Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

Part Three: On Writing Science Fiction Suspense

  I have said over and over again that I write by instinct only and that there is nothing purposeful or deliberate in what I do. Consequently, I am always more or less puzzled by people who analyze my writing and find all sorts of subtle details in it that I don't recall ever putting in but that I suppose must be there or the critic wouldn't find them and pull them out.

  Still, I have never been so puzzled as recently when I read a discussion of science fiction (where and by whom I do not remember for I threw it out in annoyance as soon as I came across the passage I'm about to tell you of). Getting to me, the essayist mentioned the fact that my style was clumsy, my dialog stilted, my characterization non-existent, but that there was no question that my books were "page-turners. "

  In fact, he said, I was the most reliable producer of "page-turning" writing in science fiction.

  It was only after I had thrown out the material and sworn a bit that I began to think of what I had read. What the essayist had said seemed to make no sense. Of course, he might be mad, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that he wasn't. In that case, if I were utterly deficient in style, dialog, and characterization, how could my writings be "page-turners"? Why should any reader want to turn the page (that is, keep on reading) when what he read had nothing to recommend it?

  What made a person want to keep on reading anything? The most obvious reason was "suspense," which comes from Latin words meaning "to be hanging"; that is, "to be suspended. " The reader finds himself in a painful situation where he is uncertain as to what will happen next in his reading matter, and he wants desperately to find out.

  Mind you, suspense is not an inalienable part of literature. No one reads Shakespeare's sonnets in order to experience suspense. Nor do you read a P. G. Wodehouse novel for the sake of suspense. You know that Bertie Wooster will get out of the ridiculous fix in which he finds himself, and you don't really care whether he does or not. You read on only because you enjoy laughing.

  Most writing, however, especially in the less exalted realms of literature, is kept going by suspense. The simplest form of suspense is to put your protagonist into constant danger, and make it seem certain that he can't possibly get out of it. Then get him out of it just so that you can plunge him into something even worse, and so on. Then, having carried it on as long as you can, you let him emerge victorious.

  You get this in its purest simplicity in something like the Flash Gordon comic strip, where, for years, Flash ricocheted from crisis to crisis without ever getting time to wipe his brow (let alone go to the bathroom). Or consider the kind of movie serial typified by The Perils of Pauline, in which the perils continued for fifteen installments, each ending in a cliffhanger. (This was so-called because the protagonist was left hanging from a cliff or caught in some equally dangerous situation until the next episode of the serial a week later-a week spent by the kid-viewers in delicious agony-resolved the situation. )

  This sort of suspense is ultra-simple. Whether Flash or Pauline survives matters really only to Flash or Pauline. Nothing of greater moment hinges on their survival.

  We take a step forward in crime novels whereupon success or failure may hinge the smooth functioning of justice; or in spy novels whereupon success or failure may hinge the survival of the nation; or in science fiction whereupon success or failure may hinge the survival of the Earth itself, or even of the universe.

  If we consider Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space, which I read as a teenager with the same emotions that I viewed the movie serials half a decade earlier, we find the same unending danger about to destroy our beloved heroes an d the security of Earth along with them. That gives more meaning and more tension to the story.

  Moving still farther up, then, we come to tales of unending danger that involve the great battle between good and evil, almost in the abstract. Surely the best example of this is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, in which the forces of good, crystallized in the end into the person of brave, suffering little Frodo, must somehow defeat the all-but-omnipotent Satan-figure of Sauron.

  Mind you, suspense is not all that is required to make a piece of writing totally effective. In most cases, it suffices only for one reading. Once you have seen The Perils of Pauline once, there is no need ever to see it again, because you know how she overcomes all her perils. That removes the suspense, and once the suspense is gone, nothing else remains.

  Yet there are suspense-filled items you read over and over again long after the suspense has been knocked out of them. I suppose that it is possible for a person who is reading (or seeing) Hamlet for the first time to be caught up most of all in whether Hamlet will defeat his wicked uncle or not. But I have read and seen Hamlet dozens of times and I know every word of the play and yet I always enjoy it, because the beauty of the language is sufficient in itself, and the texture of the plot is so thick that one never runs out of different methods of producing the play.

  In the same way, I have read The Lord of the Rings five times and enjoyed it more each time, because getting the suspense out of the way actually allows me to enjoy the writing and the texture of the book all the more.

  Now I come to my own writing, but I can only discuss it if you who are reading it understand that I never did anything of what I am about to describe purposely. It all got done, every bit of it, instinctively, and I only understand it now after the fact.

  I was interested, apparently, in going beyond the rather simplistic balance between good and evil; I didn't want the hero adventuring with the reader always certain that he ought to win over the nasty villains, so that the nation or the society or the Earth or the universe could be saved.

  I wanted a situation in which the reader could not be certain which side was good and which evil, or in which he might wonder if perhaps both sides contained mixtures of good and evil. I wanted a situation where the problem and the danger was itself uncertain, and where the resolution was not necessarily a true resolution because it might conceivably make things worse in the long run.

  In short, I wanted to write fictional history in which there are no true endings, no true "they lived happily ever after," but in which, even when a problem is apparently solved, a new one arises to take its place.

  To this end, I sacrificed everything else. I made no attempt to indulge in anything but necessary description, so that I worked always on a "bare stage. " I forced the dialog to serve nothing more than as an indication of the progress of the problem (if there was one) toward the resolution (if there was one). I wasted no time on action for its own sake, or on characterization or on poetic writing. I made everything just as clear and as straightforward as I could, so that the reader could concentrate on (and drive himself mad over) all the ambiguities I would introduce.

  (As you see, then, critics who complain that my books are too talky, and that they contain little or no action, miss the point completely. )

  I do my best to present a number of characters, each of whom has a different world view and each of whom argues his case as cogently as possible. Each of them thinks he is doing the sensible thing, working for the good of humanity, or his part of it. There is no general agreement on what the problem might be, or even, sometimes, whether there is one at all, and when the story ends even the hero himself may not be satisfied with what he has done.

  I worked this out little by little in my stories and novels, and it reached its peak in the Foundation series.

  There is indeed suspense in the series on a simple scale. Will the small world of the First Foundation hold its own against the surrounding mightier kingdoms and, if so, how? Will it survive the onslaught of the Empire and of a mutant emotion-controller, and of the Second Foundation?

  But that is not the prime suspense. Should the First Foundation survive? Should there be a Second Empire? Will the Second Empire just be a repetition of the miseries of the First? Are the Traders or the Mayors correct in their view of what the
First Foundation ought to do?

  In the two later volumes, the hero Golan Trevize spends the first in coming to an agonized decision, and the second in an agonized wonder as to whether his decision was right. In short, I try to introduce all the uncertainties of history, instead of the implausible certainties of an unrealistic fictional world.

  And apparently it works, and my novels are "page-turners. "

  But I have more to say and I will continue my discussion of suspense in next month 's editorial.