Gold, The Final Science Fiction Collection by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780002246217
Publisher: London : HarperCollins, 1995.
Published: 2010-05-08T18:30:00+00:00

I RECEIVED A LETTER FROM A FAN THE other day, one who had bought a copy of Agent of Byzantium by Harry Turtledove, which appeared in a series entitled „Isaac Asimov Presents.“ (That’s why he wrote to me.) The cover shows a man dressed, says my correspondent, „in a Romanesque military uniform, holding a Roman helmet in his left hand.“ He also carried „a very large, very modern, very lethal-looking blaster rifle“ and „an electronic scanning device.“ My correspondent was intrigued by the anachronism, bought the book, read it, and „enjoyed the book.“ However, he found no place in the story where a man was holding such a rifle and scanning device, and he felt cheated. He had been lured into buying and reading the book by an inaccurate piece of cover art, and he wrote to complain. So I thought about it. Now my knowledge of art is so small as to be beneath contempt, so naturally, I can’t be learned about it. There is, however, nothing I don’t understand about the word trade (fifty years of intimate, continuous and successful practice at it gives me the right to say that), and so I will approach matters from that angle. I see the reader’s complaint as the protest of the „literalist“ against „metaphor. „ The literalist wants a piece of art (whether word or picture) to be precise and exact with all its information in plain view on the surface. Metaphor, however, (from a Greek word meaning „transfer“ ) converts one piece of information into another analogous one, because the second one is more easily visualizable, more dramatic, more (in short) poetic. However, you have to realize there is a transfer involved and if you’re a „born-again literalist,“ if I may use the phrase, you miss the whole point. Let’s try the Bible, for instance. The children of Israel are wandering in the desert and come to the borders of Canaan. Spies are sent in to see what the situation is and their hearts fail them. They find a people with strong, walled cities; with many elaborate chariots and skilled armies; and with a high technology. They come back and report „all the people we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants....and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers and so we were in their sight.“ Right! They were of „great stature“ in the sense that they had a high technology. They were „giants“ of technology and the Israelites were „grasshoppers“ in comparison. There was as much chance, the spies felt, of the Israelites defeating the Canaanites as of a grasshopper defeating a man. It makes perfect metaphoric sense. The use of „giants“ and „grasshoppers“ is dramatic and gets across the idea. However, both Jewish and Christian fundamentalists get the vague notion that the Canaanites were two hundred feet tall, so that ordinary human beings were as grasshoppers in comparison. The infliction of literalism on us by fundamentalists who read the Bible without seeing anything but words is one of the great tragedies of history.

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