English professor at Harvard) published a six-hundred-page book entitled The Road to Xanadu, in which he traced nearly every phrase in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to various travel books that were available to the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  I tried reading the book in my youth, but gave up. It could only interest another Coleridge scholar. Besides, I saw no point to it. Granted that the phrases already existed scattered through a dozen books, they existed for everybody. It was only Coleridge who thought of putting them together, with the necessary modifications, to form one of the great poems of the English language. Coleridge might not have been a hundred percent original but he was original enough to make the poem a work of genius. You can’t overrate the skills involved in selection and arrangement.

  It was this that was in my own mind, once, when I was busily working on a book of mine called Words of Science back in the days when I was actively teaching at Boston University School of Medicine. The book consisted of 250 one-page essays on various scientific terms, giving derivations, meanings and various historical points of interest. For the purpose, I had an unabridged dictionary spread out on my desk, for I couldn’t very well make up the derivations, nor could I rely on my memory to present them to me in all correct detail. (My memory is good, but not that good.)

  A fellow faculty member happened by and looked over my shoulder. He read what I was writing at the moment, stared at the unabridged and said, “Why, you’re just copying the dictionary.”

  I stopped dead, sighed, closed the dictionary, lifted it with an effort and handed it to my friend. “Here,” I said. “The dictionary is yours. Now go write the book.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and walked away without offering to take the dictionary. He was bright enough to get the point.

  There are times, though, when I wonder how well any story of mine would survive what one might call the “Road to Xanadu” test. (There’s no point in offending fellow writers by analyzing their originality, so I’ll just stick to my own stuff.)

  The most original story I ever wrote in my opinion was “Nightfall,” which appeared back in 1941. I had not quite reached my twenty-first birthday when I wrote it and I have always been inordinately proud of the plot. “It was a brand-new plot,” I said, “and I killed it as I wrote it, for no one else would dare write a variation of it.”

  To be sure, it was John Campbell who presented me with the Emerson quote that began the story: “If the stars would appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the City of God—” and it was Campbell who sent me home to write the reverse of Emerson’s thesis.

  Allowing for that, the development and details of the story were mine—or were they?

  In 1973, I was preparing an anthology of my favorite stories of the 1930s (the years, that is, before John Campbell’s editorship, so that
I named the book Before the Golden Age) and I included, of course, Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun,” which had been published in 1934 and had, at that time, fascinated my fourteen-year-old self. I reread it, naturally, before including it and was horrified.

  You see, it dealt in part with a cult whose members were furious at scientists for rationalizing the mystic tenets of the believers. In an exciting scene, the cultists attacked the scientists’ citadel at a very crucial moment and the scientists tried to hold them off long enough to get their task done.

  I can’t deny having read that story. After all, I still remembered it with pleasure forty years later. Yet only six and a half years after reading it, I wrote “Nightfall” which dealt in part with a cult whose members were furious at scientists for rationalizing the mystic tenets of the believers. In an exciting scene, the cultists attacked the scientists’ citadel at a very crucial moment and the scientists tried to hold them off long enough to get their task done.

  No, it wasn’t plagiarism. For one thing I wrote it entirely differently. However, the scene fit both stories and having been impressed by it in Jack’s story, I drew from memory, and used it in my own story automatically—never for one moment considering that I wasn’t making it up out of nothing but had earlier read something very like that scene.

  I suppose that any thoroughgoing scholar who was willing to spend several years at the task could trace almost every quirk in “Nightfall” to one story or another that appeared in the science fiction magazines in the 1930s. (Yes, I read them all.) Naturally, he could do the same for any other story written by any other author.