from the
Black Widowers
stories by
Isaac Asimov

[...] “One of the unfortunate consequences of the era of pulp fiction, between 1920 and 1950, is that it raised a generation of Asimovs who learned to write without thought, in the pursuit of quantity only.”

“That’s not entirely bad,” said Drake. “It’s far more common for a writer to fall into the opposite trap of postponing execution in a useless search for nonexistent perfection.”

Gonzalo said, “Once something is old, it gets slavered over by critics who would slap it down hard if they were contemporaries of the object criticized. I’ve heard Manny say a hundred times that Shakespeare was a hack writer who was despised in his own day.”

“For every Shakespeare,” said Rubin, violently, his sparse beard bristling, “who was far ahead of the puny minds of his time, there were a hundred, or maybe a thousand, scribblers who were dismissed as zeroes in their own time and who are exactly zero today, if they are remembered at all.”

“That’s the point,” said Pavolini. “Surely survival is the best testimony of worth.”

“Not always,” said Rubin, characteristically shifting ground at once. “Accident must play a role. Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote over ninety plays each, and in each case only seven survive. Who can possibly say those were the seven best? Sappho was considered by the ancient Greeks to be in a class with Homer himself, and yet virtually nothing of her work survives.”

“Unfortunately, the novelists who form our stereotypical beliefs invariably make their heroines incredibly beautiful but only very rarely stress the good looks of the hero. The male protagonist tends to look craggy and charmingly plain. The result is that if I am considered not plain, I arouse instant suspicion.

“I have heard the comments, indirectly. ‘Who wants a boyfriend prettier than I am?’ ‘I’ll have to fight for a chance at the mirror.’

“The feeling is universal that if a man is, quote, good-looking, unquote, [...] then he must be vain, self-centered, capricious, and, worst of all, a simpering, brainless fool.”

“It was not love at first sight. What can one possibly know at first sight but superficialities—and very likely deceiving ones, at that?”

“It’s not death in itself. It’s how you treat it. You can deal with it as the doorway to heaven, and treat the dying person as a saint—see the death of Beth in Little Women. That can be sickeningly sentimental, but it is meant to be uplifting. Poe, on the other hand, dwells with an unholy glee on the elements of degradation and decay. He makes death worse than it is and—Come on, you all know very well what ‘morbid’ is.”

[...]

Thomas Trumbull growled and said, “Certainly. ‘Morbid’ is talking about morbidity over what would otherwise be a pleasant dinner.”

Rubin said, a bit sardonically, “The waste, sir, was once raw material, and that raw material came from somewhere [...] Why not put the waste back in the hole it came from?”

“Actually,” said Pritchard, “this has been thought of. There are indeed abandoned mines, quarries and other such things in the countryside and there have been attempts to negotiate their use as dumps. However, it can’t be done. People are willing to sell raw materials but are not willing to accept the residue after the consumer is done with it—even if we pay both times, once for taking and once for returning.”

Geoffrey Avalon said, “It’s a common sociological phenomenon. Everyone is in favor of cracking down on crime and sending criminals to jail, but nobody wants to spend money on building more jails to hold those criminals and, even more so, nobody wants any new jail built in his neighborhood. [...] I am speaking of the general ability of the public to recognize a problem and to want to solve it, but to balk at any personal inconvenience involved in a solution.”