Foundation Fear (51 page)
Reinspecting the assumptions and methods of classical works can yield new fruit. Fresh
narrative can both strike out into new territory while reflecting on the landscape of the
past. Recall that Hamlet drew from several earlier plays about the same plot.
Isaac himself revisited the Foundation, taking different angles of attack each time. In
the beginning, psychohistory equated the movements of people as a whole with the motions
of molecules. The Second Foundation looked at perturbations to such deterministic laws
(the Mule) and implied that only a superhuman elite could manage instabilities. Later,
robots emerged as the elite, better than humans at dispassionate government. Beyond robots
came Gaia ... and so on.
In this three-book series we shall reinspect the role of robots, and what psychohistory
might look like as a theory. More riffs upon the basic tune.
I had always wondered about crucial aspects of Asimov's Empire: Why were there no aliens
in the galaxy?
What role did computers play? Particularly, vs. robots?
What did the theory of psychohistory actually look like?
Finally, who was Hari Seldon -- as a character, a man?
This novel attempts some answers. It is my contribution to a discussion about power and
determinism which has now spanned over half a century.
Of course, we know some incidental answers. The term “psychohistory” was commonly used in
the thirties and appears in the 1934 Webster's Dictionary; Isaac greatly extended its
meaning, though. He didn't want to deal with John W. Campbell's notorious dislike of
aliens who might be as clever as we, so his Foundation had none. But it seemed to me there
might be more to the matter.
As well, Asimov's uniting of his robot novels and the Foundation series became intricate
and puzzling. The British critic Brian Stableford found this “comforting in its
claustrophobic enclosure. ” There are no robots in the early Foundation novels, but they
are behind-the-scenes manipulators in both Prelude to Foundation and Forward the
Foundation.
Some form of advanced computing machines must underlie the Empire, surely. Isaac remarked
that “I just put very advanced computers in the new Foundation novel and hoped that nobody
would notice the inconsistency. Nobody did.” As James Gunn remarked, “More accurately,
people noticed but didn't care.”
Asimov wrote each novel at the level of the then current scientific understanding. Later
works updated the surrounding science. Thus his galaxy is more detailed in later books,
including in Foundation's Edge both advanced computers and a black hole at the Galactic
Center. Similarly, here I have depicted our more detailed knowledge of the Galactic
Center, in place of Isaac's “hyperspace” ships I have used worm-holes, which have
considerably more theoretical justification now than they did when Einstein and Rosen
introduced them in the 1930s. Indeed, wormholes are allowed by the general theory of
relativity, but must have extreme forms of matter to form and support them. (Matt Visser's
Lorentzian Wormholes is the standard work on current thinking.)
Isaac wrote much of his fiction in a style he termed “direct and spare, ” though in the
later works he relaxed this constraint a bit. I have not attempted to write in the Asimov
style. (Those who think it is easy to write clearly about complex subjects should try it.
) For the Foundation novels he used a particularly bare-boards approach, with virtually no
background descriptions or novelistic details.
Note his own reaction when he decided to return to the series and revisited the trilogy:
“I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing
ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of
thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense.”
But it worked, famously so. I could not manage such an approach, so have taken my own way.
I found that the details of Trantor, of psychohistory and the Empire, called out to me as
I began thinking about this novel -- indeed, they led me on my subconscious quest of the
underlying story. So the book is not an imitation Asimov novel but a Benford novel using
Asimov's basic ideas and backdrop.
Necessarily my approach has harkened back to the older storytelling styles which prevailed
in the SF of Isaac's days. I have never responded favorably to the recent razoring of
literature by critics -- the tribes of structuralists, post-modernists,
deconstructionists. To many SF writers, 'post-modern" is simply a signature of exhaustion.
Its typical apparatus -- self-reference, heavy dollops of obligator) irony, self-conscious
use of older genre devices, pastiche, and parody -- betrays lack of invention, of the
crucial coin of SF, imagination. Some deconstructionists have attacked science itself as
mere rhetoric, not an ordering of nature, seeking to reduce it to the status of the
ultimately arbitrary humanities. Most SF types find this attack on empiricism a worn old
song with new lyrics, quite quaintly retro.
At the core of SF lies the experience of science. This makes the genre finally hostile to
such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical ground. Deconstructionism's stress
on contradictory or self-contained internal differences in texts, rather than their link
to reality, often merely leads to literature seen as empty word games.
SF novels give us worlds which are not to be taken as metaphors but as real. We are asked
to participate in wrenchingly strange events, not merely watch them for clues to what
they're really talking about. (Ummm, if this stands for that, then the other stuff must
stand for ... Not a way to gather narrative momentum. ) The Mars and stars and digital
deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: Life isn't
like this, it is this. Journeys can go to fresh places, not merely return us to ourselves.
Even so, I've indulged myself a bit in the satirical scenes depicting an academia going
off the rails, but I feel Isaac would have approved of my targets. Readers thinking I've
gone overboard in depicting the view that science does not deal with objective truths, but
instead is a battleground of power politics where “naive realism” meets relativist
worldviews, should look into The Golem by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. This book
attempts to portray scientists as no more the holders of objective knowledge than are
lawyers or travel agents.
The recent “re-norming” of the Scholastic Aptitude Tests so that each year the average is
forced to the same number, thus masking the decline of ability in students, I satirize in
the very last pages of the novel; I hope Isaac would have gotten a chuckle from seeing the
issue framed against an entire galaxy.
From Verne and Wells to somewhere near 1970, science fiction was mostly about the wonders
of movement, of transportation. Note the innumerable novels with the word star in their
titles, evoking far destinations, and stories such as Robert Heinlein's “The Roads Must
Roll.”
But in the past few decades we have focused more on the wonders of information, of
transformations at least partly internal, not external. The Internet, virtual reality,
computer simulations -- all these loom large in our visions of our futures. This novel
attempts to combine these two themes, with several conspicuous scenes about travel, and a
larger background motif on computers.
As James Gunn noted, the Foundation series is a saga. Its method lies in a repeated
pattern: Out of the solution of each problem grows the next problem to be solved. This
became, of course, a considerable constraint on later novels. Asimov seemed to be saying
that life was a series of problems to be solved, but life itself could never be solved. As
Gunn remarked, considering that the combined and integrated Foundation and Robot saga now
covers sixteen books, perhaps a directory of it all is called for, named, perhaps,
Encyclopedia Galactica?
Galactic empires became a mainstay frame for science fiction. Poul Anderson's Flandry
novels and Gordon R. Dickson (in his Dorsai series) particularly studied the
sociopolitical structure of such vast complexes, for a powerful, autocratic imperial
system demands great organizational skill -- the primary asset of the Romans themselves.
Isaac was not always consistent in his numbers. How many dwell on Trantor? Usually he says
forty billion, but in Second Foundation it is 400 billion (unless that's a typo). Spread
forty billion over an Earth-sized world (with all its seas drained), and that's only about
a hundred per square kilometer. Surely housing them would not demand a half-kilometer-deep
city.
Dates also get difficult to follow, across such immensities of time. Trantor is at least
12,000 years old -- and note that we assume that the year is Earth's, though Earth's
location has been forgotten. By the Galactic Empire calendar, Pebble in the Sky, which has
references to hundreds of thousands of years of expansion into space, occurs about 900 G.
E. In Foundation atomic energy is 50,000 years old. The robot Daneel is 20,000 years old
in Prelude to Foundation and in Forward the Foundation. How far away in our future do the
Sun and Spaceship emblem rule? Perhaps 40 000 years? No one date reconciles every detail.
Not that it truly matters. I know the dangers of writing a long series over decades. I
took twenty-five years to wrestle with the six volumes of my Galactic Center series.
Undoubtedly there are contradictions I missed in dating and other details, even though I
laid it all out in a timeline, published in the last volume. The aliens of that series are
not those implicated in this novel, but there are clearly conceptual links.
Science fiction speaks of the future, but to the present. The grand issues of social power
and the-technology that drives it will never fade. Often problems are best seen in the
perspectives of implication, before we meet them on the gritty ground of their arrival.
Isaac Asimov was ultimately hopeful about humanity. He saw us again and again coming to a
crossroads and prevailing. The Foundation is about that.
What matters in sagas is sweep. This, the Foundation series surely has. I can only hope I
have added a bit to that.
Works tracing the intricacies of the Foundation include notably Alexei and Cory Panshin's
historical The World Beyond the Hill, James Gunn's insightful Isaac Asimov, Joseph
Patrouch's thorough The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, and Alva Rogers' Requiem for
Astounding, which gives a sense of what it was like to read the classic works as they
appeared. I learned from all these studies.
For advice and comments on this project I am especially grateful to Janet Asimov, Mark
Martin, David Brin, Joe Miller, Jennifer Brehl, and Elisabeth Brown for close readings of
the manuscript. My gratitude goes to Don Dixon for his fantastical, future beastiary.
Appreciation for general help is due to my wife Joan, Abbe, and to Ralph Vicinanza, Janet
Asimov, James Gunn, John Silbersack, Donald Kingsbury, Chris Schelling, John Douglas, Greg
Bear, George Zebrowski, Paul Carter, Lou Aronica, Jennifer Hershey, Gary Westfahl and John
Clute. Thanks to all.
Gregory Benford -- physicist, educator, author -- was born in Mobile, Alabama. He is a
professor of physics at the University of California-Irvine, and conducts research in
plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a
hundred papers. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a visiting professor at Cambridge
University and has served as an advisor to the Deportment of Energy; NASA, aid the White
Moose Council on Space Policy. Many of bis best-known novels are part of a six-novel
sequence beginning in the near future with In the Ocean of Night, and continuing on with
Across the Sea of Suns. The series then leaps to the far future, at the center of our
galaxy, where a desperate human drama unfolds, beginning with Great Sky River, and
proceeding through Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and concluding with Sailing Bright
Eternity. At the series' end the links to the earlier novels emerge, revealing a single
unfolding tapestry against an immense background.
