y'ever feel like sometimes creators don't actually understand what about their work made it good?
@starkatt Yeah, definitely. Isaac Asimov never understood why "Nightfall" was a good short story, for example. It still kinda messes with my mind how people can do things really well and *not* understand what they're doing.
@packbat wait what, how.
@packbat link to interview or whatever?
spoilers for the 1941 short story "Nightfall" and the 1990 novelization thereof, another one swear (302 words)
@starkatt I am also tempted to slot the novelization with Robert Silverberg in as further evidence of the same point.
Some of the things that struck me as most meaningful about the short story were:
- The gallingly predictable way in which the coming cataclysm was dismissed by the press and the scientists who forecast it villified
- The ill-informed Everything Will Be Fine-sayer reporter ... being the viewpoint character, and handled sympathetically and positively in a way that actually *works*, both as someone who made a serious mistake out of arrogance and ignorance and as an outsider to be the audience for the exposition
- The exposition itself being handled so narratively, through things like the reporter experiencing significant darkness for the first time
- A constant, overarching sense of the world being much bigger than this segment we have a chance to see
- The fact that the scientists being right, being determined, and fighting for everything they can come up with *do* succeed in breaking the cycle of complete collapse, even if ... no, *especially because* they only do so in an extraordinarily limited way
- (well, I should say, are strongly implied to have succeeded, given that the story ends well before we have a chance to see the consequences)
...almost all of these points, if not literally all of these points, are undermined in the novelization. It expands outwards to capture the things that were alluded to in the short story, things that made the world feel large, and makes those things mere plot-stuff. It pads out (I'll grant Asimov's supposition that the constant momentum of the original was a strength). And most heinously in my eyes, instead of victory coming through discovery and hard work, it comes primarily through the successful conspiracy of unrealistic scale committed by a fucking cult leader.
I hate that book.
cite on Asimov not getting "Nightfall" (155 words)
@starkatt In his 1969 anthology "Nightfall and other stories", he writes intros to each story ... and says in the one for Nightfall that (a) he wrote it the same way he wrote all his stories, which is to say, "as fast as it comes into my mind"; (b) he was getting irritated by that point, eighteenish years on, that people kept saying it was his best story - after all, surely he should be getting better just from practice; and (c) he invites the reader to decide if it really is the best story in the anthology.
Honestly, I think the passage I remember is from "I. Asimov", his last volume of autobiography? (Which would imply that if he did ever figure it out, it was late enough in life not to make it into a book he was currently writing.) Because I distinctly remember him being like "maybe it's because there's just a constant pace of new things happening" and being baffled that *that's* the only distinctive feature he could recognize. But I don't know where my copy of that one is just this second, so I can't find the text for you.