In accepting a story that had been deliberately left unfinished, and then trusting that Asimov would come through promptly with an acceptable sequel, John Campbell had put himself out on the end of a very thin limb. Right now, he had a most urgent need to prove to himself that the high opinion of the youngster he’d been expressing lately was really warranted.
Did “Bridle and Saddle” get the job done? Did it complete “Foundation” satisfactorily and then carry the tale of the rise of New Galactic Empire on another step?
Could Campbell buy this story and put it right into the schedule as it stood, or was he in for even more delay while he waited for Asimov to rewrite?
What if this novelet turned out to be a complete disaster? What was the editor to do then?
As he settled to reading the manuscript, Campbell wasn’t looking for nits to pick. His only concern was for the effectiveness of the whole as a whole: Did the story work, or didn’t it?
However, we ought to be aware that if he had been actively interested in identifying points in “Bridle and Saddle” that deserved to be questioned, he could most certainly have found some. That is, this story, like both of Asimov’s previous important thought experiments, “Reason” and “Nightfall,” was built on a whole series of relatively unlikely premises.
As one instance of this, we are told in “Bridle and Saddle” that atomic power had been forgotten by Anacreon until it was reintroduced by the priests of the Galactic Spirit. And it is further revealed in the course of the story that Anacreon lacks the power of instantaneous interstellar communication.
But if Anacreon didn’t have atomic power or some even more sophisticated mode of propulsion, how was it able to send a fleet of spaceships between the stars to occupy Terminus? And if it doesn’t have the ultrawave relay, or some other system just like it, how does it coordinate its military forces and maintain its control over twenty-five different stellar systems?
We are also informed that right after the conclusion of the events of “Foundation,” a coalition of the other Kingdoms confronted Anacreon and compelled it to withdraw its men and ships from Terminus. Does it really seem likely that on the heels of such a forced retreat, Anacreon’s barbarian rulers—arrogant, small-minded and suspicious at the best of times—would be in any mood to receive “priests” from Terminus bearing some religion newly invented by Salvor Hardin, the architect of their great humiliation? Would they then give this doubtful lot permission to meddle as they pleased in every important aspect of society, or would they hedge them about as tightly as possible with regulations, ordinances and customs, stupidity, inaction and refusal, while carefully scrutinizing their every move? Can we believe that they would be so anxious to have the false prestige lent by halos and flying thrones that they would allow these red-robed intruders to make off with the allegiance of the people in the space of only thirty years?
There are questions that might be asked, too, about the immediate cause of the Foundation’s second crisis, the battle cruiser Wienis. How likely is it that at the conclusion of some great space battle of yesteryear, an Imperial Navy warship two miles long, in readily repairable condition, would have gone unaccounted for, allowed to gently drift out of the realm of human ken and be forgotten among the stars? What are we to suppose happened to its crew?
And further, how probable is it that after being invisible, or misplaced, or nonexistent for three hundred years, this derelict should come floating back into history at precisely the right moment to foment a long-predicted psychohistorical crisis? If this is a random stroke of fortune, it is an altogether marvelous one. Or was it somehow prearranged to happen by Hari Seldon and his gang of psychohistorical guardian angels?
We might also wonder what Prince Regent Wienis could possibly have been thinking about to insist that the people of the Foundation repair this mighty battle cruiser for him so that he may turn right around and attack them with it—and then neglect to oversee and double-check every last detail of the work performed by the Foundation’s technician-priests. It seems strangely trustful of him.
Finally, there is the peculiar periodicity of the crises faced by the Foundation. The fact that one of these coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Scientific Refuge, and the other takes place on the eightieth, makes them appear to have been specially timed to occur by someone with an eye to the calendar and a sense of what dates might seem significant to the yokels of Terminus, and not the result of cosmic and historical forces operating according to their own dynamic. Does Hari Seldon really enjoy that kind of fine control over the course of events?
Of these different points that we’ve raised for possible question in “Bridle and Saddle,” none is wholly impossible or beyond explanation. What we really do need to note, however, is that added all together, they amount to a case that is fully as special in its own way as, say, the unique set of circumstances presented in “Nightfall.”
This wasn’t important to John Campbell. The relative probability or improbability of the various premises of Asimov’s thought experiments didn’t concern him.
What he did care about was the results. As an editor who had a magazine to put out every month, he needed to know whether the story was sound enough to publish. And, as a man with an agenda in his head, he wanted to know if it advanced his program of imagining the establishment of human control over the stars, including the overturning of the force of cyclical history on the galactic scale.
In these matters, Campbell wasn’t disappointed. “Bridle and Saddle” did everything the editor expected of it and more:
It did work as a story, moving along so smoothly and hanging together with such apparent plausibility that—as it was told—it seemed a highly realistic view of the possible human future, particularly when compared with previous galactic stories such as Doc Smith’s Lensman series and Jack Williamson’s “After World’s End.”
And it did advance Campbell’s cause. It rounded off the dangling conclusion of “Foundation,” with its initial problem of ensuring the independent existence of the Scientific Refuge on Terminus in the face of barbarian threat, and then presented a further stage of development in which the local stellar neighborhood gets drawn together to form the nucleus of the greater galactic community to come. That was exactly the sort of thing that Campbell wanted to see.
But this wasn’t all that Asimov’s novelet had to offer the editor. In “Bridle and Saddle,” a crucial Campbellian tenet was restated, refined and extended. Again and again, first in one way and then in another, the story asserted that the fate of mankind isn’t ultimately determined by material objects, but rather by human attitudes, knowledge and states of mind.
We may recall Campbell stating in his March 1938 editorial, six months after assuming control of Astounding: “We presuppose, in these stories, two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that Man can learn it.”
Only a few months later, young Isaac Asimov, who would be John Campbell’s most attentive and diligent pupil, began to sit at the master’s knee and absorb his new beliefs—that humanity can learn and change; that one stage after another of human advance is possible; and that the arrow of future human development points away from matter and toward mind.
Now, in “Bridle and Saddle,” Asimov was handing these ideas back to his teacher, but with an important difference. That difference was Asimov’s sense of the stars as a locus of future human history.
Campbell’s late scientifiction story, “Forgetfulness,” had been visionary in nature, but not historical. It leaped ahead ten million years to show us a glimpse of potential future man—not Wells’s grotesque Big Brain flopping about futilely in a pool filled with nutrient broth, but mental man, outwardly simple and ordinary, even backward, but inwardly mature and masterful. This novelet didn’t have much to say about the details of how we were to get from here to there; it just asserted that it was possible for us to do.
As an early modern science fiction story however,
Asimov’s “Bridle and Saddle” was specifically concerned with the method, process and context that were absent from Campbell’s “Forgetfulness.” Asimov’s story took a much smaller leap into the future—only fifty thousand years—to show us men far more like ourselves than like Campbell’s advanced men of mind as they strive to rise from their current fallen condition to create a New Galactic Empire free of the weaknesses that caused the First Empire to fail. In the dynamics of their struggle, much is revealed.
We can see, for instance, that in the contention between Mayor Salvor Hardin and Prince Regent Wienis which occupies so much of the foreground of “Bridle and Saddle,” Hardin is the representative of the evolutionary power of mind, while Wienis stands for the more rigid and static power of matter.
In the Prince Regent’s frame of reference, the only things that count are brute force and will. He thinks that a two-mile-long spaceship with mighty atom blasts is all the license he needs to seize control of the universe and make everybody else bow down before him and his progeny.
It is intriguing to note that even so dedicated a non-believer as Wienis has been touched by the new transcendence-of-many-names which guides both Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin. The end they desire and the end he desires are one and the same. This becomes clear when the Prince Regent, seeking to influence young King Lepold, suggests to his ward: “ ‘Together we will recreate an empire—not just the kingdom of Anacreon—but one comprising every one of the billions of suns of the Galaxy.’ ”768
However, Wienis resolutely rejects the religious and scientific and psychohistorical pathway that would eventually ready him—or, more likely, some descendant of his—to become a participant in New Galactic Empire. It seems to be his assumption that having a lust for the goal and a willingness to kick aside anything that stands in his way is all the self-preparation he requires to become Emperor of the Galaxy.
But other people are more conscious than he of the personal shortcomings that render him unfit for the job. For instance, Hardin’s personal observer, the high priest of the Galactic Spirit on Anacreon, says of Wienis: “ ‘He’s the most egregious fool on the planet. Fancies himself as a shrewd devil, too, which makes his folly the more transparent.’ ”769
That’s not just one man’s opinion, either. From the beginning, Isaac Asimov tips a wink to the reader over the heads of his characters that there is something definitely lacking about the Prince Regent and his methods. It’s not by accident that this would-be ruler of the universe and his mighty flagship should be blessed with a name insinuating laughable impotence. Who could be expected to take with total seriousness a threat from anybody or anything named “Wienis”?
Not altogether surprisingly, then, under test it proves to be simplicity itself for the Mayor to outthink, outplan and outmaneuver this belligerent but ineffectual deadhead. In the spirit of Hardin’s favorite slogan, we may say that his competence easily wins out over Wienis’s mere violence. Mind over matter.
But that is the way things were set up to be when the Foundation was established with a vast store of human knowledge on a beleaguered peripheral planet completely lacking in natural resources. Clearly, Hari Seldon wanted the people of the Foundation to think their way to the goal, and not to win by overwhelming material force.
By setting forth this order of value and explicitly demonstrating its power in “Bridle and Saddle,” Isaac Asimov was making the auctorial promise that henceforth on the long road to New Galactic Empire, knowledge, skill and insight might always be counted upon to prevail over brute force and ignorance. Human states of mind would determine the outcome of the Plan, not armies and spaceships and atom blasts.
But Asimov didn’t stop there. He went on in this story to assess the relative effectiveness of one frame of mind and another. Taken as a whole, “Bridle and Saddle” portrayed a kind of ladder of consciousness—a series of modes of thought which must be worked through in the proper order if men are ever to defy the power of cyclical history and avert thirty to fifty thousand years of galactic darkness and barbarism.
The most elementary of these is religion. This mental framework is limited and emotional, but one that is effective in organizing the otherwise chaotic thought of local communities such as Anacreon.
Next, there is the scientific approach. Because it is willing to look at the facts and to revise itself, it is a less excitable and more pragmatic ordering of thought than religion. Yet it is still capable of becoming mesmerized by the special conditions that happen to hold true in some particular time and place, such as Village Earth in the early Twentieth Century, or Lagash in the long seasons between eclipses, or Terminus in the uncertain days after the withdrawal of the Old Empire.
Finally, beyond this scientific nearsightedness, there lies a more comprehensive and effective state of mind which might be called holistic perception.
This mode isn’t anything so advanced as the ability of the men of “Forgetfulness” to annihilate the ordinary bounds of space and time with the power of mind. Rather, it is the more modest ability to perceive complete patterns, with their necessary interconnections, and thereby to be aware of the true nature and demands of a given situation.
Asimov was thinking in this way when he found it impossible to outline his stories logically and linearly in advance of writing them, but instead had to follow an inner sense of their design and put them down whole.
And his character, Salvor Hardin, would also be thinking this way in the approach he takes to the Foundation’s second crisis. Long before there is any visible necessity to take action, Hardin does what seems utterly irrational—he founds a new religion. Then, thirty years later, when those around him are getting themselves all worked up over the renewed threat from Anacreon, Hardin never loses his composure. He has already done what had to be done at the time when it was most appropriate to do it, and now he just needs to wait for the pattern to complete itself.
The best model that Asimov had of a person who was able to think in holistic terms was, of course, John W. Campbell. Though the youngster might be a little distance ahead of his mentor in the specialized knowledge of advanced chemistry, from the moment they first met Asimov was in no doubt that Campbell was someone who saw farther and perceived more than he did.
Again and again, Asimov had the experience of bringing the editor in some idea for a new science fiction story, only to have him alter it into something a great deal larger and more meaningful, such as the Three Laws of Robotics, or a program for the attainment of New Galactic Empire. Campbell might declare, modestly enough, that he was just expressing what was already implied in the original story idea, but over and over Asimov was left marveling at his breadth of vision.
In “Foundation” and in “Bridle and Saddle,” Asimov would deliberately imagine a fictional counterpart to John Campbell in the great psychohistorian Hari Seldon. These two masters of holistic thought would be alike in setting the goal of a unified Galaxy and then standing back out of the way of its accomplishment—except for the occasional interjection of a provocative remark at just the proper moment for it to have maximum effect.
“Bridle and Saddle” declared that it was by climbing the ladder of consciousness from religion to science to holistic thought—and presumably, on beyond—that mankind would thwart the power of Fate and succeed in shaping its own destiny. That was the way to deal with the Fall of Galactic Empire.
It was also the answer to the perennial problem of Lagash in “Nightfall.” The ultimate solution to recurrent-mass freakout can come only when the people of Lagash develop sufficient holistic appreciation of their cosmic situation that sudden variations in the number of visible stars no longer faze them.
And it was the answer, too, to the Techno Age dilemma faced by Western man. Indeed, in the sequence of thought-modes offered by Asimov here in “Bridle and Saddle” we can recognize a précis of the story we have been telling in this book.
Just as soon as John Campbell finished reading the last page of Asimov�
�s manuscript, he picked up the phone and put in a call to Street & Smith’s accounting department to ask them to strike a check for Asimov. But perhaps because Asimov’s delay in delivering the story had left him with a scheduling problem that he still had to resolve, this time he didn’t see fit to throw in a bonus.
Campbell found his way out of his scheduling tangle by moving “Runaround,” the robot story, into the next issue that he made up for the printer—the March 1942 Astounding. He then held back “Foundation” until May—an issue that was perhaps the most impressive in the entire Golden Age, containing not only Asimov’s novelet, but van Vogt’s “Asylum” and the final part of Heinlein/MacDonald’s Beyond This Horizon.
“Bridle and Saddle,” of course, would follow in June. Despite the lack of bonus payment, it proved to be Asimov’s second lead story in Astounding, illustrated on the cover.
After that, however, more than two years would pass before Campbell would be able to publish another Foundation story. Three weeks to the day after Asimov brought him “Bridle and Saddle,” the United States was at war. And that meant radical changes for Astounding and for science fiction.
18: Man Transcending
IN THE SECOND PORTION OF THE GOLDEN AGE, the years from 1942 through 1945 during which the United States was an active participant in World War II, Astounding would become a very different place than it had been in the initial universe-conquering phase of John Campbell’s editorship. In part, this would be a result of Campbell’s own thought and action—his sense of what was possible and necessary at this moment, and the corresponding changes in course that he elected to make in the magazine. But also, in part, it would be the result of wartime conditions that were utterly and completely beyond his control.
It isn’t always easy to say exactly where the line should be drawn between what the editor consciously intended to do, and what would be done by him unknowingly, or even contrary to his belief, his judgment and his preference. As best he was able under trying circumstances, Campbell would attempt to go on serving as the master of provocation and farseeing coordinator of the new science fiction that he had been since assuming direction of Astounding at the end of 1937. But the war years would have their own necessities to impose that the editor could do nothing whatever about.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 78