Part Two: On Science Fiction Inventing the Universe
Why have I gone to the trouble of inventing a universe for other writers to exploit?
No, it isn't the money or the fame. Most of the royalties and all of the fame will go, as they should, to the authors who actually write the stories in this book and (it is to be hoped) in later companion pieces. My own return is, as it should be, miniscule.
But there are other reasons and I would like to explain them at some length, for among other things, they involve my feelings of guilt. Now guilt (for those of you who have never experienced the emotion) is a dreadful annoyance, souring one's life and making one unable to enjoy properly any renown or riches that come one's way. One is bowed down by its weight and is rendered fearful of the (usually imaginary) accusing eye of public disapproval.
In my case, it came about this way. I hadn't been writing for more than ten or fifteen years when I began to have the uneasy suspicion that I was becoming rather well known as a science fiction writer. In fact, I was even getting mentioned as one of the "Big Three," the other two being Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur c. Clarke.
It only got worse as the decades continued to fly by. We were not only cursed with prolificity, but with longevity, so that the same old Big Three remained Big for nearly half a century. Heinlein died in 1988 at the age of 80, but Clarke is still going strong as I write this and, obviously, so am I.
The result is that, at present, when there are a great many writers attempting to scale the mountainside of science fiction, it must be rather annoying for them to see the peak occupied by elderly has-beens who cling to it with their arthritic paws and simply won't get off. Even death, it seems, won't stop us, since Heinlein has already published a posthumous book and reissues of his old novels are in the works.
Thanks to the limited space on the shelves of bookstores (themselves of sharply limited number), large numbers of new books of science fiction and fantasy are placed on them for only brief intervals before being swept off by new arrivals. Few books seem to manage to exist in public view for longer than a month before being replaced. Always excepting (as some writers add, with a faint snarl) the "megastars. "
"So what?" I can hear you say in your warm and loving way. "So you're a mega star and your books are perennial sellers and the economic futures of yourself and your eventual survivors are set. Is that bad?"
No, it isn't bad, exactly, but that's where the guilt comes in. I worry about crowding out newcomers with my old perennials, about smothering them with the weight of my name.
I've tried to justify the situation to myself. (Anything to make it possible for me to walk about science fiction conventions without having to skulk and hide in doorways when other writers pass. )
In the first place, we started in the early days of science fiction-not only the Big Three, but others of importance such as Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury, and even some who died young: Stanley Weinbaum, Henry Kuttner, and Cyril Kornbluth, for instance. In those early days, the magazines paid only one cent a word or less, and there were only magazines. There were no hardcover science fiction publishers, no paperbacks, no Hollywood to speak of.
For years and decades we stuck it out under starvation conditions, and it was our efforts that slowly increased the popularity of science fiction to the point where today's beginners can get more for one novel than any of us got in ten years of endless plugging. So, if some of us are doing unusually well now, it is possible to argue that we earned it.
Secondly, from the more personal standpoint, back in 1958 I decided I had done enough science fiction. I had been successful in writing nonfiction of various types and it seemed to me I could make a living if I concentrated on nonfiction (and, to tell you the truth, I preferred nonfiction). In that way I could leave science fiction to the talented new writers who were making their way into the field.
So from 1958 to 1981, a period of nearly a quarter of a century, I wrote virtually no science fiction. There was one novel and a handful of short stories, but that's all. And meanwhile, along came the "New Wave. " Writing styles changed drastically, and I felt increasingly that I was a back-number and should remain out of science fiction.
The trouble was that all this didn't help. The science fiction books that I published in the 1950s refused to go out of print and continued to sell steadily through the 1960s and 1970s. And because I wrote a series of nonfiction essays for Fantasy and Science Fiction. I remained in the consciousness of the science fiction public. I was therefore still one of the Big Three.
Then, in 1981, my publisher insisted (with a big INSIST) that I write another novel and I did and, to my horror, it hit the bestseller lists and I've had to write a new novel every year since then, in consequence.
That would have made me feel guiltier than ever, but I've done various things to pull the fangs of that guilt. For instance, I have, quite deliberately, decided that since my name has developed a kind of weight and significance, I would use it, as much as possible, for the benefit of the field rather than of my self.
With my dear and able friends, Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh (and occasionally others), I have helped edit many anthologies. More than a hundred of these have now been published with my name often in the title. What these serve to do is to rescue from the shadows numbers of stories that are well worth exposing to new generations of science fiction readers. Quite apart from the fact that the readers enjoy it, it means a little money to some veteran authors, as well as a shot in the arm to encourage continued production. The thought that the presence of my name might make such anthologies do better and be more efficacious in this respect than otherwise makes me feel fine.
Then, too, a number of novels by young authors have been published under the "Isaac Asimov Presents" label. In this way, the young authors get perhaps a somewhat better sale than they might otherwise have, and even (perhaps) a better break at the bookshelves.
I have even granted the right to make use of some of the themes that I have developed in my own books. There is a series of a dozen books, for instance, that have the generic title "Isaac Asimov's Robot City. " They are written by young writers who have my express permission to use my Three Laws of Robotics, and for each one I write an introduction on one phase or another of robotics. The books are doing well, actually, and it is clear that the presence of my name doesn't hurt.
Then another way of using my name came up. Marty Greenberg suggested that, rather than have writers use a "universe" I had already invented and made my own, I invent a brand-new one I had never used and donate it to some publishing house that would be willing to have writers produce stories built about the concepts of the "universe"-and, of course, find the writers who would want to try their hand at it.
I agreed enthusiastically. After all, I had just devised a new background for my 1989 novel, Nemesis, one which had not been used in any piece of fiction I had written before, so I did not foresee any great difficulty in inventing an "Isaac's Universe" for other writers to use. (The use of the word "Isaac" in the title was Marty's idea but I snatched at it eagerly. There are well over sixty books that I have writtenby no means all anthologies-with either " Asimov" or "Isaac Asimov" in the title, but none with "Isaac" alone, until this one. )
In making up a new "Universe" there were some things I couldn't abandon, of course. We would be working within our own Galaxy in which I postulated the existence of 25,000,000 star systems containing a habitable world, the whole being linked together by devices that made it possible to travel and communicate at faster-than-light speeds. The shorthand for this is "hyperspatial travel and communication. "
I have this in my Foundation universe, and the other novels I have been connecting to the Foundation, but from here on my Universes part company.
In my Foundation series and the novels related thereto, the Galaxy contains only one intelligent species-our own. All the habitable worlds have been colonized b
y human beings so that we, in effect, have an all-human Galaxy. I may have been the first to write important novels based on such a theme, and the reason I did it was to pare away the complexities that would arise from a multiplicity of intelligences. I wanted to be able to deal with humanity and its problems in a detailed all-human manner, making them even clearer by showing them through a Galaxy-wide magnifying glass. This I have ended up doing-albeit imperfectly, of course, since I am no Shakespeare or Tolstoy.
However, I was well aware that there was the alternative multiple-intelligence Universe. We see that now constantly on such television shows as Star Trek and in many of the older "space opera " stories.
There we always have the risk of a failure of imagination that leads to the portrayal of other intelligences as differing from ourselves superficially by the possession of green faces, or antennae, or corrugated foreheads, but allowing these changes to leave them, clearly, primates. You can't really blame Star Trek for this, since they have to have human beings playing the roles of other intelligences, but in science fiction stories in print, having all intelligences primate (or, if villainous, reptilian) seems insufficient.
E. E. Smith's Galactic Patrol and its sequels had a multi-intelligence Universe that had its intelligences encased in radically different physiologies and this I found satisfying when I read the stories as a young man. I was particularly pleased with the feeling Smith labored to give of a communal mental feeling among individuals who had nothing physically in common.
It was something like this, then, that I wanted for my Universe, but I wanted to make my Universe more specific in its description of the different species and more concerned with the various political, economic, and social problems of the Galaxy. It was to be less space-opera-ish and more quasi-historical, a melding to some extent of Galactic Patrol and Foundation.
I wanted a Universe with millions of planets bearing life, with the indigenous life on every planet unique to itself and with differences limited only by the imagination of the writer. However, there are only six intelligent species-widely different in nature:
1. Earthmen.
2. An aquatic race, vaguely analogous to Earthly porpoises.
3. A fragile, skeletal insectlike species adapted to a low oxygen atmosphere plus neon rather than nitrogen.
4. A sinuous, limbless species, possessing fringed flippers, however, that are snakish in a way.
5. A small, winged species adapted to a thick atmosphere.
6. A strong, slow-moving, blocklike species with no appendages, and adapted to a gravity higher than Earth's.
The intelligences each control more than their native planets. They can be pictured as going through the Galaxy, colonizing and settling planets suitable to themselves. In general, a world suitable for one is not particularly desirable for any of the others, and with plenty of each variety, there is no push for going to the enormous expense of modifying a planet to suit one's own kind. The intelligences can therefore live together in the Galaxy without treading on each other's toes. There is nothing to fight over unless there is an inability to overcome the unreasoning dislike of one species for another because, of course, each appears incredibly ugly to all the others, and each may have social customs and ways of thought that are distasteful to the others.
Yet the various intelligences need to be in contact, since trade among them is useful for all, and since advances in technology by one species may be useful to others as well (and each intelligence has its own specialities in technology, some of which are unpalatable to the others for one reason or another), and since disputes may arise occasionally and there must be some form of political/social machinery to settle them. There are even occasional dangers that might require Galactic cooperation. What's more, each intelligence may be split up into several mutually hostile subcultures.
So, you see, the Universe I invented (and which I described in considerable detail to the publishers and to the writers who were willing to chance working within it) supplies plenty of problems, some of which would certainly be beyond my imagination to handle well, and has broad enough limits to allow the writer a great deal of personal room for his own visions.
You can see how it works out in the sampling of stories in this volume, which (we very much hope) will be but the first of a series. Good reading-and if you like it, write and say so. It will lower my level of guilt, and I can always use that.