Asimov oddness
Mar. 27th, 2007 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenI'm probably going to lose my geek accreditation for this, but I never managed to get into Asimov. Every so often I try reading another of his books to see what the big deal is, and every time I give up partway through. I can see why he appeals to people, but certain parts of his style really irritate me.
To explain why... Suppose I came up with a simple and elegant mathematical result. Rather than just publishing it in a mathematical journal, I wrote it out on canvas, with a brush, and then framed the canvas and hung it on the wall.
To my mind, that's "a mathematical result presented in painting format". But it's not, except by purely technical definition, a 'painting'.* If somebody called me a 'painter' on the strength of that work, I think the people who actually put some creativity and technique into the step where paint meets canvas would quite rightly feel a little put out.
(Or, as Truman Capote put it, "That's not writing, that's typing.")
And that's pretty much how I see Asimov. Everything I've read of his has turned out to be a logic problem presented in story format, rather than an actual story; the story exists not for its own sake, but merely as a sort of front-end to lead readers into the logic problem. Which would not be a bad thing if he were marketed as a logician - it works well enough for folk like Martin Gardner - but I get irritated to see this stuff described as "master storytelling".
And sometimes, the logic puzzles themselves really aren't that great.
From The Casebook of the Black Widowers, short story 'The Sports Page'. Stefan, a Russian who was actually a double agent working for the USA, had just returned from Cuba when he was knifed in his hotel room. He used a Scrabble set to leave a cryptic message (more on that in a moment) and then died.
The ex-intelligence-agent telling this tale, many years later, is utterly convinced that Stefan was trying to warn them against the Bay of Pigs invasion. He tells his audience that after being stabbed, Stefan managed to pull himself upright, tried to write with a hotel pen but found it was dry, and instead of going to the other end of the room to get his own pen he pulled out his Scrabble set, took out five letters ('epock'), put them in the wooden rack, and died.
His audience, very reasonably, ask a whole bunch of questions - for instance, what if Stefan meant to use more letters and died before he could get them out? And there's always an answer - - no, he'd carefully put the lid back on the box. If you're just setting up a logic puzzle, this is great - it's good for the readers to know what possibilities are and aren't allowed. But as a story, it sucks; the agent has far more certainty about what Stefan was doing than he should've had. It's strongly suggested that he was trying to indicate a number - perhaps using the letters to indicate something in the sports page of the newspaper sitting next to the Scrabble set.
In the end, the answer turns out to be that if you think of those letters as Cyrillic, and then translate to the English equivalents, 'c' becomes 's', 'p' becomes 'r', and 'k' becomes hard 'c', so you get 'erosc', which rearranges to spell 'score'... which means 'twenty', and that turns out to be the prearranged code for 'government in strong control, don't invade'.
Okay, I can accept that a dying man might not be thinking clearly and could conceivably come up with that. What bugs me is that none of the half-dozen bright people hearing this story even considered a much more obvious line of inquiry. The omission makes me wonder if Asimov had ever actually played Scrabble, because anybody who does knows that you end up converting letters to numbers EVERY TIME YOU PLAY A WORD. Maybe '1,3,1,3,5' doesn't yield any meaning, but wouldn't it be a sensible place to start?
*Which is not to say that it isn't some sort of art. IMHO, certain mathematical results are a type of art in themselves, and if I presented it in painting format with the aim of making people think about "what is art?", that might be an artistic act in itself.
To explain why... Suppose I came up with a simple and elegant mathematical result. Rather than just publishing it in a mathematical journal, I wrote it out on canvas, with a brush, and then framed the canvas and hung it on the wall.
To my mind, that's "a mathematical result presented in painting format". But it's not, except by purely technical definition, a 'painting'.* If somebody called me a 'painter' on the strength of that work, I think the people who actually put some creativity and technique into the step where paint meets canvas would quite rightly feel a little put out.
(Or, as Truman Capote put it, "That's not writing, that's typing.")
And that's pretty much how I see Asimov. Everything I've read of his has turned out to be a logic problem presented in story format, rather than an actual story; the story exists not for its own sake, but merely as a sort of front-end to lead readers into the logic problem. Which would not be a bad thing if he were marketed as a logician - it works well enough for folk like Martin Gardner - but I get irritated to see this stuff described as "master storytelling".
And sometimes, the logic puzzles themselves really aren't that great.
From The Casebook of the Black Widowers, short story 'The Sports Page'. Stefan, a Russian who was actually a double agent working for the USA, had just returned from Cuba when he was knifed in his hotel room. He used a Scrabble set to leave a cryptic message (more on that in a moment) and then died.
The ex-intelligence-agent telling this tale, many years later, is utterly convinced that Stefan was trying to warn them against the Bay of Pigs invasion. He tells his audience that after being stabbed, Stefan managed to pull himself upright, tried to write with a hotel pen but found it was dry, and instead of going to the other end of the room to get his own pen he pulled out his Scrabble set, took out five letters ('epock'), put them in the wooden rack, and died.
His audience, very reasonably, ask a whole bunch of questions - for instance, what if Stefan meant to use more letters and died before he could get them out? And there's always an answer - - no, he'd carefully put the lid back on the box. If you're just setting up a logic puzzle, this is great - it's good for the readers to know what possibilities are and aren't allowed. But as a story, it sucks; the agent has far more certainty about what Stefan was doing than he should've had. It's strongly suggested that he was trying to indicate a number - perhaps using the letters to indicate something in the sports page of the newspaper sitting next to the Scrabble set.
In the end, the answer turns out to be that if you think of those letters as Cyrillic, and then translate to the English equivalents, 'c' becomes 's', 'p' becomes 'r', and 'k' becomes hard 'c', so you get 'erosc', which rearranges to spell 'score'... which means 'twenty', and that turns out to be the prearranged code for 'government in strong control, don't invade'.
Okay, I can accept that a dying man might not be thinking clearly and could conceivably come up with that. What bugs me is that none of the half-dozen bright people hearing this story even considered a much more obvious line of inquiry. The omission makes me wonder if Asimov had ever actually played Scrabble, because anybody who does knows that you end up converting letters to numbers EVERY TIME YOU PLAY A WORD. Maybe '1,3,1,3,5' doesn't yield any meaning, but wouldn't it be a sensible place to start?
*Which is not to say that it isn't some sort of art. IMHO, certain mathematical results are a type of art in themselves, and if I presented it in painting format with the aim of making people think about "what is art?", that might be an artistic act in itself.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 02:38 am (UTC)It's very restful reading, too, because his characterisation is light, and you only have to engage on an intellectual level, which is sometimes just what I want. Very calming, in the right mood.
But I think you are spot on about the mathematical/logic problem aspect of his writing.
love
Catherine - who also adores Asimov's essays
no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 04:38 am (UTC)And it's always the waiter who has the answer (IIRC). That bugged me. If it were someone's specialisation, shouldn't they, occasionally, have the right answer?
no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 05:16 pm (UTC)But Henry seeing the solution after the other Widowers have found all sorts of complicated but unsuccessful explanations is part of the gimmick; it's kind of like complaining that Asimov's robots insist on following the First Law.
Anyway, ``The Sports Page'' is just a bad story. Asimov had this thing where he liked coming up with excessively complicated ways to send tiny bits of information, probably because he committed himself to writing one of them every month on top of everything else and if you shy away from murder plots, secret-passing-of-information plots are almost as reliable. (The Union Club mysteries, which with few exceptions I like much less, are worse in the too-complicated-message-passing routine.) Better stories, while sticking to the mystery sort, include ``Early Sunday Morning'', ``Sunset on the Water'', and I've got a fondness for ``Triple Devil'' that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lederhosen might appreciate as it's basically all character and the mystery is put in and solved quickly just because the story needs some deductive element to fit in its series.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-28 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 03:44 am (UTC)My only beef with the man is that he hit on my wife at a con. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 05:11 am (UTC)I don't think it all comes down to the era, though. Looking at early Clarke, for instance, while a lot of his stories are about problems that need to be solved by science, he usually goes the extra mile to make them work as stories too.
For instance, 'Breaking Strain' presents the scenario of two men thirty days from home who only have enough air to last the pair of them for twenty days. An Asimov story would use everything else to set up that logic problem, and make solving it the centerpiece of the story; Clarke uses the logic problem to set up a story about how two people deal with the knowledge that one of them has to die for the other to live.
Or take Heinlein - while his characterisation leaves an awful lot to be desired, he does at least give the impression that he's interested in story and character for their own sake and not just as a way to set up a puzzle. (Occasionally he uses them to set up a political lecture instead, which is usually the point at which I tune out.)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 10:09 am (UTC)To me it is nothing like anything else of his that I've read. No Hero, Problem, Solution as such. I guess you could say there is a surprise twist in the ending, but it was only a surprise to me as a 13-year-old ... I'd see it coming a mile away these days. And it's not what the story rests on.
It's Asimov's attempt to write a personal story from the perspective of a character of an alien race. Humans play a small part in the story, but they are minor characters rather than centre stage.
Current writers will push an alien perspective further, of course, but The Gods Themselves is an early attempt at something really really different.
(Sometimes I wonder whether Asimov might've ripped off the idea from some other, lesser-known author ... but I suppose everyone's allowed to have a truly original idea in their lifetime, even Isaac Asimov.)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 01:57 pm (UTC)That said, I do admire Asimov's novel The End of Eternity, one of the most interesting time travel stories I've ever read. And a few of his short stories work as human stories as well as puzzles: 'The Ugly Little Boy', 'The Dead Past', and 'The Feeling of Power' come to mind.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-28 02:16 am (UTC)And if that doesn't lose me my geek cred, nothing will.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-28 05:54 am (UTC)He dictated his books, mostly, and I guess I 'head' them as verbal story-telling, and didn't and don't expect Literature.