womzilla | Listening to NPR on Asimov

silvertide posted a pointer to a long piece from the July 18 Morning Edition which, as silvertide said, is intelligent and interesting, treating the questions of faithfulness to the source seriously, with discussion of the issues from Geoffrey Landis (who is reasonable) and Harlan Ellison (r) (who is Ellison). It's nice to see it when the outsiders seem to understand what the insiders actually think.

One thing jumped out at me during the piece. Asimov's widow, Janet Jeppson, mostly recuses herself from the discussion, I suspect in large part because she doesn't control the film rights to Isaac's work. It transpires that those rights are controlled by Asimov's daughter, Robin (who is not interviewed for the piece).

This, in turn, reminded me of an amusing amusing anecdote about Robin Asimov in one of Isaac's essays, about watching the film Fantastic Voyage with her as he was writing the novelization. At the end of the film, the miniaturized sub-mariners rush out of the defector's body just in time to avoid expanding back to full size inside his brain and killing him. However, they leave the corpse of one of their party behind, along with the submarine. Robin, then measuring her age in single digits, leaned over to her father and said, "Won't the submarine expand and kill him?" Issac said that yes, it would. "Why did they leave it behind, then?" "Because people in Hollywood are not as smart as eight-year-old girls."

Robin's not an eight-year-old girl any more, I guess.