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Page 252
Gunn: Maybe it's because you have an insight into publishing some publishers don't have, that people have always been willing to read old-fashioned works. There may be a basic kind of appeal there that the publishers are overlooking.
A.: Well, that could be. In any case, fortunately, my publishers are very pleasant to me and usually let me have my way, in sort of a very fatherly way. You know that's another place where I have been extremely fortunate. Campbell took what I consider to have been a fatherly interest in me. He had a number of writers who came to visit him periodically or corresponded with him and discussed with them in those late 30s and early 40s that first five years in which he was editor, which were the most creative of all. And I think that of all the writers I was the youngest, in years, and still young in outlook. I was naive, unsophisticated, and therefore somehow he felt that I was most malleable, and the most easily molded, and he enjoyed molding me, so to speak. And he was in loco parentis he was a father in almost everything but the literal sense of the word, and literally he was a father. And this somehow has been the same attitude that, to a somewhat lesser extent, all my editors, virtually all, have since taken to me, even when, as in recent years, they've turned out to be, say, twenty years younger than I was. Right now my Doubleday editor is a young woman named Kathleen Jordan, who is approximately a quarter-century younger than I am. And yet her attitude toward me is distinctly motherly. I have the feeling in fact it is not something I really had to dig for, because it's quite open and obvious on the surface that she's out there making sure that I don't fall over my own big feet, you know, and she won't let me do things that I shouldn't, because she says no, I'm not going to let you, Isaac, and I know she worries about me. So, I suppose I could say that by the most peculiar coincidence something like a dozen editors with whom I've been close in books and magazines have all just happened to be the fatherly the parental type. But I don't think that that is conceivable. I think that rather what it is that for some darn reason I inspire this in other people, I think largely because I am quite obviously naive and unsophisticated. (Laughter). I don't really think that I am, but that's how I must impress others.
Gunn: To get back for a moment to this question about the mysteries, it seems to me as I look over the stories that there are a couple of basic ways in which one can deal with characters in a story. They can either have a problem to solve or else they themselves can change and in your stories, few of your characters change you talked about that in your 1953 essay "Social Science Fiction," that people are pretty much the

 
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