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

by James Gunn

  The Mule uses the kidnapping of his Fool as a pretext for an attack on the Foundation. He wins battle after battle until finally, at the very moment a projection of Seldon appears in the Time Vault with comments that reveal Seldon had not foreseen this crisis, the Mule conquers Terminus itself. Toran, Bayta, scientist Ebling Mis, and Magnifico escape to Haven, but it too comes under attack. Before Haven falls, the four are sent to Trantor so that Mis can search the ancient Imperial Library for information that might lead to the Second Foundation and then to its help against the Mule. Trantor is in ruins, virtually destroyed by a rebellious general. The four escapees are captured by the heir to what is left of the Empire. Magnifico kills him with the aid of a music-and-image-creating machine called a Visi-Sonor, and they escape to the Library, where an agricultural community has grown up. Mis searches the records, but he is ill and visibly growing weaker. On the verge of death, as he is about to reveal the location of the Second Foundation, Mis is shot and killed by Bayta. Bayta has decided that Magnifico, the Fool, is really the Mule. His mysterious advantage is his ability to adjust people's emotions. Everywhere they have taken him he has sown despair, has adjusted the minds of key leaders to surrender at the crucial moment, and has pushed Mis to discover the location of the Second Foundation so that he can remove that threat as well. His critical mistake was to leave Bayta unadjusted. She had been the only person who had liked him without his interference, and he had valued too highly this natural feeling. The novella ends with the Mule's temporary defeat but his continued determination to find the Second Foundation. Whatever his victories, however, they cannot last beyond his death because, like his namesake, the Mule is sterile.

  "Search by the Mule" ("Now You See It . . ." in the January 1948 Astounding) begins the third volume of the Trilogy, titled Second Foundation, which consists of two novellas. "Search by the Mule" picks up about five years after "The Mule.'' The Mule has consolidated his empire while, through an adjusted Han Pritcher, he has continued his search for the Second Foundation. Now he sends Pritcher out again with the capable but unadjusted Bail Channis. For the first time in the Trilogy, the Second Foundation psychologists make an appearance, discussing the situation. It had been discovered in old records that the Second Foundation had been established at "Star's End." Channis decides that "Star's End" must refer to a world called Tazenda, which is isolated in space by a dark cloud of interstellar gas. Pritcher and Channis land on Rossem, a poor, cold, agricultural planet in Tazenda's sphere of influence. After some inquiries, Pritcher accuses Channis of treason to the Mule: Channis found the location of the Second Foundation too easily. But the Mule arrives, having traced their ship, and reveals that he has used Channis, whom he suspects of being a Second Foundation agent, to lead him to the Second Foundation. He has destroyed Tazenda, the Mule says, but then Channis admits, under pressure, that Rossem, not Tazenda, is the location of the Second Foundation. The First Speaker, the leading psychologist of the Second Foundation, enters and reveals that Channis was convinced that Rossem was the location but that was false. The Mule has been lured to Rossem; in his absence Second Foundation psychologists can sow rebellion on Kalgan. The Mule realizes how he has been tricked, and in his moment of lowered defenses the First Speaker enters his mind and reconstructs his memories, eliminating the Mule as a danger.

  "Search by the Foundation" (". . . And Now You Don't" in Astounding, November, December 1949, January 1950) concludes the Trilogy. It opens about seventy years after the end of "Search by the Mule," as a group of conspirators gather in the home of Dr. Toran Darell on Terminus at the instigation of a new arrival named Pelleas Anthor. They believe that people in key positions in the Empire may be under the mental control of the Second Foundation. Such control would show up on encephalographs. To be controlled in this way would be an intolerable limitation of these people's freedom. The conspirators are determined to locate the Second Foundation. One of them, a librarian named Homir Munn, is sent to Kalgan to search the Mule's old palace for information. Unknown to him, he carries a stowaway who had eaves-dropped on the conversation, Darell's romantic, fourteen-year-old daughter Arcadia, more familiarly known as Arkady, who is Bayta's granddaughter.

  Meanwhile, the First Speaker and an apprentice for speakerhood discuss Seldon's Plan, which contemplated the development of a future civilization based on mental science and led by Second Foundation psychologists. Now that citizens know about the existence of the Second Foundation, they have begun to believe that it will prevent all mishaps. They are failing to exercise normal initiative; the predictions of Seldon's Plan may not work out. Another group is actively fighting the idea of a ruling class of psychologists. The Second Foundation has had to adopt a project with a low probability of success, to preserve the Plan and themselves, by working with individuals rather than large groups. Arkady proves helpful on Kalgan by persuading Lord Stettin's mistress, Lady Callia, that Munn intends to prove that the Second Foundation does not exist and that Lord Stettin, the ruler of Kalgan, is destined to unite the Galaxy instead of the Foundation. Stettin permits Munn's research in the old palace, but also decides to marry Arkady. Callia helps Arkady escape, and Arkady suspects that Callia is a member of the Second Foundation. Arkady is almost captured at the spaceport on Kalgan but is saved by Preem Palver and his wife, trading representatives of their farm cooperative on Trantor. They take Arkady back to Trantor. Stettin attacks the Foundation and forces its fleets back to its original group of planets. In a final battle, however, Stettin's fleet is wiped out.

  The conspirators gather once more in Darell's home, each claiming the solution to the mystery of the Second Foundation. Munn says there is no Second Foundation, but an encephalograph reveals that his mind has been tampered with. Anthor says that the Second Foundation must be on Kalgan, where everything, including the tampering with Munn's mind, has happened. Then Darell reveals a message from Arkady: "A circle has no end." From this he has deduced that the Second Foundation is on Terminus itself. He has invented a device that creates Mental Static and renders helpless minds capable of advanced mental science. Anthor collapses when it is turned on. Other Second Foundation members on Terminus will be sought out and neutralized.

  In the final chapter the First Speaker reveals to the apprentice that his plan has worked. Fifty men and women of the Second Foundation have been sacrificed, but the Foundation is convinced that the Second Foundation has been destroyed, and Seldon's Plan has been restored. The Second Foundation is actually located on Trantor, where its psychologists are simple farmers. Why is the Second Foundation described as being at "the opposite end of the Galaxy"? From its periphery, the opposite end of a spiral is its center, and the Galaxy is a double spiral. Moreover, in social terms the opposite end of the extremities is the heart, and Trantor was once the heart of the Empire. What about "Star's End"? An old saying goes: "Stars end at Trantor." The First Speaker is Preem Palver.

  Asimov abandoned The Foundation Trilogy with "Search by the Foundation" because it had grown too difficult to bring the reader up to date on everything and because he was tired of it. In his autobiography he reveals that while he was writing "Search by the Foundation" (". . . And Now You Don't") he "disliked it intensely and found working on it very difficult." Even Campbell's persistent demand for open endings that would allow sequels could not persuade Asimov. The future history that had envisioned one thousand years of Seldon's Plan ended after less than four hundred (more than thirty years later Asimov agreed to write a fourth volume which became Foundation's Edge and Asimov's first bestseller, and then Foundation and Earth, but that is a story for Chapter 8). Nevertheless, Asimov used his concept of a humanly inhabited Galaxy, of an outward movement of humanity from Earth until Earth itself was forgotten, and of the rise of an Empire and its eventual fall as the background for half a dozen later novels and several dozen shorter stories, and eventually found a way to tie nearly all his novels into a self-consistent future.

  Other authors have used the background as well,
taking it not so much directly from the Trilogy as from the assumptions about the future (to which the Trilogy contributed) that became the shared property of a generation of science-fiction writers. What author Jack Williamson called "the central myth of the future" begins with the expansion of humanity into the galaxy in the same way that Europe ventured forth in the Age of Exploration to discover and then to colonize the rest of the world. The myth was not original with Asimov; it was developed by many writers, particularly by E.E. "Doc" Smith and Edmond Hamilton in the magazine period. But Asimov said it best and most completely in his series of stories published in Astounding between 1942 and 1949. It has since been used by writers as diverse as Jerry Pournelle and Ursula K. Le Guin. Moreover, Asimov described a totally human galaxy, partly to avoid Campbell's prejudice against relationships between humans and aliens in which the humans were inferior. In some ways readers may have preferred an all-human galaxy.

  This, however, does not completely explain the Trilogy's popularity. The reader must delve into what the series is about and how its narrative is handled.

  One significant aspect of the series is Asimov's invention of psycho-history, with its implications for determinism and free will. Psychohistory was put together out of psychology, sociology, and history not hard sciences, which Campbell had a reputation for preferring, but at best soft sciences: a behavioral science, a social science, and a discipline that has difficulty deciding whether to define itself as a social science or a humanity. Actually, as Asimov pointed out in his 1953 essay "Social Science Fiction," Campbell had encouraged social science fiction from his first days as an editor. Moreover Campbell had pointed out the logical basis for using the soft sciences for the kind of extrapolation he preferred, in his 1947 essay for Lloyd A. Eschbach's Of Worlds Beyond "The Science of Science Fiction Writing":

  To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction if they're logically explained but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and parapsychology are, today, not true sciences: therefore instead of forecasting future results of applications of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology.

  Psychohistory is the art of prediction projected as a science; later it might have been called "futurology" or "futuristics." The ability to predict or foresee the future has been a persistent notion in science fiction almost from the genre's beginnings. Hundreds of stories have been based on various mechanisms for doing it and the various out-comes of attempts. One might cite as examples Robert Heinlein's first story, "Life-Line," Lewis Padgett's "What You Need,'' and James Blish's "Beep." What Asimov brought to the concept was the science of probabilities as a mechanism, the element of uncertainty for suspense, and the philosophical question "What is worth predicting?" for depth. His method statistical probability prohibited the prediction of any actions smaller than those of large aggregates of population. Four decades earlier, incidentally, H.G. Wells had told the Sociological Society that a science of sociology was impossible because everything in the universe was unique and sociologists could not deal with sufficiently large numbers to handle those things statistically, as physicists did. Asimov could deal with large numbers, and he defined psychohistory, in the epigraph quoted from the Encyclopedia Galactica for Section 4 of "The Psychohistorians," as "that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli. . . . Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment. . . . A further necessary assumption is that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random." Finally, Asimov answered the question "What is worth predicting?" Not individual human lives but a great event whose consequences might be avoided, such as the fall of an empire and the dark ages of barbarism, war, hunger, despair, and death that would follow.

  Asimov was as open about the origins of the Foundation stories as he was about the other details of his life and writing. One of the charms about the man was his openness. Well, openness may be understatement: after 1962 all of Asimov's anthologies and collections of stories were strung together like ornaments on the string of his life story, culminating in Opus 100, Opus 200, Opus 300, his 640,000-word autobiography and his 260,000-word memoirs.

  In his autobiography and a piece he contributed to the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin in 1967 titled "There's Nothing Like a Good Foundation," Asimov traced the idea for the Foundation stories to a 1941 subway ride when he was going to visit Campbell at his Street & Smith office. Searching for an idea, Asimov looked down at a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan plays he was reading, opened it to lolanthe, and saw a picture of the fairy queen kneeling in front of Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards. His mind wandered to soldiers, to a military society, to feudalism, to the breakup of the Roman Empire. When he reached Campbell's office, he told the editor that he was planning to write a story about the breakup of the Galactic Empire. "He talked and I talked and he talked and I talked and when I left I had the Foundation series in mind." Exactly what Asimov had in mind may affect the critic's judgment of the work. He had not, for instance, thought out all the different permutations in idea and story; they were built, one on another, as the years passed and the Trilogy developed. But he must have discussed with Campbell the implications of prediction. Some critics have tried to explain "psychohistory" on philosophical bases, as ''the science that Marxism never became" (Wollheim) or "the vulgar, mechanical, debased version of Marxism promulgated in the Thirties" (Elkins). Elkins also related the Trilogy's enduring popularity to its fatalism, which "accurately sizes up the modern situation."

  People do talk a great deal about determinism in the Trilogy. When Bel Riose is informed by Ducem Barr of Seldon's predictions, he says, "Then we stand clasped tightly in the forcing hand of the Goddess of Historical Necessity?" But Barr corrects him: "Of Psycho-Historical Necessity." And Riose is defeated, apparently, by what seem like Seldon's inexorable laws.

  Psychohistory had its origins not in Marxism (Asimov has called Wollheim's speculation "reading his bent into me," for Asimov had "never read anything about it") but in John Campbell's ideas about symbolic logic. Symbolic logic, if further developed, Campbell told the young Asimov in their first discussion, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind that human actions would be predictable. Campbell more or less forced Asimov to include some references to symbolic logic in the first story, "Foundation" "forced," because Asimov knew nothing about symbolic logic and did not believe, as Campbell insisted, that symbolic logic would "unobscure the language and leave everything clear." Asimov made a comparison to the kinetic theory of gases, ''where the individual molecules in the gas remain as unpredictable as ever, but the average action is completely predictable."

  The spirit of the early stories, however, is determinedly anti-deterministic. If intelligent, courageous, and forceful individuals do not attempt to retrieve the situation, most crises all but one, perhaps will not be resolved satisfactorily. Seldon's predictions, like God's will, are hidden from all the characters except the psychologists of the Second Foundation, as they are from the reader. Seldon's prophecies are revealed only after the fact, and even the solutions that he or others say are obvious are obvious only in retrospect, as in all good histories. At the time, they are not obvious to anyone but Salvor Hardin or Hober Mallow; the reader has no feeling that the crises would have been resolved if persons such as Hardin and Mallow had not been there. Moreover, the predictions of psychohistory are expressed as probabilities, and one of the necessary ingredients of Seldon's Plan, discussed in detail in "Search by the Foundation," is the exercise of normal initiative.

  As a matter of fact, Asimov has the best of both deter
minism and free will. Psychohistory and Seldon's Plan provide the framework for diverse episodes about a variety of characters over a period of four hundred years, and those episodes feature a number of strong-minded individuals seeking solutions to a series of problems as they arise. If determinism alone were Asimov's subject, the Trilogy would reveal characters continually defeated in their attempts to change events, or manipulated like puppets by godlike prophets, or unable to fight the onrushing current of necessity.

  A work in which characters were inexorably defeated by psychohistorical necessity would be so depressing that it would not have remained popular for more than a quarter of a century. Bel Riose is the only character who stares into the face of determinism; only he is frustrated by psychohistorical necessity rather than by the actions of an individual. But in "The General," Bel Riose is not the viewpoint character. The basis of the story is not Riose's predicament but how he is to be stopped, and the resolution does not celebrate the victory of determinism but the survival of the Foundation, even though the efforts of the Foundation are not involved. The reader, whose sympathies are with the Foundation, sees the events as an ally of the Foundation, not as an opponent. The Foundation's unusual power of survival, however, influences both itself and its enemies; it supplies to the Foundation confidence in ultimate victory (which can become overconfidence, and thus a problem), and it discourages the Foundation's attackers (but never enough to eliminate challenges entirely). Asimov seems to be more interested in the psychological impact of Seldon's Plan than in its philosophical implications. Indeed, it is only to those looking from the outside that Seldon's Plan seems like determinism; from within, the Foundation leaders still must find solutions without Seldon's help.