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Page 164
it reached twenty thousand. That was a short novel. Thinking that Doubleday, which was to publish New Dimensions, might expand the volume to include the extra length of the story, Asimov took it to Larry Ashmead, Doubleday's current science-fiction editor. Ashmead telephoned to say that anthologization was out; he wanted the story expanded into a novel.
Asimov did not want to expand it. On the spot, however, he offered to write two more sections of equal length: "The story involves an energy source that depends on communication between ourselves and another universe, and it ends downbeat. What I can do is retell the story from the standpoint of the other universe and still leave it down-beat. Then I can take it up a third time in still a third setting, and this time make it upbeat."
"Are you sure you can do this?" Ashmead asked.
"Absolutely positive," Asimov responded, although he had made up the idea on the spur of the moment. But as he added in his autobiography, "If I couldn't, I wasn't Isaac Asimov." On March 8, 1971, he dropped in at Doubleday and signed a contract to write the novel. He also set to work on a different story for Silverberg's anthology, a short story titled "Take a Match'' that appeared in New Dimensions II (1972).
Asimov might have been reluctant at first to tackle a new science-fiction novel not only because of his feeling that he belonged to another, perhaps outmoded, generation of science-fiction writers he had divided science fiction into periods he called "adventure-dominant, science-dominant, sociology-dominant, and style-dominant," and it was not difficult to perceive that he thought style-dominance was a perversion of Campbell's vision but because he had not written an adult science-fiction novel for more than fifteen years (or any kind of science-fiction novel, including juveniles, for thirteen).
In addition, he had more writing projects than he could handle, and he was involved in a lengthy and disturbing divorce negotiation with his wife. He also found writing science fiction more difficult than anything else.
In the introduction to Nebula Award Stories Eight, which he edited for the Science Fiction Writers of America the year after the publication of The Gods Themselves, he compared science fiction to other kinds of writing and wrote, "A good science-fiction writer can, very probably, write anything else he wishes (and for more money), if he decides to take the trouble to do so. . . . It is uphill to science fiction; downhill to everything else."
He went on to offer himself as the world authority on this subject:

 
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