Or let’s turn to Shakespeare and the tragedy of Macbeth.
Macbeth has just killed Duncan and his hands are bloody and he is himself horror-struck at the deed. Lady Macbeth is concerned over her husband’s having been unmanned and gives him some practical advice. “Go,” she says, “get some water and wash this filthy witness from your hand.”
And Macbeth, his whole mind in disarray, says, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”
It’s a powerful figure, as you see a bloody hand dipped into the ocean and all the vast sea turning red in response, but, literally, it makes no sense. How can a few drops of blood turn the ocean red? All the blood in all the human beings on Earth if poured into the ocean would not change its overall color perceptibly. Macbeth might seem to be indulging in “hyperbole” (an extravagant exaggeration which sometimes makes its point, but usually reduces it to ridicule).
This, however, is not hyperbole, but metaphor. Consider! Macbeth has killed a man who had loved him and loaded him with honors, so he commits the terrible sin of ingratitude. Furthermore, the man he murdered was a guest in his house, so that Macbeth has violated the hallowed and civilized rules of hospitality. Finally, the man he murdered was his king and in Shakespeare’s time, a.king was looked upon as the visible representative of God on Earth. This triple crime has loaded Macbeth’s soul with infinite guilt.
The blood cannot redden the ocean, but the blood is not blood, it is used here as a metaphor for guilt. The picture of the ocean turning red gives you a violently dramatic notion of the infinite blackness that now burdens Macbeth’s soul, something you couldn’t get if he had merely said, “Oh, my guilt is infinite.”
A literalist who sets about calculating the effect on the ocean of a bloody hand is getting no value out of what he reads.
One more example. Consider Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “ In the fourteenth verse of the third part, there come the lines: “Till clomb above the eastern bar the horned Moon, with one bright star within the nether tip.”
The “horned Moon” is the crescent moon, of course, and there ca n’t be a bright star within the nether tip. The crescent is the lighted portion of the moon, but the rest of it, though out of the sunlight and dark, is still there. For a bright star to be within the nether tip is to have it shining through hundreds of miles of lunar substance. It is an impossibility, and I don’t know how many readers have snickered at Coleridge’s naivete in this.
But is it naïveté? The poem begins very simply and naturally till the Ancient Mariner kills the albatross, a lovable and unoffending bird. This itself is a metaphor. After all, human beings have killed lovable and unoffending birds since time immemorial. In this case, though, the killing represents all the callous and indifferent cruelty of the human species, and, as a result, the ship with its crew (who approved the Mariner’s deed) enters a strange world in which natural law is suspended and chaos is come again as God removes himself. The atmosphere of the poem becomes weird and unearthly and normality begins to return only after the Mariner involuntarily blesses all the living things in the ocean in a gush of love.
I have a feeling that Coleridge knew that a star could not shine within the nether tip of the crescent but merely used it as one more example of the chaos of a world in which human cruelty denies love, order, and God’s presence. It is only fitting that a star shine where no star could possibly shine.
To miss that point is to miss the point of the poem and to understand only its jigging meter and its clever rhyming-which is plenty, but far from enough. A literalist deprives himself of the best part of art.
Suppose we apply this way of looking at things to visual art. If you ask an artist to illustrate a piece of writing precisely, you make of him a slave to the literal word. You suppress his creativity and impugn the independence of his mind and ability. The better the artist, the less likely he is (barring an absolute need for money) to accept such a job.
An artist worth his salt does not illustrate the literal words, but the mood of a story. He tries, by virtue of his art and ability, to deepen and reinforce the meaning of a story and the intent of the writer.
Thus, in the mid-December 1988 issue, the cover of Asimov’s illustrates my story “Christmas Without Rodney.” It does not illustrate any incident in the story. Instead it shows in the foreground a boy with a sullen and self-absorbed expression. What’s more, the predominant color is red, which to my way of thinking symbolizes anger (a metaphor for the flushed face of a person in rage). This demonstrates the anger of a spoiled brat who does not instantly have his own way, and the anger he inspires in the narrator of the story. Behind the boy is an elaborate robot, with one metal hand to his cheek as though uncertain as to his course of action, something that fulfills one of the underlying themes of the story. The artist, Gary Freeman, does not illustrate the story, but adds to it and gives it a visual dimension. That is what he is supposed to do and what he is paid to do.
This brings us to the cover illustration of Agent of Byzantium. It is clearly the intent of the artist to illustrate the n ature of the story, not the story itself. Constantinople is in the background, identified by the gilded dome of Hagia Sophia. In the foreground is a soldier who has Byzantine characteristics. So far we have an historical novel. But he also possesses objects of high technology associated with modern western culture. Clearly it is an historical novel set in an alternate reality. And that is what the book deals with. The cover is precise, it tells us what we need to know, it satisfies the artist’s own cravings, and if the details of the technology are not precisely met in any incident in the book, that matters not a whit.
Ideas
Someone once asked Isaac Newton how he managed to reach solutions to problems that others found impenetrable. He answered, “By thinking and thinking and thinking about it.”
I don’t know what other answer people can possibly expect. There is the romantic notion that there is such a thing as “inspiration,” that a heavenly Muse comes down and plunks her harp over your head and, presto, the job is done. Like all romantic notions, however, this is just a romantic notion.
Some people may be better at solving problems and getting ideas than others are; they may have a livelier imagination, a more efficient way of grasping at distant consequences; but it all comes down to thinking in the end. What counts is how well you can think, and even more, how long and persistently you can think without breaking down. There are brilliant people, I imagine, who produce little, if anything, because their attention span to their own thoughts is so short; and there are less brilliant people who can plug away at their thoughts until they wrench something out of them.
All this comes up in my mind now because a friend of mine, a science fiction writer whose work I admire enormously, in the course of a conversation asked, in a very embarrassed manner, “How do you get your ideas?”
I could see what the problem was. He had been having a little trouble coming up with something and he thought that perhaps he had lost the knack of getting ideas, or had never really had it, and he turned to me. After all, I write so much that I must have no trouble getting ideas and I might even have some special system that others could use, too.
But I answered, very earnestly, “How do I get my ideas? By thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to jump out the window.”
“You, too?” he said, quite obviously relieved.
“Of course,” I said. “If you’re having trouble, all it means is that you’re one of us. After all, if getting ideas were easy, everyone in the world would be writing.”
After that, I put some serious thought into the matter of getting ideas. Was there any way I could spot my own system? Was there, in fact, any system at all, or did one simply think at random?
I went back over what happened in my mind before I wrote my most recent novel, Nemesis, which Doubleday published in October 1989, and I thought it might be helpful to aspiring writers, or even just to readers, if I described the preliminary thinking that went into the novel.
It started when my Doubleday editor, Jennifer Brehl, said to me, “I’d like your next novel not to be part of a series, Isaac. I don’t want it to be a Foundation novel or a Robot novel or an Empire novel. Write one that’s completely independent.”
So I started thinking, and this is the way it went, in brief. (I’ll cut out all the false starts and dead ends and mooning about and try to trace a sensible pathway through it all.)
The Foundation novels, Robot novels, and Empire novels are all interconnected and all deal with a background in which interstellar travel at super luminal speeds is well established. Of my previous independent novels, The End of Eternity deals with time-travel; The Gods Themselves with communication between universes; and Fantastic Voyage II with miniaturization. In none of these is there interstellar travel.
Very well, then, let me have a new novel which exploits an entirely new background. Let it deal with the establishment of interstellar travel, with the first interstellar voyages. Immediately I imagined a settled solar system, an Earth in decay, large numbers of space settlements in lunar orbit and in the asteroids. I imagined the space settlements as hostile to Earth and vice versa.
That gave me a reason for the drive to develop interstellar travel. Naturally, technological advances may be made for their own sake (as mountains are climbed “because they’re there”) but it helps to have a less exalted reason. A settlement might want to get away from the solar system to create a completely new society, profiting by past experience to avoid some of humanity’s earlier mistakes.