by Isaac Asimov
It is even more likely that in the bad old days before the women’s movement became strong, women who wrote science fiction concealed their sex from the readers (and even, sometimes, from the editors). Science fiction was thought to be a very masculine pursuit at the time and I know two editors (no names, please, even though both are now dead) who insisted on believing that women could not write good science fiction. Pseudonyms were therefore necessary if they were to sell anything at all.
Sometimes, women did not have to use pseudonyms. Their first names might be epicene, and that would be protection enough. Thus, Leslie F. Stone and Leigh Brackett were women but, as far as one could tell from their names, they might be as masculine as Leslie Fiedler and Leigh Hunt. Editors and readers at first believed they were.
Or women might simply convert names to initials. Could you tell that A. R. Long owned up to the name of Amelia, or that C. L. Moore was Catherine to her friends?
There were other reasons for pseudonyms in science fiction. In the early days of the magazine many of the successful writers could only make a living by writing a great deal just as fast as they could, for a variety of pulp markets. They might use different names for different markets, creating separate personalities, so to speak, that wouldn’t compete with each other. Thus Will Jenkins wrote for the slicks under his own name, but adopted the pseudonym Murray Leinster when he wrote science fiction.
Sometimes, even within the single field of science fiction, particular writers wrote too many stories. They were so good that editors would cheerfully buy, let us say, eighteen stories from them in a particular year in which they only published twelve issues of their magazines. This meant (if you work out the arithmetic carefully) that it would be necessary to run more than one story by them in a single issue now and then, and editors generally have a prejudice against that. Readers would feel they were cheated of variety, or suspect that editors were showing undue favoritism, or who knows what. Therefore some of the stories would be put under a pseudonym.
The pseudonyms might be transparent enough. For instance, Robert A. Heinlein at the height of his magazine popularity wrote half his stories under the name of Anson MacDonald, but Bob’s middle initial A. stood for Anson, and MacDonald was the maiden name of his then-wife. Similarly, L. Ron Hubbard wrote under the name of Rene Lafayette, but the initial L. in Hubbard’s name was Lafayette, and Rene was a not-too-distant version of Ron. Still, as long as the readers were led to believe that not too many stories of one author were included in the inventory, all was well.
Sometimes, an author is so identified with a particular type of story, that when he writes another type of story, he doesn’t want to confuse the reader by false associations—so he adopts a new name. Thus, John W. Campbell was a writer of super-science stories of cosmic scope, and one day he wrote a story called “Twilight” which was altogether different. He put it under the name of Don A. Stuart (his then-wife’s maiden name was Dona Stuart, you see) and rapidly made that name even more popular than his own.
Sometimes, an author simply wants to separate his writing activities from his nonwriting activities, if they are of equal importance to him. Thus, a talented teacher at Milton Academy, who is named Harry C. Stubbs, writes under the name of Hal Clement. He’s not hiding. Hal is short for Harry, as all Shakespearian devotees know, and the C. in his full name stands for Clement.
Again, my dear wife has practiced medicine for over thirty years as Janet Jeppson, M.D. As a writer she prefers J. O. Jeppson. The earnings fall into two different slots as far as the I.R.S. is concerned and that makes it convenient for her bookkeeping.
In my own case, I have eschewed pseudonyms almost entirely; I am far too fond of my own name, and far too proud of my writing to want to sail under false colors for any reason. And yet, in one or two cases…
Thus in 1951, I was persuaded to write a juvenile science fiction novel in the hope that it would be sold as the beginning of a long-lived television series. (Those were early days, and no one understood how television was going to work.) I objected, very correctly I think, that TV might ruin the stuff and make me ashamed of having my name associated with it. My editor said, “Then use a pseudonym.”
I did, plucking Paul French out of the air for the purpose, and eventually wrote six novels under that name. (Some people, with little knowledge of science fiction, assumed from this that all my SF was written under Paul French, a suggestion that simply horrified me.)
As soon as it was clear that TV was not interested in my juveniles, I dropped all pretense, and made use of the Three Laws of Robotics, for instance, which was a dead giveaway. Eventually, when it was time for new printings, I had my own name put upon it.
Again, in 1942, I wrote a short story for an editor who wanted it done under a pseudonym in order to give the impression that it was by a brand-new author. (The reason is complicated and I won’t bore you with it. You’ll find it in my autobiography.) I wrote it, reluctantly, under the name George E. Dale, but eventually included it in my book The Early Asimov as a story of my own.
Also, in 1942, I sold a story to the magazine Super Science Stories which printed it under the pseudonym H. B. Ogden, for reasons I no longer remember. (Even my memory has its limits.) So little did I care for the story, and so unhappy was I over the nonuse of my name that I totally forgot about it, until nearly forty years later when I was going over my diary carefully in order to prepare my autobiography.
I was shocked to find there was a story of mine that I had forgotten and didn’t own in printed form. Fortunately, with the help of Forrest J. Ackerman I got the issue and reprinted the story in the first volume of my autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, acknowledging it as my own.
In 1971, I was persuaded to write a book entitled The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, in which I gently satirized sexual how-to books such as The Sensuous Woman. Since the latter book was written by a writer identified only as “J,” my editor felt the joke should be carried on by having my book written by “Dr. A.” Even before publication day, however, it was announced that I was the author and my identity was never a secret.
At the present moment, then, absolutely none of my writing appears under anything but my own name.
Which brings up one puzzle. The early pulps occasionally made use of “house names.” A particular magazine would use a pseudonym that was never used except in that magazine, but that pseudonym might be used by any number of different writers. I have never really understood why this was done and if any reader knows I would appreciate being told.
Dialog
Most stories deal with people and one of the surefire activities of people is that of talking and of making conversation. It follows that in most stories there is dialog. Sometimes stories are largely dialog; my own stories almost always are. For that reason, when I think of the art of writing (which isn’t often, I must admit) I tend to think of dialog.
In the romantic period of literature in the first part of the nineteenth century, the style of dialog tended to be elaborate and adorned. Authors used their full vocabulary and had their characters speak ornately.
I remember when I was very young and first read Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. How I loved the conversation. The funny passages were very funny to me, though I had trouble with John Browdie’s thick Yorshire accent (something his beloved Matilda, brought up under similar conditions, lacked, for some reason). What I loved even more though was the ornamentation—the way everyone “spoke like a book.”
Thus, consider the scene in which Nicholas Nickleby confronts his villainous Uncle Ralph. Nicholas’s virtuous and beautiful sister, Kate, who has been listening to Ralph’s false version of events, which make out Nicholas to have been doing wrong, cried out wildly to her brother, “Refute these calumnies.”
Of course, I had to look up “refute” and “calumny” in the dictionary, but that meant I had learned two useful words. I also had never heard any seventeen-year-old girl of my acquaintance use those words but that jus
t showed me how superior the characters in the book were, and that filled me with satisfaction.
It’s easy to laugh at the books of that era and to point out that no one really talks that way. But then, do you suppose people in Shakespeare’s time went around casually speaking in iambic pentameter?
Still, don’t you want literature to improve on nature? Sure you do. When you go to the movies, the hero and heroine don’t look like the people you see in the streets, do they? Of course not. They look like movie stars. The characters in fiction are better looking, stronger, braver, more ingenious and clever than anyone you are likely to meet, so why shouldn’t they speak better, too?
And yet there are values in realism—in making people look, and sound, and act like real people.
For instance, back in 1919, some of the players on the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox were accused of accepting money from gamblers to throw the World Series (the so-called “Black Sox” scandal) and were barred from baseball for life as a result. At the trial, a young lad is supposed to have followed his idol, the greatest of the accused, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and to have cried out in anguish, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
That is a deathless cry that can’t be tampered with. It is unthinkable to have the boy say “Refute these calumnies, Joseph,” even though that’s what he means. Any writer who tried to improve matters in that fashion would, and should, be lynched at once. I doubt that anyone would, or should, even change it to “Say it isn’t so, Joe.”
For that matter, you couldn’t possibly have had Kate Nickleby cry out to her brother, “Say it ain’t so, Nick.”
Of course, during much of history most people were illiterate and the reading of books was very much confined to the few who were educated and scholarly. Such books of fiction as existed were supposed to “improve the mind,” or risk being regarded as works of the devil.
It was only gradually, as mass education began to flourish, that books began to deal with ordinary people. Of course, Shakespeare had his clowns and Dickens had his Sam Wellers, and in both cases, dialog was used that mangled the English language to some extent—but that was intended as humor. The audience was expected to laugh uproariously at these representatives of the lower classes.
As far as I know the first great book which was written entirely and seriously in substandard English and which was a great work of literature nevertheless (or even, possibly, to some extent because of it) was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which was published in 1884. Huck Finn is himself the narrator, and he is made to speak as an uneducated backwoods boy would speak—if he happened to be a literary genius. That is, he used the dialect of an uneducated boy, but he put together sentences and paragraphs like a master.
The book was extremely popular when it came out because its realism made it incredibly effective—but it was also extremely controversial as all sorts of fatheads inveighed against it because it didn’t use proper English.
And yet, at that, Mark Twain had to draw the line, too, as did all writers until the present generation.
People, all sorts of people, use vulgarisms as a matter of course. I remember my days in the army when it was impossible to hear a single sentence in which the common word for sexual intercourse was not used as an all-purpose adjective. Later, after I had gotten out of the army, I lived on a street along which young boys and girls walked to the local junior high school in the morning, and back again in the evening, and their shouted conversations brought back memories of my barracks days with nauseating clarity.
Yet could writers reproduce that aspect of common speech? Of course not. For that reason, Huck Finn was always saying that something was “blamed” annoying, “blamed” this, “blamed” that. You can bet that the least he was really saying was “damned.”
A whole set of euphemisms was developed and placed in the mouths of characters who wouldn’t, in real life, have been caught dead saying them. Think of the all the “dad-blameds,” and “gol-darneds,” and “consarneds” we have seen in print and heard in the movies. To be sure, youngsters say them as a matter of caution for they would probably be punished (if of “good family”) by their parents if caught using the terms they had heard said parents use. (Don’t let your hearts bleed for the kids for when they grow up they will beat up their kids for the same crime.)
For the last few decades, however, it has become permissible to use all the vulgarisms freely and many writers have availed themselves of the new freedom to lend an air of further realism to their dialog. What’s more, they are apt to resent bitterly any suggestion that this habit be modified or that some nonvulgar expression be substituted.
In fact, one sees a curious reversal now. A writer must withstand a certain criticism if he does not make use of said vulgarisms.
Once when I read a series of letters by science fiction writers in which such terms were used freely and frequently, I wrote a response that made what seemed to me to be an obvious point. In it, I said something like this:
“Ordinary people, who are not well educated and who lack a large working vocabulary, are limited in their ability to lend force to their statements. In their search for force, they must therefore make use of vulgarisms which serve, through their shock value, but which, through overuse, quickly lose whatever force they have, so that the purpose of the use is defeated.
“Writers, on the other hand, have (it is to be presumed) the full and magnificent vocabulary of the English language at their disposal. They can say anything they want with whatever intensity of invective they require in a thousand different ways without ever once deviating from full respectability of utterance. They have, therefore, no need to trespass upon the usages of the ignorant and forlorn, and to steal their tattered expressions as substitutes for the language of Shakespeare and Milton.”
All I got for my pains were a few comments to the effect that there must be something seriously wrong with me.
Nevertheless, it is my contention that dialog is realistic when, and only when, it reflects the situation as you describe it and when it produces the effect you wish to produce.
At rather rare intervals, I will make use of dialect. I will have someone speak as a Brooklyn-bred person would (that is, as I myself do, in my hours of ease), or insert Yiddishisms here and there, if it serves a purpose. I may even try to make up a dialect, as I did in Foundation’s Edge, if it plays an important part in the development of the story.
Mostly, however, I do not.
The characters in my stories (almost without exception) are pictured as being well educated and highly intelligent. It is natural, therefore, for them to make use of a wide vocabulary and to speak precisely and grammatically, even though I try not to fall into the ornateness of the Romantic Ear.
And, as a matter of quixotic principle, I try to avoid expletives, even mild ones, when I can. But other writers, of course, may do as they please.
Acknowledgments
Cal copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc.
Left to Right copyright © 1987 by Nightfall, Inc.
Frustration copyright © 1991 by Nightfall, Inc.
Hallucination copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Instability copyright © 1989 by Nightfall, Inc.
Alexander the God copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
In the Canyon copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
Good-bye to Earth copyright © 1989 by Nightfall, Inc.
Battle-Hymn copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
Feghoot and the Courts copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
Fault Intolerant copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc.
Kid Brother copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Nations in Space copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Smile of the Chipper copyright © 1989 by Nightfall, Inc.
Gold copyright © 1991 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Longest Voyage copyright © 1983 by Nightfall, Inc.
Inventing a Universe copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, I
nc.
Flying Saucers and Science Fiction copyright © 1982 by Nightfall, Inc.
Invasion copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Science Fiction Blowgun copyright © 1995 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Robot Chronicles copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc.
Golden Age Ahead copyright © 1979 by Nightfall, Inc.
The All-Human Galaxy copyright © 1983 by Nightfall, Inc.
Psychohistory copyright © 1988 by Nightfall, Inc.
Science Fiction Series copyright © 1986 by Nightfall, Inc.
Survivors copyright © 1987 by Nightfall, Inc.
Nowhere! copyright © 1983 by Nightfall, Inc.
Outsiders, Insiders copyright © 1986 by Nightfall, Inc.
Science Fiction Anthologies copyright © 1981 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Influence of Science Fiction copyright © 1981 by Nightfall, Inc.
Women and Science Fiction copyright © 1983 by Nightfall, Inc.
Religion and Science Fiction copyright © 1984 by Nightfall, Inc.
Time-Travel copyright © 1984 by Nightfall, Inc.
Plotting copyright © 1989 by Nightfall, Inc.
Metaphor copyright © 1989 by Nightfall, Inc.
Ideas copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc.
Suspense copyright © 1991 by Nightfall, Inc.
Serials copyright © 1980 by Nightfall, Inc.
The Name of Our Field copyright © 1978 by Nightfall, Inc.
Hints copyright © 1979 by Nightfall, Inc.
Writing for Young People copyright © 1986 by Nightfall, Inc.
Names copyright © 1984 by Nightfall, Inc.
Originality copyright © 1986 by Nightfall, Inc.
Book Reviews copyright © 1981 by Nightfall, Inc.