Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) Read online

  Even in the second half of the Trilogy, questions of free will raised by the events of the story relate not to Seldon's Plan but to the psychological manipulation of minds such as that effected by the Mule and the Second Foundation psychologists. Nothing in the story happens unless someone makes it happen; the reader is told on several occasions that "Seldon's laws help those who help themselves."

  The Biblical parallel is significant. Psychohistory is no more restrictive of free will than the Judeo-Christian deity. Christians are given free will by an omniscient God; characters in the Trilogy receive free will from an omniscient author, as an act of authorial necessity. At the end of Second Foundation, Seldon's Plan has been restored, events are back on their ordered course, the rise of a new and better Empire to reunite the Galaxy and the creation of a new civilization based on mental science seem assured. The Second Foundation psychologists have won; that victory, benevolent as it seems, may have ominous undertones, but if we are to accept Asimov as being as benevolent as he is omniscient, the reader can assume that the benefits of mental science will be available to everyone.

  Determinism, then, is not what the Trilogy is about. The structure of the episodes is anti-deterministic, for the outcome of each critical event is not inevitable. The basic appeal of the stories is problem-solving, an essential replacement for the more customary narrative drives of action and romance. Each episode presents a problem, in a way much like the formal detective story, and challenges the reader to find a solution. In the first published story, "Foundation," the solution is withheld until the next episode, a strategy of Asimov's to ensure a sequel (published in the very next issue) that almost accidentally reinforced the problem-solving quality of the stories. For the reader, the fascination lies in the presentation of clues, the twists of plot, and the final solution that makes sense of it all. In the final episode of "Foundation," Jorane Sutt says to Hober Mallow, "There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings." He might have been speaking of Asimov.

  The series of searches for the Second Foundation, the various clues pursued to inconclusive ends, the near revelation by Ebling Mis of its location (though he may have been wrong), and the succession of incorrect solutions shows Asimov imitating the methods of the detective novel. In response to Campbell's challenge, he later shaped those kinds of devices more obviously into science-fiction detective novels and stories beginning with The Caves of Steel (serialized in 1953). In the final chapter of Second Foundation, with its succession of " `I've got the answer' `No, I've got the answer'" reversals, Asimov no doubt is parodying the concluding scenes of a thousand formal detective novels.

  But even the problem-solving aspect of the Trilogy does not account completely for the success of the series. Other aspects, more peripheral to the central structure, might be cited: the characters, for instance, though scorned by some critics, engage the reader's sympathies. They are similar to each other, it is true, mostly by being men and women of action. They do not let events happen to them (as might seem more appropriate if the theme of the Trilogy actually was determinism); they make things happen. The Trilogy, after all, is a history, and history is about people who have made things happen. The characters may not be strongly differentiated Salvor Hardin, Limmar Ponyets, Hober Mallow, and Lathan Devers may seem interchangeable but they may be as differentiated as the personages in most histories. Men and women of action, in and out of fiction, are much alike. Clearly Asimov's characters are adequate for the purposes they serve in the Trilogy.

  Asimov also provided some of his philosophy of history in his storytelling. History fascinated him. He almost took his graduate degree in history instead of chemistry; his customary method of developing both his fiction and his non-fiction was historical; and a number of his non-fiction books are concerned with history (of his 470 books Asimov listed 19 under "history"). Some of what Asimov says about history comes from his model, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; little seems to derive from Marxism or whatever impressions of it were in the air when the Trilogy was being conceived and created, and a good deal seems to be Asimov's own observations. Government, for instance, never is what it appears to be: in the Trilogy figureheads and powers behind the throne proliferate. Every innovation rigidifies into sterile tradition, which must, in turn, be overturned: the grip of the Encyclopedists, for instance, must be broken by Salvor Hardin, and the political power of the Mayor must be broken, in its turn, by Hober Mallow, and the economic power of the Traders must then be modified by the incorporation of the independent traders, and so on. There is, to be sure, a narrative necessity to keep the series going, but the reader cannot ignore the inevitable feeling of continual change, which seems a philosophy: one generation's solution is the next generation's problem. Asimov probably would have agreed that this is the case in real life.

  On top of this, and perhaps the most important aspect of Asimov's writing, was his rationalism. More than any other writer of his time (the Campbell era, as Asimov called it) or even during the twenty years between Campbell's death and Asimov's, Asimov spoke with the voice of reason. Avoid the emotional, the irrational, the Trilogy says. Avoid the obvious military reaction to threats of military attack, says Salvor Hardin. Do not throw the slender military might of the Foundation against the great battleships of the Empire, says Hober Mallow, whose continual retreat before the attacking Korellian forces is considered treason.

  Rationality is the one human trait that can always be trusted, the Trilogy says, and the reader comes to believe that that was Asimov's conviction as well. Sometimes rational decisions are based on insufficient information and turn out to be wrong, or the person making the decision is not intelligent enough to see the ultimate solution rather than the partial one, but nothing other than reason works at all. Even the antagonists are as rational as the protagonists and therefore cannot legitimately be called villains. In the stories that Asimov liked best, rationality does not triumph over irrationality or emotion but over other rationality, as in the conflict between the Mule and Bayta (though the Mule is betrayed as well by an element of emotion unnatural to him), between the Mule and the First Speaker, and between the Second Foundation and the First Foundation.

  Asimov's confidence in rationality must have been comforting to him not only in personal terms but in terms of the times when the stories were written and published. He was only twenty-one when he started writing "Foundation" and he had passed through a difficult adolescence. He was still ill at ease with women and society in general, and he was writing largely for maladjusted teenagers who had sublimated their sexual and social frustrations into various kinds of intellectual activity, including the reading of science fiction. Asimov's belief that reason could solve all problems not only was desirable, it may have been psychologically necessary. Moreover, events in the larger world, though they did not encourage a belief in the rationality of human behavior, nourished the hope that rationality would prevail. The United States had pulled itself out of the incomprehensibility of the Depression only to plunge itself into the insanity of war. Just as the theory of psychohistory was for Asimov a way to make Hitler's persistent victories bearable no matter what initial successes the Nazis managed, the logic of history (psychohistory) would eventually bring about their defeat so reason eventually had to prove its supremacy. Later, as the Foundation stories began to appear, the success of the Allies, aided by products of scientific laboratories, confirmed that earlier faith.

  The Trilogy also offers more isolated insights into history, politics, and human behavior. Often these surface in the epigraphs that precede most of the chapters in the form of excerpts from the 116th edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica published in 1020 F.E. (Foundational Era) by the Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Co., Terminus. But Asimov also included some illuminating concepts within the text of the stories. "It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works," he wrote in "The Mayors." "Never let yo
ur sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right," he had Limmar Ponyets say in "The Traders.'' "Seldon assumed that human reaction to stimuli would remain constant," Mis comments in "The Mule."

  The statement by Mis sums up Asimov's own attitude toward character. His characters have been criticized for being "one-dimensional," and unchanged from contemporary people by the passage of time and the altered conditions in which they live. But this occurs by choice rather than from lack of skill or failure of observation. Asimov divided "social science fiction" into two widely different types of stories: "chess game" and "chess puzzle." The chess game begins with "a fixed number of pieces in a fixed position" and "the pieces change their positions according to a fixed set of rules." In a chess-puzzle story, the fixed set of rules applies but the position varies. The rules by which the pieces move (common to both types) may be equated, Asimov says, "with the motions [emotions?] and impulses of humanity: hate, love, fear, suspicion, passion, hunger, lust and so on. Presumably these will not change while mankind remains Homo sapiens." Basic human characteristics remain the same.

  Asimov may not be right, but his choice is defensible against the opposing Marxist view that character will change when society becomes more rational. In addition, the Trilogy is concerned not with the revolution, or even the evolution, of character but with the evolution of an idea. There is also a strategic narrative value in the maintenance of contemporary characteristics. The recognizability of characters reflects that the characters accept their world as commonplace. This is the technique that Heinlein perfected as an alternative to the "gee whiz!" school of writing about the future, which introduced a character from the past in order to elicit his wonder at each new future marvel.

  A story of the future is a lot like a historical novel, and its problems are similar to those of a translation from a foreign language. Verisimilitude always is desirable, but how much and of what kind? Asimov chose what might be called the verisimilitude of feeling over the verisimilitude of language or of character, just as a historical novelist or a translator might choose the flavor of the original over a literal representation. Science-fiction stories about changes in humanity or its language have been written, but the Trilogy is not one of them and does not pretend to be.

  Asimov creates a sense of reality in another way: by choosing appropriate but unfamiliar names for characters, objects, and processes. Every name seems foreign yet credible. The science-fiction reader values this kind of invention above subtle differentiations in character. The non-science-fiction reader often finds "the funny names" puzzling at best, off-putting at worst. "Psychohistory" has proved so apt a name that it has been picked up as terminology for an academic discipline, though not, to be sure, the discipline Asimov had in mind. The names of characters are subtly altered, by changing the spelling, or dropping or rearranging letters, to suggest evolution within continuity, and the shifts increase as the series progresses: Hari Seldon leads to Hober Mallow leads to Han Pritcher leads to Bail Channis and eventually to Arkady Darell. Possibly only Heinlein was Asimov's superior in creating future societies, though several other writers have been better with names.

  Asimov, however, was the master of the epigraph. Models of imitation, clarity, and dramatization, they offer some preview of his later skill at science popularization. The epigraphs serve as a medium for exposition, which became increasingly burdensome as the series continued a long essay Arkady writes for school in "Search by the Foundation" serves this function (and also convinced Asimov that the series had to end there) but which helped Asimov provide essential back-ground information. They also provide a framework that puts events into context and lends to the structure the verisimilitude of a future perspective.

  The final virtue of the Trilogy, and perhaps the most important to its extended popularity, is its exhaustive treatment of an idea. That idea was not psychohistory or even determinism: it was the Foundations.

  Each story examined one aspect of the Foundations and their relative positions in the Galaxy and in the events happening around them. In "The Psychohistorians," for instance, the problem for the Foundation is how to persuade the Empire to let the Foundation be set up on Terminus and how to persuade 100,000 Encyclopedists and their families to leave the comfort and security of Trantor for the rigors and uncertainties of the frontier. This problem, of course, is concealed until the conclusion, even until after the resolution. "The Encyclopedists" presents the next problem: how is the Foundation to survive the power of the barbarians that surround Terminus as the Empire slowly begins to lose its control of the periphery? The first solution is to play each group of barbarians against the others; the second, to supply the barbarians with atomic energy within a religious framework centered around Terminus.

  In "The Mayors" the problem has become: what will happen to the Foundation when the barbarians are completely equipped with atomic weapons and are restless to use them? The answer: the priests of the scientific religion will not permit an attack on Terminus. In "The Traders" the question has changed to how Foundation hegemony will spread once the religious framework is recognized as a political tool of the Foundation. The answer is: by trade. Economic motivations can succeed where religion fails. Sometimes two problems converge in one story, as in "The Merchant Princes.'' The political and religious structures have rigidified into useless tradition, and the location of the Foundation has been discovered by the Empire. The solutions to those problems are that the Traders seize political power and that war against the Foundation can only succeed in making an attacker poorer.

  Each problem solved strengthens the Foundation and its progress toward ultimate reunification of the Galaxy, but each solution contains the seed of a new problem. In "The General," the Foundation faces the problem of its own success, which has made it an attractive prize for the Empire. But it is protected by the essential nature of a decaying Empire a weak Emperor cannot permit strong generals. In "The Mule" and its sequel, "Search by the Mule," Asimov strikes out in a new direction. With its victory by default over the Empire, the Foundation has no clear challenges to the eventual extension of its power throughout the Galaxy and the final realization of Seldon's Plan. But what about the unexpected developments that Seldon's psychohistorical equations could not predict because they involve elements of the unique, like the genetic accident that creates the Mule and his unpredictable and Plan-destroying power? The answer: the Second Foundation.

  Asimov planted mention of the Second Foundation in the first Foundation story, not because he had anticipated the function of the Second Foundation but as a safety measure, a strategic reserve in case something developed in the plot and he needed a way out. In "The Mule," the Second Foundation emerges as a group of psychologists to whom Seldon's Plan was entrusted and who were charged with responsibility for protecting it. Finally, in "Search by the Foundation," two new questions are raised by the revelation of the Second Foundation: what will happen to the Foundation now that it knows of the existence of the Second Foundation and suspects its custody of Seldon's Plan (which destroys one of the basic requirements for the effectiveness of psychohistorical predictions), and what can the Second Foundation do to restore the previous condition and rescue Seldon's Plan? The answer is dual-purpose: the Second Foundation deceives the Foundation into believing that it has located and destroyed the Second Foundation. In "There's Nothing Like a Good Foundation,'' Asimov wrote that "in designing each new Foundation story, I found I had to work within an increasingly constricted area, with progressively fewer and fewer degrees of freedom. I was forced to seize whatever way out I could find without worrying about how difficult I might make the next story. Then when I came to the next story, those difficulties arose and beat me over the head." The difficulties are not apparent: each story seems designed to arise out of the earlier ones, and each develops with an air of inevitability appropriate to psychohistory itself. But it is critical folly to assume that the Trilogy is an organic whole, conceived before it was begun, crafted in accordan
ce with some master plan, and produced in full consideration of the contribution of each part to the whole. External and internal evidence demonstrate that Asimov moved from story to story, solving the problems of each as they arose and discovering, on his own or with the help of Campbell, new problems on which to base the next stories. The Trilogy succeeds by its ingenuity, and it is a tribute to Asimov's ingenuity and cool rationality that it seems so complete, so well integrated.