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Page 264
kind of ambiguity, I mean that kind of coyness about naming names. I wasn't sure exactly what. . . .
A.: Well, I'll re-read the story and then I'll write you on that. [He never did, and the ambiguity remains. J.G.]
Gunn: In his book, Joseph Patrouch wrote that you have not written about what you are most concerned about that is pollution, overpopulation and so forth in your fiction but it seems to me that you show people living with these problems and solving them in your fiction. In The Caves of Steel there is the problem of overpopulation, but it's something the people are living with people are adaptable. But it seems to me that in talks and in your science articles you exhibit a kind of an alarm about our public position, about our situation what I call your public despair as contrasted to your fictional optimism.
A.: Yes, that's because in my public statements I have to deal with the world as it is which is a world in which irrationality is predominant; whereas in my fiction I create a world, and in my world, my created worlds, things are rational. Even the villains, the supposed villains are villanous for rational reasons.
Gunn: The way I put it is this: that in your science writing you try to persuade by showing the terrible consequences of what is likely to happen, and in your fiction you try to persuade by showing how people can solve their problems.
A.: OK.
Gunn: Finally, I think we're getting close to the end. At least I sense in your autobiographical writings of all kinds a great deal of what I might call a high level of loyalty to what you were; to the boy you were and to what science fiction was when you discovered it. That is unlike what has happened to some other writers, who have gone on and put away what they once were. Like Harlan Ellison, for instance, who may say, well, that's all past, it's not me any longer, I now am off doing my own thing. A perfectly reasonable attitude, but the opposite is what you display. I think a lot of people feel that this kind of loyalty makes you different and maybe admirable. But I wonder whether you ever felt that science fiction is not as important as it was.
A.: It's not as important to me, personally. I write comparatively little science fiction. But, Jim, this is a matter of deliberateness on my part. In many respects I frequently say I follow the line of least resistance. I don't deliberately try to write well, I just write as it comes, and if it happens to be good, thank goodness, that sort of stuff. But as far as this business of not abandoning my origins, that's deliberate. I made up my mind when I was quite young and I said it in print in places that no

 
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