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Page 266
been a traitor to Judaism, which I try to make up for by making sure that everybody knows I'm a Jew, so while I'm deprived of the benefits of being part of a group, you know, I make sure that I don't lose any of the disadvantages, because no one should think that I am denying my Judaism in order to gain certain advantages. But in order to make up for that, I made up my mind that I'm not going to be disloyal in any other way, and there it is, I suppose. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the sort of thing that people do work up for reasons, and, after all, I'm imaginative enough to think up such reasons, too. So if you want one, there's one handed to you free of charge, but I don't guarantee it's correct.
Gunn: If I were seeking an explanation I don't want to embarrass you by giving you descriptions of yourself as I've been trying to do, there seems to me to be a kind of common element among science fiction readers and science fiction writers that is a kind of disturbed puberty, or a disturbed adolescence, one which finds itself uneasy socially and there is a kind of displaced sexual activity which goes into reading and a desire to write and the whole thing, which I think one finds among many science fiction writers, myself among them, a kind of emphasis more on reason and intellectual abilities, perhaps to make up for the fact that most science fiction writers have problems fitting in. I think Damon Knight said that all science-fiction writers and fans start out as toads. But that is a preface. I wonder whether you could accept that you see yourself as a person who is trying to live a life of reason in an emotional world. A world where reason is not that much valued and certain conflicts arise out of this.
A.: Well, first I'll have to admit, you can see for yourself in my autobiography, that I had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the world when I was young, and to a large extent the world was an enemy world, and Robert Silverberg, who read my autobiography, has written me saying he can't wait for the second volume and he wants the galleys. Because he says there is so much in my life that parallels his own, that it gives him a feeling of déjà vu to read it. And I suspect that what you have said and what Knight has said is not only true of science-fiction writers, and to a lesser extent of science-fiction readers, but obviously true. It is science fiction and its very nature is intended to appeal a) to people who value reason and b) to people who form a small minority in a world which doesn't value reason. And science fiction is that kind of an escape. Now, I am trying to lead a world of reason in an emotional world. For instance, I have just recently Reader's Digest asked me to see a person who claims he has a way of breaking up water into hydrogen

 
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