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Page 254
(Asimov laughing) Because clearly you have thought about it and you've attended the Bread Loaf Conference and they must have talked about things which I'm sure did not go over your head. And you've mentioned the incident in which you noticed how Clifford Simak left gaps in his stories to indicate a change of place or action. First you thought that was offensive and then you realized that this was a good thing to do and so you learned how to do it yourself. You have picked up things and I just wonder whether you think a little bit more about this than your public pose would suggest.
A.: Well, now, that's really hard to say. I swear to you that I don't deliberately set up a pose it's what I tend to think. There was a book recently called Isaac Asimov a collection of essays about me edited by Martin Greenberg and Joseph Olander, and I wrote an appendix called "Asimov on Asimov" in which I first denied that it was at all possible that I could possibly have inserted all that meaning in my stories, and then I presented the opposite view that maybe I could, at that, without even knowing it. So that it's possible that consciously I don't think much about the mechanics of writing. I don't sit down and brood about it or try to think it out or discuss it with people, but that without very much in the way of conscious thinking I manage to learn from what I read and from what I hear. For instance, I remember distinctly reading once that you have written that it is necessary to engage several of the senses. And whenever I can remember, I try to do so, you see? But it's very difficult for me to remember in the fury of composition.
Gunn: The first time I learned that I put the five senses up in front of my typewriter so that I would be reminded (laughter). Carolyn Gordon taught me that a number of years ago. In Donald Wollheim's book The Universe Makers, he speculates that psychohistory is the science that Marxism pretended to be and I wondered whether you ever consciously thought about that in that relationship.
A.: Well . . . you know that's so difficult to answer because psychohistory originated in a discussion between myself and Campbell, as so many of the things in my early science fiction stories did. And I think Campbell must have been reading about symbolic logic at the time. There is some reference to symbolic logic in the first story and that was more or less forced on me by John Campbell; it didn't come naturally to me, because I knew nothing about symbolic logic. And he felt in our discussion that symbolic logic, further developed, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind as to leave human actions predictable. The reason human beings are so unpredictable was we didn't really

 
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