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Page 257
Gunn: To permit the continuation of the series. But you don't say what your ending was.
A.: I don't remember I don't remember.
Gunn: Oh, I see. . . . (Laughter) You don't remember how you were going to end it. Maybe the Mule wins out maybe he was going to find the Second Foundation?
A.: No, no I was going to reveal what the Second Foundation was and have the Second Foundation triumphant as it was, but reveal where it was and no more. But I don't remember where I had said it was, that's the point, and Campbell made me take it out, because he wasn't going to let me finish, and then I wrote one more and after that nothing on earth could have made me continue; it just got too heavy.
Gunn: Yet, in many ways the last book, Second Foundation, may be liked better by a lot of people because of the character of the girl.
A.: Yes, yes, Arkady, she was good. It was the only time I ever tried extended treatment of a teenage girl and I enjoyed that very much. It was not that I couldn't write more about the Foundation, it was that the situation under which I wrote it, individual stories in magazines in which each one had to be self-contained where you have to assume that it was quite possible that somebody was going to start reading it that hadn't read any of the other Foundation stories you had to explain everything that went before it just got so hard. Now if I had written it in novel form, so that instead of having eight stories of different length I had three novels as a trilogy, I could undoubtedly have had a fourth one.
Gunn: It wouldn't have been as difficult.
A.: Yes. But in those days, there were no novels, no books. Everything appeared in magazines.
Gunn: This is one thing I want to deal with in my book, the influence of the medium of communication on the things that were not written they obviously influenced what was written.
A.: Well, yes. Another thing was it was ephemeral. In other words, you expected a story to appear in a magazine and be there for a month, and then be gone forever, except for those who collected the magazines, and well, you know, that meant you were paid once for it. In fact, there was no concept of subsidiary sales. Never heard of such a thing. You sold a story, you got some money for it, a penny a word or whatever, and that was it, forever. So that the emphasis was writing it fast, on trying not to have to revise, because you wanted to write more and make more money, if you were trying to make a living. That was what enforced pulp writing, which is essentially first-draft writing and sure-fire writing. It gave the stories a lot of action. When you write nowadays,

 
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