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to use names, not codes, and easily pronounceable names, too; but names that
don t resemble any real ones, or any recognizable ethnic group.
For one thing that gives the impression of alienism without annoying the
reader. For another, it minimizes the chance of offending someone by using his
or her name.
This is a real danger. The most amusing example was one that was encountered
by L. Sprague de Camp when he wrote The Merman back in 1938. The hero was
one Vernon Brock (not a common name) and he was an ichthyologist (not a common
profession). After the story appeared in the December 1938, Astounding, a
thunderstruck Sprague heard from a real Vernon Brock who was really an
ichthyologist. Fortunately, the real Brock was merely amused and didn t mind
at all, but if he had been a nasty person, he might have sued. Sprague would
certainly have won out, but he would have been stuck with legal fees, lost
time, and much annoyance.
Sometimes I get away with slight misspellings: Baley instead of Bailey; Hari
instead of Harry; Daneel instead of Daniel. At other times, I make the names
considerably different, especially the first name: Salvor Hardin, Gaal
Dornick, Golan Trevize, Stor Gendibal, Janov Pelorat. (I hope I m getting them
right; I m not bothering to look them up.)
My feminine characters also receive that treatment, though the names I choose
tend to be faintly classical because I like the sound: Callia, Artemisia,
Noys, Arcadia, Gladia, and so on.
I must admit that when I started doing this, I expected to get irritated
letters from readers, but, you know, I
never got one. It began in wholesale manner in 1942 with the first Foundation
story and in the forty-plus years since, not one such letter arrived. Well,
Damon Knight once referred to Noys in a review of
The End of Eternity as the woman with the funny name, but that s as close as
it got.
Which brings me to the George and Azazel stories again. There I use a
different system. The George and
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Azazel stories are intended to be humorous. In fact, they are farces, with no
attempt at or pretense of realism. The stories are outrageously overwritten on
purpose. My ordinary writing style is so (deliberately) plain that every once
in a while, I enjoy showing that I can be florid and rococo if I choose.
Well, then, in a rococo story, how on Earth can I be expected to have
characters with ordinary names, even though the stories are set in the present
and (except for Azazel) deal only with Earth people, so that I can t use
nonexistent names?
Instead I use real names, but choose very unusual and pretentious first names.
In my George and Azazel stories, characters have been named Mordecai Sims,
Gottlieb Jones, Menander Block, Hannibal West, and so on. By associating the
outlandish first name with a sober last name, I heighten the oddness of the
first. (On second thought, I
should have made Ishtar Mistik, Ishtar Smith.)
None of this is, of course, intended as a universal rule. It s just what do.
If you want to write an SF story, I
by all means make up a system of your own.
ORIGlNALITY
HAVING PUBLISHED AN EDITORIAL ENTITLED
Plagiarism in the August, 1985 issue of the magazine, it occurs to me to
look at the other side of the coin. After all, if plagiarism is reprehensible,
total originality is just about impossible.
The thing is that there exists an incredible number of books in which an
enormous variety of ideas and an even more enormous variety of phrases and
ways of putting things have been included. Anyone literate enough to write
well has, as a matter of course, read a huge miscellany of printed material
and, the human brain being what it is, a great deal of it remains in the
memory at least unconsciously, and will be regurgitated onto the manuscript
page at odd moments.
In 1927, for instance, John Livingston Lowes (an English professor at Harvard)
published a six-hundred-
page book entitled
The Road to Xanadu, in which he traced nearly every phrase in The Rime of the
Ancient
Mariner to various travel books that were available to the poet, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge.
I tried reading the book in my youth, but gave up. It could only interest
another Coleridge scholar. Besides, I saw no point to it. Granted that the
phrases already existed scattered through a dozen books, they existed for
everybody. It was only Coleridge who thought of putting them together, with
the necessary modifications, to form one of the great poems of the English
language. Coleridge might not have been a hundred percent original but he was
original enough to make the poem a work of genius. You can t overrate the
skills involved in selection and arrangement.
It was this that was in my own mind, once, when I was busily working on a book
of mine called
Words of
Science back in the days when I was actively teaching at Boston University
School of Medicine. The book consisted of 250 one-page essays on various
scientific terms, giving derivations, meanings and various historical points
of interest. For the purpose, I had an unabridged dictionary spread out on my
desk, for I couldn t very well make up the derivations, nor could I rely on my
memory to present them to me in all correct detail. (My memory is good, but
not that good.)
A fellow faculty member happened by and looked over my shoulder. He read what
I was writing at the moment, stared at the unabridged and said, Why, you re
just copying the dictionary.
I stopped dead, sighed, closed the dictionary, lifted it with an effort and
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handed it to my friend. Here, I
said. The dictionary is yours. Now go write the book.
He shrugged his shoulders and walked away without offering to take the
dictionary. He was bright enough to get the point.
There are times, though, when I wonder how well any story of mine would
survive what one might call the
Road to Xanadu test. (There s no point in offending fellow writers by
analyzing their originality, so I ll just stick to my own stuff.)
The most original story I ever wrote in my opinion was Nightfall, which
appeared back in 1941. I had not quite reached my twenty-first birthday when I
wrote it and I have always been inordinately proud of the plot. It was a
brand-new plot, I said, and I killed it as I wrote it, for no one else would
dare write a variation of it.
To be sure, it was John Campbell who presented me with the Emerson quote that
began the story: If the stars would appear one night in a thousand years, how
would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance
of the City of God-- and it was Campbell who sent me home to write the
reverse of
Emerson s thesis.
Allowing for that, the development and details of the story were mine--or were
they?
In 1973, I was preparing an anthology of my favorite stories of the 1930s (the
years, that is, before John
Campbell s editorship, so that I named the book
Before the Golden Age)
and I included, of course, Jack Williamson s
Born of the Sun, which had been published in 1934 and had, at that time,
fascinated my fourteen-year-old self. I
reread it, naturally, before including it and was horrified.
You see, it dealt in part with a cult whose members were furious at scientists
for rationalizing the mystic tenets of the believers. In an exciting scene,
the cultists attacked the scientists citadel at a very crucial moment and the
scientists tried to hold them off long enough to get their task done.
I can t deny having read that story. After all, I still remembered it with
pleasure forty years later. Yet only six and a half years after reading it, I
wrote Nightfall which dealt in part with a cult whose members were furious
at scientists for rationalizing the mystic tenets of the believers. In an
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