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

by James Gunn

  In my public statements I have to deal with the world as it is which is the world in which irrationality is predominant; whereas in my fiction I create a world and in my world, my created worlds, things are rational. Even the villains, the supposed villains, are villainous for rational reasons. . . .

  You can see for yourself in my autobiography that I had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the world when I was young. To a large extent the world was an enemy world. . . . Science fiction in its very nature is intended to appeal a) to people who value reason and b) to people who form a small minority in a world that doesn't value reason. . . . I am trying to lead a life of reason in an emotional world.

  Asimov, no doubt, still was trying to please his stern father with industry and productivity. Asimov would have been the first to admit it. He also would have said that it didn't matter how the past had shaped him. He was satisfied to be what he was: a claustrophile, an acrophobe, a compulsive writer. When he was a teenager, people complained about his eccentricities: his walking home from the library with three books, reading one and holding one under each arm; his love of cemeteries; his constant whistling. Their complaints didn't bother him (though he did, when asked, stop whistling in the cemetery). "I had gathered the notion somewhere that my eccentricities belonged to me and to nobody else and that I had every right to keep them." He added, "And I lived long enough to see these eccentricities and others that I have not mentioned come to be described as `colorful' facets of my personality."

  He ended up rationalizing everything that had happened to him; he was a rational man who knew that the past cannot be changed, it can only be understood. Moreover, the things that he became were rewarded by the world. He had his many triumphs. Scientists applauded his science books: Professor George G. Simpson of Harvard called him "one of our natural wonders and national resources." He was guest of honor and toastmaster at World Science Fiction Conventions. He won Hugos and Nebulas, was named a Grand Master by his fellow science-fiction writers, and, perhaps best of all, John Campbell told him, "You are one of the greatest science-fiction writers in the world."

  As a rational man, Asimov knew that the present must be accepted, and as a rational man, he knew that what he was was an excellent thing to be. So the world said, and so he agreed. That life of reason found its expression in his fiction as well as his non-fiction. How it developed and how it expressed itself can be found in the following pages.

  2 The Foundations of Science Fiction

  The foundations of science fiction were constructed in the science-fiction magazines created by various entrepreneurs from the mid-1920s to 1950. Today the influence of those magazines has been diminished by alternative methods of publication: hardcover and paperback books, original anthologies, films and television, comic magazines, even comic strips, which seem to be making a comeback after the original Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon days.

  Even contemporary writers who are scornful of the magazines, of the Gernsback ghetto and the Campbell cabal, are writing fiction influenced by the concepts created in the magazines and by the conversations carried on by means of stories and letters and articles that led to a kind of consensus view of the future and the conventions by which it could be described. Reaction has developed, but reaction itself is a kind of tribute to the power of earlier visions.

  Science fiction was built on individual works as well: on E.E. "Doc" Smith's galaxy-spanning spaceships and John W. Campbell's mightiest machines, on Murray Leinster's first contacts with the unknown and Robert Heinlein's future history, on A.E. van Vogt's supermen and Isaac Asimov's robots. And on Asimov's Galactic Empire.

  The Foundation Trilogy is a basic work upon which a vast structure of stories has been built. Its assumptions provided a solid footing for a whole city of fictional constructions. The way in which it was created, then, and the way in which it came to prominence may be useful examples of the process by which science fiction was shaped in the magazines.

  The Trilogy, which actually consists of five novelettes and four novellas, has received many tributes to its importance. The 1966 World Science Fiction Convention awarded it a Hugo as "the greatest all-time science fiction series." Donald Wollheim, in his The Universe Makers, called it "the point of departure for the full cosmogony of science-fiction future history. Asimov attributed his success as a writer to it. It continues to be reprinted; it continues to sell well Asimov did not keep accurate track, but he checked up a few years ago and found that by 1978 it had sold more than two million copies. It may be the best-known science-fiction work of recent times, at least among those works defined as hard-core science fiction. And it eventually transformed Asimov, to his surprise, into a writer of bestsellers.

  On the other hand, critics have attacked the Trilogy for a variety of reasons. Professor Charles Elkins of Florida International University called it "seriously flawed," "stylistically . . . a disaster," its characters "undifferentiated and one-dimensional," and Asimov's ear for dialogue "simply atrocious." Its ideas, Elkins concluded, are vulgar, mechanized, debased . . . Marxism." Although not all the criticism is so negative, Elkins's comments are typical not only of Asimov's critics but of what literary critics commonly say about magazine science fiction as a body of literature.

  Asimov himself has described the Trilogy as "in the older tradition of the wide-spanning galactic romance." But, strangely, the series contains little action and almost no romance. The stories offer no maidens in need of rescue and no involvement of man and woman in an emotional relationship. What do a couple on a honeymoon talk about? Politics. As for action, all of it takes place off stage, as in Greek drama. The Foundation galaxy contains a crumbling empire, decadent emperors, rebellious subject worlds, frontier hardship, and several major space wars that involve the destruction of several planets. But there are only three acts of violence, two of them in the same story.

  How to explain the continuing popularity of the Trilogy? Why has the Foundation become a foundation? The student of science fiction who can understand the appeal and influence of the series may understand much that differentiates science fiction from other kinds of literature, and something about the basic appeal of Campbellian science fiction. The failure to provide adequate answers to these questions is the central problem of scholarship about science fiction. The circumstances of creation, for instance, may provide some measure of understanding, but much contemporary scholarship chooses to ignore such ephemeral issues, preferring to apply to science fiction the same timeless criteria applied to Henry James or William Faulkner or John Updike.

  Another view might argue not for lesser standards but for different standards, for more useful standards. How can traditional criticism understand the Trilogy, for instance, if it does not take into consideration that it was a series written for one to two cents a word by a part-time writer for the readers of a single science-fiction magazine with a strong-willed editor over a period of years in which the author aged from twenty-one to twenty-eight?

  Most traditional criticism consists of textual analysis. In magazine science fiction, textual analysis finds little to work with. The important aspects of science fiction are the characteristics that transcend the text. The first of these is narrative. When the Trilogy was being published in Astounding Science Fiction, piece by piece, the story was the thing; if not the whole thing, at least the main thing. An entertaining style, a bit of wit, characters who had some resemblance to real people could be added, but those elements were not essential. And sometimes they were handicaps, as in the case of Stanley Weinbaum, whose work, relatively more stylish and with more realistic people than other writers of his time, was more successful after his death than in the brief year and a half in which he tried to sell his stories to the magazines.

  Story in The Foundation Trilogy is plentiful. Events move on a grand scale, beginning with the approaching dissolution of a galactic empire that has ruled 25 million planets inhabited by humans who spread out from Earth, although they have long forgotten th
eir origin. The Empire has brought 12,000 years of peace, but now, according to the calculations of a psychologist named Hari Seldon, who has used a new science for predicting mass behavior called "psychohistory," the Empire will fall and be followed by 30,000 years of misery and barbarism. Seldon sets up two Foundations, one of physical scientists and a Second Foundation of psychologists (about which nothing more is heard until the last book of the Trilogy), at "opposite ends of the Galaxy" to shorten the oncoming dark ages to only a thousand years. The Foundation Trilogy covers the first four hundred years of that interregnum and tells how the Foundation meets one threat to its existence after another and alone, or with the help of the Second Foundation, preserves Seldon's Plan.

  Into this overall pattern fit the individual stories. Foundation, the first book of the Trilogy, consists of five novelettes. The first, "The Psychohistorians," was written specially for the book version that first appeared in 1951. The action takes place on Trantor, the administrative center of the Empire, where 40 million bureaucrats and their families inhabit a world entirely covered with buildings and tunneled a mile deep into the surface. The viewpoint character is Gaal Dornick, a young psychohistorian from a distant planet who arrives on Trantor to work with Seldon and is immediately plunged into intrigue that culminates in the trial of Seldon for treason because his calculations predict the fall of the Empire. Seldon defends the accuracy of his prediction and persuades his judges that he and the Empire will be better off if he is allowed to set up his Foundation on the planet Terminus, at the edge of the Galaxy, in order to compile a great encyclopedia that will contain all human knowledge. At the end, however, Seldon reveals to Dornick that he has manipulated the accusation of treason, the trial, and everyone involved in it in order to precipitate the crisis and persuade his 100,000 Encyclopedists and their families to establish his Foundation on Terminus.

  The second story, "The Encyclopedists" (called "Foundation" in the magazine version that launched the series in the May 1942 issue of Astounding), takes place fifty years later. Terminus is metal poor but thriving with technology through the efforts of the scientists settled there. Outlying provinces of the Empire are being taken over by ambitious local rulers. One ruler, in a region called Anacreon, has decided to annex Terminus. The Encyclopedists on Terminus are too scholarly and impractical to respond with anything but futile force. They need psychologists, but Seldon had allowed none to emigrate. Mayor Salvor Hardin, who studied psychology briefly, is the next best thing, a politician. He notes that Anacreon and a rival system, Smyrno, no longer have atomic power, because civilization begins decaying first on the frontiers. He takes the entire government of Terminus from the Encyclopedists during Seldon's first filmed appearance in a Time Vault. Seldon offered no guidance before a crisis but had prepared commentary so that he could talk to the descendants of the Foundation scientists about the crises he predicted. At this time the long-dead Seldon announces that the Encyclopedia project was a fraud, that he had predicted what was to happen and set up the Terminus colony to influence the course of events without the knowledge of the Encyclopedists. The Encyclopedists' actions had been purposefully limited. Now they no longer have freedom of action, which is the essential condition of a Seldon crisis. A Seldon crisis is a turning point in the Plan he has conceived but never disclosed. Seldon describes their predicament: Terminus is an island of atomic power in an ocean of more primitive energy resources; the solution to the problem is obvious. It is not obvious, however, to anyone but Hardin. The story ends with the Anacreons landing and only Hardin aware that the invaders will be forced to leave Terminus in six months.

  In the third story, "The Mayors" (called "Bridle and Saddle" in the June 1942 Astounding), which takes place thirty years later, the solution to the Seldon crisis in the previous story is revealed. Hardin played one barbarian kingdom against another by rousing their fears that sole possession of Terminus by any of them would make that kingdom too powerful. The other kingdoms forced the Anacreons to leave. Hardin then sold atomic devices to everyone. But he put atomic science, viewed by barbarians as a kind of magic, within a religious framework of faith and miracles. This has enhanced the military capabilities of the barbarians and conferred religious authority upon their rulers. The Anacreons attack Terminus, but the Anacreon priests are offended by the blasphemy against their religious center and lead a rebellion. Seldon appears again in the Time Vault. His warning this time: beware the spirit of regionalism (or nationalism) because it is stronger than spiritual power.

  In ''The Traders" ("The Big and the Little" in Astounding for August 1944) another fifty years have passed. The Foundation on Terminus has absorbed its barbarian neighbors and rules them with its scientific religion. Basically irreligious Traders sell Foundation atomic power and gadgets to other worlds for metals. The Foundation is committed to expansion through the export of its religion. A Trader named Limmar Ponyets is sent to Askone, where machines are sacrilegious, to save another Trader who has been arrested for interfering in local politics (actually, he was a Foundation agent-missionary). Ponyets works upon Askonian greed for gold by jury-rigging a transmutation machine to turn base metals into gold, talks one influential Askonian into accepting the machine, and then blackmails him, with secret films of his blasphemous association, into introducing Foundation machines.

  "The Merchant Princes" (published as "The Wedge" in Astounding, October 1944) takes place about twenty-five years later. Religion has rigidified into faith. The Mayor's office has stultified and even the Traders have grown rich and self-satisfied. One of them, Hober Mallow, is considered a political threat by Jorane Sutt, the Mayor's secretary and the real political power. Mallow is sent to investigate the disappearance of Foundation ships near Korell. When a Foundation missionary seeks refuge in Mallow's ship from a Korellian mob, Mallow surrenders him to the Korellians. This leads to an audience with the Commdor, the hereditary ruler of the "republic," in which Mallow persuades the Commdor that the atomic devices Mallow has to sell will increase the Commdor's profits. Mallow dispenses with the religious paraphernalia "religion," he says, "would cut my profits" and the Korellian economy soon is dependent upon Foundation devices and efficiency. Mallow then traces the Spaceship-and-Sun design on Korellian handguns to Siwenna, where an Empire viceroy wants to carve out a new Empire among the barbarians, and discovers that Siwenna's atomic capabilities have degenerated into ritual. Back on Terminus once more, Mallow is tried for the death of the priest he had turned over to the Korellians but wins his freedom (and is elected mayor) by demonstrating that the so-called priest was an agent of the Korellian secret police. The Korellian republic attacks the Foundation with old Empire atomic cruisers, but the attack slows as Foundation devices on Korell begin to fail. The Korellians rebel in order to regain their prosperity. Mallow predicts future crises in which money power will be as useless as religion.

  The second volume of the Trilogy, titled Foundation and Empire, consists of two novellas. The first, "The General" (called "Dead Hand" in the April 1945 Astounding), takes place about forty years after "The Merchant Princes.'' The central action is the attempt by Bel Riose, an ambitious and capable young general for the decaying Empire, to conquer the Foundation, whose reputation for trade and science by now has reached Trantor. The Merchant Princes, the only Foundation leaders, are without ideas about how to repel Riose's attack; they send a young trader, Lathan Devers, in a ship to be captured by Riose. The Emperor becomes suspicious of Riose's request for more ships to attack the Foundation and sends his privy secretary, Brodrig, to investigate. But Brodrig joins Riose with the hope of using Foundation technology to conquer the Empire and restore its glory. Riose's authority on the Foundation is Ducem Barr. Barr and Devers escape in Devers's ship to Trantor with a message that implicates Brodrig in a plot with Riose. Though they are unable to break through bureaucratic barriers to reach the Emperor, they learn, as they are leaving Trantor, that Riose and Brodrig are under arrest. The crisis has resolved itself: a weak general
was no threat to the Foundation and the Emperor would not have tolerated a strong general lest he seize the throne. Only the combination of a strong Emperor and a strong general could endanger the Foundation, but a strong Emperor remains strong by permitting no strong subjects. Even a strong Emperor who was also a general could not risk engaging himself in foreign wars for fear of rebellion springing up in his absence. Under any circumstances, the Foundation had to win out.

  "The Mule" (Astounding, November, December 1945) takes place 105 years after the execution of Riose and Brodrig. Toran, son of a small trader on Haven, and Bayta, a Foundation citizen who is unhappy about the way the wealthy traders have accumulated power, have just been married. They arrive on Haven to learn that Toran's father and uncle are worried about Foundation tax collectors and are speculating about a new and mysterious conqueror of worlds called "The Mule." The worlds have fallen without battle, the most recent of them the pleasure world Kalgan. Toran and Bayta are sent to Kalgan to stir up a war between the Mule and the Foundation; in the conflict the small traders on Kalgan hope to win their freedom. A disturbance on the beach leads Toran to intervene on behalf of the Mule's court Fool, Magnifico, who has fled the Mule's cruelty. Toran and Bayta then flee, accompanied by Magnifico and Han Pritcher, a Foundation spy.