The SciFi Channel’s Sci-Fi Weekly has just public a long interview with me about science fiction, copyright, and the future:
What were you trying to accomplish by naming your story after Asimov’s famous story collection?
Doctorow: I was trying to do couple things with the title. I hope that it served a lot of different purposes. First of all it’s not Asimov’s title; I, Claudius is the title, then it was Eando Binder’s title, then Asimov’s title, and now it’s my title.
I certainly wanted to make it explicit that I was talking about Asimov. I’d done an assignment for Wired Magazine on the movie, and I’d gone back and reread all of the Robot books. At the time that I [first] read them, I hadn’t really noticed how thin the social stuff was, how thin the socioeconomics stuff was, that there is this given that somewhere some wise men in white coats had figured out what robots should do and shouldn’t do. And that apparently they figured out to impose their will on everyone else for a period lasting millennia. So I wanted to call out to that.
And finally there has been a controversy in science fiction about whether or not appropriating titles was or wasn’t cool that arose out of Ray Bradbury’s critique of Michael Moore calling his movie Fahrenheit 9/11. He argued that it was rude. You know, I don’t think John W. Campbell asked Eando Binder if he minded if Asimov’s collection would be called I, Robot, and certainly all of the Nightfalls out there didn’t come with permission. I think it’s far from rude; I think it’s the essence of free expression that we take our ideas and build atop them. There was a great passage in Judy Merrill’s … Hugo Award-winning autobiography in which she talks about how [she and her writer friends] all used to live in this big geek house together, and they would write each other’s stories. They would write under the same pseudonym and borrow ideas from each other and build on each other rapidly. When you look through the history of the field, that’s really a big piece of it, and I wanted to be a part of that tradition of stealing from the best.
