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 worldview. 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.