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reactions to the possibility of space settlement, which Giskard now believes is possible. All of this Baley accomplishes in a remarkable three days. |
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Other reasons for the novel's length may be similar to those that lengthened the novels of Henry James: as he got older, his thoughts became more convoluted, and what once seemed simple became more complex; in addition, both writers adopted new writing methods (James began to dictate his novels to a stenographer; Asimov had gone to a computer's word-processing, although he always wrote his first drafts on his typewriter) that minimized the effort of getting words into fictional order. Still other, and perhaps more significant, factors suggest themselves. Asimov had been asked by Doubleday to write a longer novel in Foundation's Edge, and it had come in at 140,000 words. It was a more discursive book than The Robots of Dawn, and it became a bestseller. Asimov wrote in his memoir that he assumed Doubleday wanted a robot novel of equal length, but he may have been influenced by the success of Foundation's Edge. The Robots of Dawn clearly had an excellent chance of equaling Foundation's Edge's success and almost did. In addition, one of the characteristics of bestselling science-fiction novels is length: there have been only a handful of them, and all have had a substantial heft to them. The possible consequence: Foundation's Edge was 366 pages, The Robots of Dawn was 419. |
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Perhaps the most important reason of all was that Asimov did not have an editor who could tell him, as John Campbell and Horace Gold and Walter Bradbury would have had no reluctance to tell him: "You're getting too wordy, Isaac [Campbell, at least, would have called him 'Asimov']. Tighten it up!" And, Asimov, always receptive to good editing (and convinced, as he says in his autobiography, that an editor has his role in the process and his prerogatives, just as the writer has his) would have tightened it up. And, as always when standards are raised for the good writer and the easy way is eliminated, the novel would have been better. It is not that Asimov did not want to write the best novel it was possible for him to write for the sake of his pride in his work, of which he had much, he wanted to write well. But a writer, particularly a writer like Asimov who said (though we must not take this as total truth) that he did not know anything about writing, needs a good editor. Whoever were Asimov's editors at Doubleday, even Bradbury if he were still there, would have had difficulty editing the Asimov of 1983. The Robots of Dawn was going to be a bestseller no matter how Asimov wrote it, as long as it was not a complete disgrace (and even then, some cynics would say). Asimov invested considerable |
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