Re: Arthur C. Clarke question

cgoodin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Chuk Goodin) writes:

>On 13 Mar 2008 23:22:56 -0400, nebusj-@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Joseph Nebus) wrote:

>>	I recall Asimov once accidentally rewriting pretty much the 
>>whole of a very early and poor short-short and having it turn out to 
>>be a slightly more polished but not good short-short, mostly because 
>>he forgot the first had ever existed.  

>Was the first one his own work?

>I remember him writing somewhere that he'd accidentally plagiarized 
>something once, basically rewriting someone else's story that he'd read, 
>then forgotten. I think it all ended well, though.

	Fair question, and yeah, there was that Asimov story that turned 
out to be (possibly) unintentional plagiarism.  But no, I'm fairly sure 
that Asimov wrote a story which turned out to duplicate an earlier one 
he'd thoroughly forgotten. 

	My vague recollection is that 'Day of the Hunters' was one of 
the versions, although looking over the Jenkins list of Asimov stories 
I don't see any that stand out as being too close to it.  Maybe it was 
'Darwinian Poolroom' instead.  

	(On the other hand, Asimov did write about 400 billion stories, 
mostly Black Widowers or Union Club tales, in which elaborate schemes are 
cooked up to pass a couple of bits of information with an enormous risk 
of failure or garbled transmission.  Or at least it seems like he wrote 
that many.)  

-- 
								Joseph Nebus
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