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what science fiction was at the time, in the sense that what you wrote encapsulates what science fiction was concerned with. |
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A.: In a way, I suppose, I was the perfect foil for John Campbell. On the one hand I was close to him. I lived right in town and I could see him every week. And, for another, I could endure him. That is, I imagine that a great many other writers found him too rich for their blood at least to sit there and listen to him hour after hour. But I was fortunate in the sense that he was in some ways a lot like my father. (Laughter) And I had grown up listening to my father pontificate in much the same way that John did, and so I was quite at home. I suppose if you took all the time that I sat there listening to John and put it together, it was easily a week's worth of just listening to him talk. Day and night. 168 hours. And I remembered everything he said and how he thought and I did my best because I desperately wanted to sell stories to him to incorporate his method of thinking into my stories, which, of course, also had my method of thinking, with the result that somehow I caught the Campbell flavor. |
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Gunn: That's close to what I wrote in the third volume of The Road to Science Fiction. Each of the stories is preceded by biographical notes, and I commented about you, and I hope you don't feel it denigrating, that you were the quintessential Campbell writer. You were Campbell's kind of writer; whereas Heinlein, I felt, was always his own kind of writer who just happened for awhile to write things that coincided with what Campbell wanted. |
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A.: I think you're right. I think you're right. Certainly towards the end, Campbell would say things to me that led me to think that, too. |
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Gunn: Well, one thing I wrote was that the over-riding element of your fiction (there are a few places where it doesn't quite fit) is the search for answers the application of reason, rationality, to complex, puzzling situations. There is very little of the triumph of emotion over rationality. Or if it does, it is a kind of tragic circumstance. It is a happy circumstance when reason triumphs over emotion, or when people find a solution to whatever it is that bothers them. |
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A.: You're right, you leave me nothing to say, because I agree with you completely there. |
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Gunn: As a matter of fact in the third volume of Road to Science Fiction I reprinted the story "Reason." Like you I delight in puns and I called the biographical headnote "The Clear, Cool Voice of Asimov." |
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I have read virtually all the science fiction you have ever published. I wonder whether the reason the stories in The Early Asimov were not included in your other anthologies was that they were in some way |
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