Howard S. Smith
Author of I,robot (Robot Binaries & Press)
Read the review here.
Website: www.robotpress.net
When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a kid?
I remember reading cereal boxes. Tony the Tiger sticks in my mind.
My next door neighbor and best friend Gary had a Childcraft Encyclopedia. Every day after playing with him I remember sitting on his floor and reading another few pages of the encyclopedia. In third grade our teacher told us about novels. The first one I ever read was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I remember thinking that novels had better endings than the encyclopedia.
There was a used bookstore next to the barbershop I went to as a kid. For a quarter, the store owner would go to one of his packed shelves, pull out a novel, blow off the dust, and tell me to come back when I finished it. With every haircut came another novel. The second book I ever read was I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.
When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
My mom kept buying me Dr. Seuss books. Aghh!! Yup, I know everyone loves them. I didn’t. I thought they were stupid. My mother, however, had a membership in the Book of the Month Club. Her books were a lot better than mine.
In the fifth grade I switched to reading technical books. I took a correspondence course in electronics technology from the Cleveland Institute of Electronics that lasted a few years. I went to MIT after eleventh grade, and didn’t really start reading fiction again for a while. I missed it. Television was okay, movies were better, but nothing satisfied like a good (fiction) book.
When did you think about becoming a writer? Was there someone who got you interested in writing?
Am I writer now? I never really thought about it like that. Writing I,robot (small ‘r’) was just something I wanted to do (okay… something I felt compelled to do), rather than being “a writer.”
How do you write? Do you have a daily routine? What’s good about it? What do you hate about it?
I try to write as quickly as possible. No agonizing about this or that word. Get the story out. Then, once that’s done, I can come back and agonize. So my daily writing routine is to snatch any period of free time and write.I wrote I,robot in five drafts. In the first try, the story took place in the Far East. The intensity between the combatants was so high that World War III started off before there was enough time for the development and rise of the robots. No good. In the next draft I switched the setting to Iraq. Just the right amount of violence (… that sure seems like an oxymoron) but a confusing story. It never makes sense why people die, but in this case, it really didn’t make sense. Into the trash bucket. I then moved the end of the story over to the Israeli-Lebanese border. It worked well. The fourth draft was a research exercise – what evidence supported every single line in the book. And then, in the fifth and final draft, I edited. One hundred fifty thousand words became one hundred ten, and the book read well.
Any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?
After seeing the 2004 I, Robot film I thought that someone should update this ridiculous notion of a “positronic brain” and update how the rise of the robots would really come about.
Asimov wrote his first robot stories in the early 1940s, shortly after the discovery of the positron (it’s like an electron, but it has a positive charge). This was before even primitive computers such as the ENIAC existed. The trouble with positrons is that they immediately annihilate upon contact with electrons, so it really wouldn’t make much sense to build a computer based on these particles.
However, Asimov’s I, Robot is more about software than hardware − rules (Three Laws of Robotics) and how they affect the lives of robots and people. I have tried to be true to this principle in my rendition of Asimov’s classic.
The author welcomes your comments. Please write to him at:
authorhowardssmith@robotpress.net
