The Wisdom of Isaac Asimov

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

The Wisdom of Isaac Asimov

A few days ago was Isaac Asimov’s 99th birthday. (Rather, his official birthday. He knew he was born between Oct 4, 1919 and Jan 2, 1920, and since he hated the idea of being old, he took the latest date possible as his birthday.) One of the comments on a blog I was reading that day about the Good Doctor was the following:

“Story that Isaac told: Isaac sat in on a class where the professor was teaching about one of his stories.  He approached the professor after the class and said, ‘That story doesn’t mean that at all. I should know. I wrote it.’  And the professor looked at him and said, ‘So?’

And at that moment, Isaac said, he realized that the professor was right.  No matter what the author intended, what the reader got out of it was what was really there.”

If only JKR had his wisdom. I suggest that the official motto of DTCL should be the following:

Saith Isaac Asimov: No matter what the author intends, what the reader gets out of the story is what is really there.

P.S. Don’t stop commenting on sunnyskywalker’s thread below just because I’ve started a new one. The intricacies of the Fidelius Charm are entirely worth a thorough thrashing out.

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

in my limited experience

Well, that's kind of the point of doing a broader survey, isn't it? Everyone's personal experiences are necessarily limited, and human brains are frankly terrible at drawing accurate statistical conclusions based on our impressions.

I'm not saying it's exactly the same, but there's a lot more lack of diversity and a lot less general support for diversity than Tumblr and Twitter would have you believe, is what I mean. The people JKR hangs out with on a day to day basis are probably her own age, and haven't changed in sweeping, massively transformative ways.

Not to mention, there was a lot more diversity in old stories than we give People Back Then credit for. Loki was arguably gender-fluid (he once gave birth to a horse while in mare form, e.g.). The Round Table included the Saracen brothers Sir Palamedes, Sir Safir, and Sir Segwarides; the black Sir Morien; and Parzival's older half-brother Feirefiz, who was mixed-race and had black-and-white patched skin (which sounds wild, but is kind of possible with vitilogo or chimerism). I really doubt medieval folks were ticking off 21st-century boxes. No one was going, "Guys, we have to add gender identity to Norse myths and make the Round Table more diverse so people centuries in the future will approve of it!" They had their own reasons for telling those stories. It's modern readers' faults if we edit diversity out of older stories in our imaginations.