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The problem remains: what more can a critic say about Asimov's life and work that Asimov himself didn't say already in nearly a million well-chosen words? Asimov's autobiographical writings are both an asset and an intimidation, revealing valuable information about the circumstances of creation and publication but also rendering redundant the critic's job of digging out little-known facts about life and work. Asimov's life is an open book in fact, four hundred and seventy open books. |
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Well, the critic can tell the Asimov story more selectively and send the still curious on to Asimov's own fuller accounts, bring the details of the life into focus in illuminating the work, and explain the work in terms of a thesis that may have been too close to Asimov for him to perceive. The critic also has an opportunity to comment on the state of criticism as well as the work and the author at hand. One reason for first undertaking this study, more than a dozen years ago, was the conviction that much criticism of science fiction has been misguided and particularly that critics of Asimov's work have headed up false trails, trying to bring to the analysis of Asimov's fiction traditional methods and traditional criteria that are unproductive when applied to Asimov and to much other science fiction. What I found myself doing as I began writing, then, was blending biographical, sociological, publishing, and critical considerations into what I later perceived (perhaps without sufficient perspective) to be something a bit unusual in criticism, perhaps unnatural in normal circumstances, that I eventually thought of calling "criticism in context." Within the following chapters, for instance, the reader will find a number of plot summaries. These are desirable for several reasons: first, because the reader may be familiar with many Asimov works but certainly not all; second, because the reader may remember the general outlines of stories and novels but not the revealing details; and third (and most important), because what happens is the most important aspect of Asimov's fiction (and most other science fiction) and what happens is revealed in plot. |
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Other matters that I found important as I got into my consideration of Asimov's work were the conditions under which the fiction was written and the way in which it was published. Asimov himself kept referring to these matters in his autobiographical writings; he thought they were important to what he wrote and didn't write, and so do I. In one footnote in his autobiography, he wrote: |
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In this book I am going to pay considerable attention to the details of the money I received for stories and other things. Perhaps I should be noble |
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