A Whiff of Death, aka The Death Dealers

I'm currently re-reading A Whiff of Death, Asimov's first published mystery novel.  Somewhat autobiographical as the "amateur detective" protagonist is clearly Asimov fighting for the security of tenure at Boston University, and his wife - as was Asimov's first wife Gertrude - more interested in the security that tenure would bring than in the main character's happiness - he owed a duty to his family, not to himself.

(As a segue, that always reminds me of a commercial from a few years ago, where a husband and wife are talking about  ...something...I forget what... the husband wants to buy a motorcycle or something and the wife says, "What happens to us if you hurt yourself? Buy some life insurance" which always caused me to think that she didn't love her husband, she just loved the fact that he was a provider who had damn well better provide for her in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed.)

More on this on Tuesday, when I share more from the book and what Asimov wrote about it in his autobiography.)

Asimov advertises RadioShack TRA-80

Nick Denton is here to talk about how Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels inspired him

From I09.com: 

Nick Denton is here to talk about how Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels inspired him

Most people know Nick Denton as the founder of io9's parent company, Gawker Media. Today he's a notorious media entrepreneur, but his inspiration began with science fiction. My first conversation with him was about the Syfy series Battlestar Galactica. Later, he revealed that he'd read Isaac Asimov's celebrated Foundation series as a teenager, and it allowed him to see the world in a whole new way. This afternoon from 1:00-2:00 PM PST, he's here to talk to you about how Foundation and other works of science fiction can lead to building things in the real world, whether those things are companies or space elevators or longevity treatments. This conversation with Nick Denton is different from all the other ones because he's here as a science fiction fan. Ask him how his engagement with Asimov's work has helped inspire a site like io9, or any of our sister sites: Jezebel, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jalopnik and Deadspin. Talk to him about what SF he enjoys now, and whether his obsession with dystopian stories has an effect on how he makes financial decisions. Please keep your questions relevant to the Foundation series or science fiction — and be polite!
Get started asking questions now, and Nick will answer as many as he can while he's here.
Want to know more about Foundation? Read io9's in-depth series on these incredible books.

(Read the article at the link above.)

 

Isaac Asimov 4 Tips for Your Next Presentation

From SOAP:  Isaac Asimov 4 Tips for Your Next Presentation

Most of us had to deal with years of grammar and composition lessons and never really understood why we had to read books and write short stories, essays, and poems. And, today, with school long-gone, some of us still don’t like to read, and we rarely write anything other than business reports and emails.

Going even further, most of us have no idea how to tell a story.  We know we enjoy good stories (the movie theaters are filled with viewers night after night all over the world).  But we have no idea how a good story happens.

According to Isaac Asimov, one of the world’s great science fiction writers, there are no real ‘suggestions’ as to how to tell stories, but he does provide four key tips to help a young writer:

1. Vocabulary:

For Asimov, it’s important to know and use the right tools. And the writer’s most important tool is language.  If you want to be a writer, you have to develop a good vocabulary, learn grammar, and learn how to spell.

2. Plotting:

But there will be no point to mastering vocabulary if you don’t know how to weave the elements of your story. Every character has to have a purpose. And at every moment, the progression of the plot points is moving toward a specific conclusion. To achieve this interweaving, there’s nothing better than to read the great masters of prose, like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. And don’t only see what they do, but try to analyze what they’re doing, and why.

3. Information:

To write a good story, it isn’t enough to have a general idea of what we’re talking about. We have to have a solid understanding of the context we’re creating: What is your context? How can you write about a baseball game if all you only know are the rules of baseball? Isn’t it just as important to know the pressure a batter feels when facing a pitcher? How does it feel to be a spectator? What’s the thrill of watching a game closely? How does it feel to enjoy a sunny day and eat a hot dog? A good writer has to have first-hand experience of the various contents of the story. At the very least, detailed research has to happen if first-hand experience is impossible.

4. Merge plot into environment/context:

In the heat of writing, it’s not unusual for a writer to forget the environment in which the characters are living and functioning and to focus only on the action. If this is you, don’t be distracted by dialogue and action. Pretty much the only way a reader is going to be able to imagine your story is if you describe in some detail the environment in which your characters are living and functioning.

These tips are valuable to all writers. Not just for people who write blogs, which are all the rage today. They’re also for people who create business presentations. In fact, storytelling is becoming increasingly more popular here, because it is stories that engage audiences even when the subject matter is complex or boring … or both.

So, to adapt Asimov’s writing tips to creating a presentation:

1) The writer needs to have a good vocabulary, one that is shared by the audience. There’s no point saying “if you please” to a group of teenagers! Remember: This applies to presentations with and without storytelling.  Your language must conform to the experience of your audience.

2) Throughout your presentation, be sure to let the dialogue and actions of each character predominate. All your characters and words must have a purpose, bringing coherence to your story. It’s up to you, the writer, to know what that purpose is.

3) When creating a presentation, you have to know the content inside-out. How can you talk about a technological system when the terms may as well be a foreign language you don’t speak? So search, learn, and master the subject of your presentation before you sit down to develop the presentation.

4) It’s common that a presentation writer gets excited about the story and forgets totally about the presentation that story is supposed to be delivering. Yes, you may be using a story in a presentation, but you’re also supposed to be sharing or even selling something, right? So, yes, you need to entertain your audience, but never forget your main goal. Make sure your story is helping you to convey the message you need to convey.

So now that you know the value of a good story, you can ask those people up at the front of the room: “How come you didn’t use storytelling in your presentation?”

 

Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Marks 50th

From Publisher's Weekly: Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Marks 50th

The Cape Cod Writers Center Conference is celebrating its first half century next month with a series of classes and talks from August 5-10 at the Resort & Conference Center of Hyannis, Mass. Begun in 1963 by a dozen writers known as the Twelve O’clock Scholars, the first conferences consisted of talks for aspiring writers by authors visiting the Cape—Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Art Buchwald, and Jacques Barzun.

 

Fifty years later the focus continues to be on authors helping authors ready their work for publication, although that now includes new media and technology. “At a time when the publishing industry is in transition, it is gratifying to see that the literary impulse remains strong and continues to draw aspiring authors, poets, and screenwriters to our conference,” says conference director Nancy Rubin Stuart, executive director of the Cape Cod Writers Center.

 

In keeping with the Center’s tradition, this year’s lineup includes keynotes by bestselling writers Joseph Finder and Andre Dubus III and Beacon Press executive director Amy Caldwell, as well as presentations by novelist Matthew Pearl and Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish, among others. For Finder, supporting the conference is a good thing. He hadn’t heard of writers’ conferences when he was trying to get his first book, The Moscow Club, published in the late ‘80s, but he wishes he had. “When I first tried to figure out how to write a novel,” he says, “I had no idea how to get it going. It was before the Internet. I didn’t know any writers. I felt like I was in the old Soviet Union. I had no idea how to write a query letter, or if you called. I went to Widener [Harvard University’s library] to look up literary agents. I was doing this in the dark. The purpose this conference serves is highly important. I’ve learned so much from other writers. I still do.” 

Wisdom for Cherry Hill’s Class of 2012

From South Jersey News Sun:  Wisdom for Cherry Hill’s Class of 2012

Board of Education President Seth Klukoff shared his words of wisdom to the Class of 2012 at Temple University’s Liacouras Center last week:

Throughout most of my career, I’ve carried around a quote from the author and scholar Isaac Asimov, and it reads as follows:  “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way though our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Twenty years ago, when I first came across those words, I found them as wise as I do today.  And today, I believe those words are even more relevant.

Why do I believe that?  For one, inherent in that quote is the assumption that thoughtful, rational, tolerant dialogue fuels a democracy.  Also inherent in that quote is the warning that such a dialogue, which ought to be grounded in reason and fact, is in grave danger of disappearing.  It’s replacement, an endless volley of uninformed, ubiquitous opinion.  Everyone is right.  No one is wrong.  On to the next discussion.

That’s where I believe we are today.  We live in a culture of extremes, where shades of gray, the places where truth and fact exist, are discredited, overlooked, not considered cool.  Try to present an argument against the extreme, to marshal facts and logic, and you are perceived by that extreme as being defensive, your arguments are met with derision and, even worse, you are personally attacked in the coarsest, basest of language. And when that extreme position is voiced by a mob of many, and amplified by an uncritical media, and when their simple messages can spread virally in a nanosecond via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or other social media platforms, you no longer have discussion or debate.  You have unthinking, unfettered chaos.

Whatever the issue, be it the environment, health care, the economy, or the fate of public education, the formula appears to be the same.  Think about it.  When was the last time our nation truly had a responsible conversation about global warming, access to affordable health care, employment, and our schools?  And think about this.  Is our nation even capable of having those critical discussions today, or worse, do we even want to?

I do wonder why our country has reached a point where civil discourse has seemingly become outmoded, where opinion masquerades as fact, where nastiness and disregard for language hide behind the anonymity of email or online comments, and where lies cloaked as truth are trumpeted loudly and brashly.
I wonder about this.  I do.

But you know what; I think I know how things can get better.

The answer, I believe, lies in public education, in the responsibility of educators to teach the importance of critical thinking, to foster questioning and reasoned argument in the classroom and out, to place high value on the beauty of words well written or well spoken, to steadfastly articulate, and defend, the essential importance of what is fact and what is fallacy, and to prepare students to embrace those responsibilities themselves, so that they may practice them as informed, thoughtful citizens.

You see, it is through public education that students are exposed to a mosaic of diverse viewpoints and backgrounds, have the opportunity to engage with peers who think differently, hold different values, and have different life experiences.  And it is through public education where tolerance for those differences are learned and celebrated, rather than dismissed and scorned.

I truly believe that public education can help create this change. And during a time when that institution is being unjustly vilified by elected officials and ideologues, it must be supported more than ever before.   Public education can and must become the bulwark against the continuing tide of anti-intellectualism.

Graduates of Cherry Hill East and West, I look to all of you to draw upon your education, to think before you write, listen before you argue, challenge the logic of your own assumptions, explore the value of the opposing opinion and wrest yourselves from the comfort of the known.  Those are the lessons you must practice as you move forward in your lives, and that you must ask of your peers to practice as well.  For it is exactly those lessons that can ultimately bring down the false equivalence of ignorance and knowledge that is so harmful to our society.

 

Economist Paul Krugman talks Asimov, Death Stars, and other sci-fi influences

From the Verge:  Economist Paul Krugman talks Asimov, Death Stars, and other sci-fi influences

IT's 4 pages long and I suggest you read it all.

I share only the initial bit about Asimov.

Wired: You’ve said that you recently agreed to write a new introduction to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. What will you be talking about in your introduction?

Paul Krugman: The background story is, I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity.

Wired: In recent years you seem to have a very good track record of predicting what’s going to happen. Do you ever feel like in some way you’ve achieved your dream of becoming a psychohistorian?

Krugman: Well, no. I mean, a little bit, fine. But two things. One is, it’s a pretty limited domain. I don’t think I’ve had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried. In economics we do have some … you know, we don’t exactly have the laws of psychohistory, but we do have some pretty good guidelines. The other thing, of course, is in Foundation, Hari Seldon is able to put together his long term plan and actually nudge history in the direction he wants it to go, and so far I’m feeling not like Hari Seldon but like Cassandra. I keep on predicting bad things, no one will believe me, and then they happen.

Wired: Is science fiction something that a lot of economists are into?

Krugman: I think it’s fairly common. Not everyone, obviously, but social scientists in general … I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction. It’s speculative, we’re thinking about what society could be like. Never mind the gadgets, although they create the alternative worlds, but a lot of it is thinking about society.