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kinds of SF (hard, Utopian, military, satirical) share assumptions, code
words, lines of argument, narrative voices. Fond remembrance of golden age
Astounding and its letter column, of the New Wave, of Horace Gold's
Galaxy these are echoes of distant conversations earnestly carried out.
Genre pleasures are many, but this quality of shared values within an ongoing
discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans.
In contrast to the Grand Canon view of great works standing like monoliths in
a deserted landscape, genre reading satisfactions are a striking facet of
modern democratic (pop) culture, a shared movement.
There are questions about how writers deal with what some call the "anxiety of
influence, " but which I'd prefer to term more mildly: the digestion of
tradition.
I'm reminded of John Berger's definition of hack work, describing oil painting
in Ways of Seeing, as "... not the result of either clumsiness or
provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands
than the art. " Fair enough; but this can happen in any context. Working in a
known region of concept-space does not necessarily imply that the territory
has been mined out. Nor is fresh ground always fertile.
Surely we should notice that a novel Hemingway thought the best in American
literature is a sequel indeed, following on a boy's book, Tom Sawyer.
Sharing common ground isn't only a literary tradition. Are we thrown into
moral confusion when we hear Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini? Do we
indignantly march from the concert hall when assaulted by Variations on a
Theme by
Haydn? Sharecropping by the Greats? Shocking!
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
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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, hi 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
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