Isaac Asimov, the Groper
Then again, given the fact that Asimov wrote the books titled The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971) and Lecherous Limericks (1976), his behavioral violations shouldn't have been that surprising.
[Nevala-Lee also comments on Asimov's tremendous output as an author, but somehow ignores the strong possibility that a portion of this output likely was ghostwritten.]
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3 comments:
I'm curious where the notion that Asimov used ghost writers comes from. I mean, personal incredulity of his vast output is not enough.
Why do I think Isaac Asimov had a significant portion of his fiction and nonfiction output ghost-written ?
Let’s go to the Isaac Asimov ‘Bibliography’ Wiki………..it says that in 1966 he published 11 books, including the novel ‘Fantastic Voyage’. Eight of those 11 books are nonfiction books devoted to physics, the Roman Empire, and astronomy.
I’m supposed to believe that in 1966, when there was no internet, and no word processors, Asimov composed, researched, and typed 11 books – the equivalent of almost one per month – and at the same time, also produced some of the 489 short stories and novelettes, and some of the 90,000 letters and postcards, that he issued during his 53 year writing career, as according to Ed Seiler’s ‘Asimov Online’ website and a statement from Asimov’s brother Stanley ?
Note that Robert Silverberg (who, I do not believe, ever used ghostwriters) states that from 1959 – 1964, a five year interval during which he wrote a total of 150 sleaze paperbacks, could only write a maximum of four, 212-page paperbacks per month. These were typed on a manual typewriter, and used prewritten sex scene ‘modules’ that Silverberg plugged into each novel to speed up the writing process.
These are sleaze paperbacks that Silverberg wrote – dialogue, characterization, plotting, etc. were nowhere near the level of those used in ‘aboveground’ novels, and certainly didn’t require the research and attention to detail demanded of nonfiction books. Yet four per month was the maximum number that Silverberg, a skilled writer and typist, (and at the time a young man) could humanly produce.
When it comes to Asimov, something doesn’t add up............
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mvbw3v/sin-a-rama-excerpt-my-life-as-a-pornographer
Okay, but wait a sec. I have no idea whether Asimov wrote every book with his name on it or not, and the idea he used a ghostwriter is intriguing, and I have no interest in defending the man one way or the other (despite the pleasure a number of his works gave me when I was younger). But--
He published 11 books in 1966--that doesn't mean he wrote 11 books that year. The previous year (per Wikipedia) he published four. In 1961 he only published two books--for all I know his relatively low output that year was because he was mostly working on 1966's The Roman Republic.
On top of that, it turns out that the bibliography may be... misleading. An Internet search of 1966's The Genetic Effects of Radiation reveals that the 50-page government pamphlet (with numerous illustrations and photos--you can find it on Project Gutenberg) was co-written with Professor Theodosius Dobzhansky; one suspects that Asimov's main role in this one may have been to make the booklet accessible to its intended lay audience. At any rate, a 50-page booklet explaining radiation's effect on human gene's written at a grade-school level with lots and lots of pictures is hardly comparable to a 212-page novel, however hacky and modular the 212-page novel might be.
Maybe Asimov used a ghostwriter; it would be interesting to know if he did. But for all I know he suffered from the same nearly pathological condition Stephen King does, where he seems to be unable to not turn out pages even when it's meant periods of time where he was neglectful of other things like family and health. And/or maybe Asimov's "legendary output" is puffed up by work like that AEC booklet. (Or puffed up by counting books like I, Robot as novels when they were really just edited anthologies of previously published work; indeed, skimming through the Wikipedia bibliography also hints at some double-counting in Asimov's oeuvre, with several of his books having previously been published in magazines, as was fairly routine in SF in those decades.)
(I also can't help uncharitably observing that while I've enjoyed some of Asimov's better works, quite a number of his short stories and novels are so slight I have to wonder if he put as much thought into them as Silverberg put into those modular porn novels. He didn't write good dialogue. He didn't write good characters. His style was workmanlike through and through. He sometimes--sometimes--came up with a helluva gimmick or clever plot turn or Interesting Really Big Idea, and then you get something like the original Foundation Trilogy or one of the better mysteries, but that's such a small percentage of his work.)
Anyway, saying something smells isn't really enough. It's a hunch, but you need evidence if you're going to assert it as fact.
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