The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  Seldon says:

  “To that end we have placed you on such a planet and at such a time that in fifty years you were maneuvered to the point where you no longer have freedom of action. From now on, and into the centuries, the path you must take is inevitable. You will be faced with a series of crises, as you are now faced with the first, and in each case your freedom of action will become similarly circumscribed so that you will be forced along one, and only one path. . . .

  “This, by the way, is a rather straightforward crisis, much simpler than many of those that are ahead. To reduce it to its fundamentals, it is this: You are a planet suddenly cut off from the still-civilized centers of the Galaxy, and threatened by your stronger neighbors. You are a small world of scientists surrounded by vast and rapidly expanding reaches of barbarism. You are an island of atomic power in a growing ocean of more primitive energy; but are helpless despite that, because of your lack of metals.

  “You see, then, that you are faced by hard necessity, and that action is forced on you. The nature of that action—that is, the solution to your dilemma—is, of course, obvious!”742

  But Hari Seldon doesn’t reveal this solution. He simply repeats that no matter how convoluted the way may seem, the path has been marked out, and at the end of it lies the Second Galactic Empire. Then his image disappears and the lights come up.

  The only person in the time vault who doesn’t have to begin radically revising his thinking, the one person with any idea of what must be done next, is Salvor Hardin. He doesn’t need someone else to tell him how to cope with this crisis. The first spaceships from Anacreon may be landing on Terminus tomorrow, but the Mayor is confident that he will have them off the planet again within six months.

  The story ends with him affirming to himself: “The solution to this first crisis was obvious. Obvious as hell!”743

  However, he doesn’t reveal the solution, either. And neither does Asimov-the-narrator. The story simply ends with old Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin, fifty years apart in time, both knowing the answer and us not. What a strange, unresolved conclusion!

  But that’s the way that Asimov had it. And John Campbell bought the story. Its acceptance was the sealing of a bargain between them.

  We may remember that Asimov began “Foundation” after resolving that he was going to write one self-sufficient story and only worry about sequels at some later time. But while he was at work on “Foundation,” he changed his mind.

  From the moment that Asimov had first started writing science fiction and submitting it to John Campbell, he had yearned to establish an ongoing story series in Astounding. When “Reason” and “Liar” clicked with the editor, he had thought himself on top of the world. But it was only as he was working on “Foundation” that it finally sank in that to every appearance, Campbell had now committed himself to two different Asimov story series!

  Once this thought had crossed his mind, he couldn’t rest easy until he had confirmed the reality of this dream come true. And leaving the conclusion of “Foundation” dangling was a way of testing whether he did indeed have an open door at Astounding for a new series of stories.

  As Asimov would come to say (with a certain note of wry bemusement at the machinations of his younger self): “The idea was that Campbell would have to let me write the sequel now, and would, moreover, have to take it. How clever of me!”744

  When his scheme worked, and Asimov got Campbell’s acceptance and a check for “Foundation” on September 17, he couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. Just recently, he had received a congratulatory note from Robert Heinlein upon the publication of “Nightfall.” And the very next night following receipt of the check for “Foundation,” he would see the colored streamers of the Northern Lights hanging in the sky over Brooklyn for the first time in his life. At the moment, it seemed to Asimov that he had the universe by the tail.

  There was only one thing that he was failing to take into account. This was the two-way nature of the tacit deal he’d just made. The acceptance of “Foundation” as it stood didn’t merely mean that he had John Campbell in a position where he had to take a sequel and couldn’t back out. It also meant that Asimov had committed himself to sitting down and writing this companion story, and that the editor was expecting to see it delivered pretty damn quick.

  With its incomplete ending, “Foundation” could only be published after the sequel was on hand, so that the two stories could be scheduled for consecutive issues. Together they would make a rough short novel, with a cliff-hanger at the end of the first installment.

  It was a sign of real trust on Campbell’s part, and also a measure of how much he wanted to see this particular series, that he could be willing to buy “Foundation”—a story that as it stood was unpublishable—and be confident that Asimov was not going to let him down. By this time, however, the editor had begun to count Asimov as one of his major new authors, even if he wasn’t yet telling him so.

  But Campbell wouldn’t be shy about telling others. In a letter to Jack Williamson a few weeks after the acceptance of “Foundation,” he was ready to say:

  At present, the strongest science-fiction writers are Heinlein and van Vogt—two brand-new men. Asimov is really pushing upward, too. Reason, I think, is that neither of the first two ever really liked the early scf styles—they were free to roll their own. . . . Asimov, a little later, has actually formed his stuff on theirs.745

  What a mixture of truth and non-truth this was!

  It wasn’t true, for instance, that neither Heinlein nor van Vogt had ever really liked the early science fiction styles. A.E. van Vogt loved A. Merritt’s vivid and sensuous use of language, and had a desire to make great pulp music of his own. And such was Robert Heinlein’s passion for H.G. Wells that in 1935, when he ought to have been in bed recovering from tuberculosis, he’d made a pilgrimage to hear Wells speak in California, and taken along his treasured copy of The Sleeper Awakes for Wells to autograph.

  Neither was it strictly true that Asimov had specifically modeled his work on that of Heinlein and van Vogt. He had certainly learned much from Heinlein, and absorbed something from van Vogt, as well—as these two writers in turn would find stimulation in Asimov’s science fiction. But where fundamental influence was concerned, it would be a lot closer to the mark to suggest that it was the most imaginative (and also the most humanistic) writers of the Thirties—not the least important among them John W. Campbell and Jack Williamson—whom Asimov was really aiming to integrate, answer and extend in his stories.

  At this moment, however, Campbell was less interested in speaking with absolute accuracy than in having a desired effect. And in the letters he was sending to Jack Williamson just now, the editor was attempting to convince this senior SF writer—who was still only 33 years old, one year younger than Heinlein—to rid himself of his remaining Techno Age storytelling habits and make himself over as a modern science fiction writer in the emerging style.

  Williamson took this instruction with good grace, even gratitude. He was aware that science fiction was changing rapidly under Campbell’s direction, and that he wasn’t yet fully in tune with the new, more rigorous SF.

  He replied to Campbell that while living in Los Angeles this past year, he had been paying close attention to Heinlein’s ideas about the writing of science fiction at gatherings of the Mañana Literary Society. And he was trying to apply them now in a novel that he was writing about the Fall of a Galactic Empire: “Bob has been commenting on the inadequate social and cultural backgrounds of Doc’s interstellar stories, and I hope to do something better.”746

  What a wonderful coincidence we have here! It would seem that the very same idea of a failing Galactic Empire had struck two different writers at almost the same exact moment!

  During the summer, Williamson had been writing a novelet, “Breakdown,” which Campbell would make the cover story of the January 1942 Astounding. Here, an empire that encompasses our Solar System has reached its climax and is
now collapsing. But, as its culminating achievement, it has produced a spaceship which will preserve something of human civilization and plant the seed of man among the stars.

  The inventor of this “interstellar cruiser” expects to find every normal star accompanied by its own family of planets, even though planet-formation seems contrary to the processes presently at work in the universe. He accounts for his expectation with an argument expressing a favorite Williamson proposition—that natural law may not be the same in all times and places. He says:

  “The old cosmologists went wrong because they didn’t know their own universe. They thought their constants of mass and energy were really constant. Now we know that the only real constant is the unitron itself—a basic underlying unit common to both the subatomic particles of mass and the quanta of energy. I’ve been working with the unitron equations that treat mass and energy as changing functions of time. They show that our universe was a very different place, five or six billion years ago—a sort of place the old astronomers never imagined. Processes worked then that would be impossible now.”747

  When he finished this novel in August, Williamson was pleased with what he had done. It occurred to him then that he might write another story that was doubly related to it. This novel, the working title of which would be Star of Empire, would follow “Breakdown” in time, depicting the long-term results of its intended seeding of the stars. It would also be a further exploration of the theme of “Breakdown,” in that it would tell of the simultaneous coming to completion and collapse of a human empire that spans the galaxy.

  Here, in two stories, Williamson’s Star of Empire and Asimov’s “Foundation,” we can see an index of change in SF. Back in the Romantic Era, the urge to write a story of science-beyond-science might overcome a rare writer once or twice in a lifetime. But now, in the early Atomic Age, there were so many dedicated writers of science fiction at work on the same set of problems that it was possible for two of them to conceive stories with the same new idea at the very same time.

  And this wasn’t the only occasion during the Golden Age when such a coincidence of inspiration and effort would take place. It was almost as though the One Great Big Writer imagined by van Vogt as producing the science fiction printed in Astounding were tuned in to One Common Wavelength, so that if one writer didn’t express a particular story idea, another surely would.

  In the case of this novel of galactic downfall, Star of Empire, Campbell didn’t undercut Williamson’s effort by informing him that Asimov, too, was at work on the subject, and had already delivered a short novelet, with more soon to follow. Rather, he made a suggestion to Williamson much like the one he had made to Asimov—that he should broaden his canvas and turn his novel into “ ‘the chronological background for a dozen or two dozen shorts and novelettes.’ ”748

  As it happened, at the time that Campbell and Williamson were exchanging their notes concerning Star of Empire and what Williamson must do to make himself into a modern science fiction writer, Asimov had not yet begun to work on the sequel to “Foundation” that he had bound himself to write. Through the remainder of September and most of October, he took it easy and busied himself with other things.

  He registered for the new term at Columbia and settled into a course in food analysis that he needed in order to pass his Ph.D. Qualifying Exams. He was feeling so chipper this fall that his professor received a number of complaints about Asimov’s incessant singing and joking in the lab. Asimov offset these by telling his teacher that although he might make his living by writing, it was chemistry that was the delight of his heart and he just couldn’t help showing it.

  Then, when he did return to the typewriter early in October, it still wasn’t to work on the story that Campbell was waiting to see. Instead, as though he needed to prove to himself that he really did have two different series established with the editor, Asimov devoted the first three weeks of the month to turning out a new robot story entitled “Runaround.”

  In itself, this story would be relatively trivial. An expensive robot named Speedy is being field-tested on Mercury when it gets stuck going round and round a pool of molten selenium in an endless approach/avoidance pattern, and nothing that our old friends Greg Powell and Mike Donovan can do will snap it out of its funk.

  At last, however, Powell puts himself in danger of too much exposure to the Sun, and then calls upon the robot to save him. So powerful is the grip of the First Law—“ ‘A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm’ ”749—that Speedy is compelled to respond, thereby breaking him free of his futile round and restoring him to rationality.

  “Liar!,” Asimov’s previous robot story, had served to show that one of his mechanical men would short out and do nothing at all rather than cause even psychic distress to a human being. Now, in “Runaround,” he demonstrated that his law-abiding robots would ignore previous orders, put aside the impulse to protect themselves, and even overcome mental imbalance in order to save a human being from peril. What firmer assurance of robotic reliability and subservience to man could be asked for?

  As the first story in which the Three Laws of Robotics were explicitly stated, “Runaround” was immediately acceptable to John Campbell. The editor may have hesitated for a full week before he bought “Foundation” with its inconclusive ending, but he put through a check for “Runaround” on the very same day he received the story.

  It was only then, at the beginning of the last week in October 1941, that Asimov finally took up the problem of writing the sequel to “Foundation” that he had been putting off for a month and a half. The new story was called “Bridle and Saddle,” and at the outset it went very smoothly. After just three days of writing, Asimov had accumulated seventeen pages of manuscript.

  In this story, thirty years have passed since the events of “Foundation,” but Salvor Hardin is still Mayor of Terminus City and director of the affairs of the planet. Early in the novelet—in that portion which had just come so easily to Asimov—Hardin at last offers an answer to the question of how the threat posed to Terminus by Anacreon was countered and the first crisis resolved. Hardin says:

  “What I did . . . was to visit the three other kingdoms, one by one; point out to each that to allow the secret of atomic power to fall into the hands of Anacreon was the quickest way of cutting their own throats; and suggest gently that they do the obvious thing. That was all. One month after the Anacreonian force had landed on Terminus, their king received a joint ultimatum from his three neighbors. In seven days, the last Anacreonian was off Terminus.”750

  Ever since then, the Foundation/Terminus has been performing a delicate balancing act. It preserves its existence by making itself indispensable to the rulers of the Four Kingdoms—Anacreon, Smyrno, Konom and Daribow—but not so useful as to allow any one of them to gain advantage over the others.

  Because advanced science is regarded with awe by the ordinary populace of the Four Kingdoms, the Foundation offers its technical, economic, medical and educational assistance under the guise of a new religion of the Galactic Spirit. In each of the Four Kingdoms, the most promising young men are picked out to travel to Terminus and be educated in the priesthood.

  The best of the best are brought within the Foundation as genuine scientific researchers. The second-raters are trained in technology, but not in science, and then sent back to their home worlds to run the new atomic power plants, give support to the current rulers, and minister to the people.

  However, there are political firebrands on Terminus—the Actionist Party—who despise this religion as flummery and perceive the provision of any kind of assistance to the Four Kingdoms as craven truckling that in the long run must be dangerous to the security of the planet. They would prefer to build up the military strength of Terminus and impose their will on the Four Kingdoms before the time comes when the barbarians have learned too much and launch their own inevitable attack.

  Salvor Hardin’s res
ponse to their contempt for his presumed weakness and their transparent greed for power is to repeat his favorite slogan: “ ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ ”751

  This was about as far as Asimov had managed to move “Bridle and Saddle” along when he went to pay one of his regular visits to John Campbell. This time the editor greeted him by finally declaring, “ ‘I want that Foundation story.’ ”752 And that was sufficient to throw Asimov completely off balance.

  For the next five days, nothing he tried would convince the novelet to move ahead another inch. Asimov was completely stymied.

  By a synchronicity of the kind we’ve encountered so often, the other Fall of Galactic Empire story, Star of Empire, was running into trouble during October, too. In fact, so badly stuck did his novel get that Jack Williamson would at last find it necessary to set it aside and go on to other things. A dozen years later, with the aid of a co-writer, James E. Gunn, he would be able to start the story moving again, and it would finally see publication as a book in 1955 under the title Star Bridge.

  Asimov would get over his own block more easily, but by much the same method—bringing an outside judgment to bear on the problem. On Sunday, the second of November, he went to Lower Manhattan to visit his friend and age-mate, Fred Pohl, who at different times had been his editor, his agent, and his collaborator.

  They had first gotten to know each other in 1938 as two of the founding members of the Futurians, a small pack of hungry, bright and radical young New York City SF fans. As it turned out, Asimov was too busy trying to be an “A” student, a candy store clerk, and a science fiction professional all at once to have the time to be an active fan. But his peripheral participation in this group did lead to an abiding friendship with Pohl.