Tangents + Ideas = Opposite x Hypotheticals

Isaac Asimov, my greatest hero, was a scientist.  He dealt in practical things.  Physics, chemistry, astronomy and, above all, mathematics.

His was a life devoted to the precision and care associated with getting things right.  No guessing.  Intuitive leaps, perhaps, based on carefully composed ideas but the final result always rested on the analysis of the calculations.

Many of my other heroes, Arthur C Clarke, Carl Sagan have that in common.  They all thought scientifically.  They all had that cold logical rationalization of their ideas.

And yet.

Read their stories.

Not the factual documentaries that they wrote so as to fascinate us readers and draw us, beguilingly, into their world of numbers and facts, but the stories.  The fiction.

See how it flows.

Consider the ‘Foundation’ series. ‘Prelude to Foundation’, ‘Forward the Foundation’, ‘Foundation’, ‘Foundation and Empire’, ‘Second Foundation’, ‘Foundation's Edge’, and ‘Foundation and Earth’.  This is not the sequence they were written in.

‘Foundation’ was originally a series of eight short stories published (in ‘Astounding Magazine’) between May 1942 and January 1950.  It was based, loosely, upon Edward Gibbons’ ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’.

In 1993 Asimov wrote the final book, ‘Forward the Foundation’.  In this story he raveled together all the threads of his other series—including ‘I, Robot’ to bring them all together into one singularity.

He could not have foreseen this in 1942 in his conversations with John W. Campbell, his editor.

Where does this lead us?

In reading his books, and those of other authors in similar vein—Robert A. Heinlein springs to mind, you will see that, in spite of his training, there has been no pre-planning.

When he, Asimov, wrote the first ‘Foundation’ story he could have had no idea that, eventually, there would be more and that they would all tie together with his other stories.  Pre-planning is an impossibility.

In similar manner, Robert Heinlein certainly would not have considered that writing about water beds in his stories, with fairly complete descriptions, would prevent an applicant, thirty years later, from getting a patent on the idea through prior art.

If we now contract this idea into the writing of one book we can get back to the concept of ‘idea’ sprites.  I have mentioned these before in another ‘Blog’.

These sprites are the things that come into your head while you are writing or ironing or welding something to a car chassis.  They try to convince you that there is something else you should be doing instead, something more important.  You can, they will insist, always come back to this idea later.  But you cannot.  You will, invariably, forget.  The notion of ‘picking up the thread’ afterwards is a false one.  At best you will have only a vague memory of something that you were doing or thinking but, in essence, the meat of it will be gone.

Asimov, et al, had ‘idea’ sprites.  You can see them working their threads through the stories.

The difference with these great authors is that they used the sprites.  They seized them by the scruff of the neck, used the idea, and then incorporated that into their story so that the story led back into its original stream.

Really great authors with genius running through their mental veins do it over a period of fifty years.  Through seven volumes.

Hard to top that.

That’s why he is my Number One Hero.