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An Interview with Isaac Asimov |
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In April of 1979, upon the occasion of the Nebula Award weekend, I visited New York to interview Isaac Asimov in preparation for the writing of Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1982. He took an hour away from his guest duties at a New York City science-fiction convention, held at a mid-town college or university, as I recall, and we had the following conversation in a large, otherwise deserted, downstairs lobby. |
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Gunn: When you write about your own writing you seem to be asking: how did it come to be so successful? |
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A.: Yes, you're perfectly right. To this day I don't know the steps by which it happened. The success of writers such as Bob Heinlein and van Vogt seemed easy to understand because from their first stories they were recognized as extremely good science-fiction writers, whereas I don't think in the case of my own first few stories there was any thought on the part of anybody, including myself, that I was a particularly good writer. I was a new writer and no one paid much attention to me. Even when "Nightfall" appeared, it didn't seem to me that it made much of a difference because it appeared in the same issue with stories by Heinlein that completely drowned it out. |
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Gunn: Throughout The Early Asimov and the other collections in which you added autobiographical notes as well as in the first volume of your autobiography, what makes all this concentration on Asimov and his writing tolerable is a note of delighted surprise that it ever came out that way. |
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A.: Yes, I'm still delighted and I'm still surprised. |
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Gunn: The question keeps coming up: how did it happen? And that's one thing I'm going to be writing about in my book about your science-fiction writing. I'm interested in treating your work as being not only the unique product of your own personality, but also a kind of expression of |
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