Isaac Asimov penned a ditty with that title, parodying a patter song from Gilbert & Sullivan’ Patience. One stanza goes like this:
So success is not a mystery. Just brush up on your history,
And borrow day by day.
Take an empire that was Roman, and you’ll it is at home in
All the starry Milky Way.
With a drive that’s hyperspatial, though the parsecs you will race,
You’ll find that plotting is a breeze,
With a tiny bit of cribbin’ from the works of Edward Gibbon
And that Greek Thucydides.
It came to mind when I read, on Law & Liberty, of all unexpected venues, a review of a one-volume edition of the Foundation Trilogy, which once won a Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Series of All Time, beating inter alia Lord of the Rings. (It was Asimov’s first Hugo and the only one that he truly deserved.)
The review is worth reading. What the reviewer finds in the novels isn’t a sheer phantasm of his own creation. It isn’t unreasonable of him to see them as imbued with a Comte-like mystical positivism. “It may seem astonishing that Asimov’s story should begin with a confident, if cynical, rationalism that despises religion as obsolete, only to end up with an idealistic superstition that destroys rational thought.” That reading is, of course, inspired by the trajectory of our own age.
Asimov unwittingly rehearses modern politics, and his Foundation becomes totalitarian in the quest to control thoughts, with scientists torturing dissenters! He also rehearses modern philosophy, innocent of the trouble he invites. He can command public assent to the importance of technology, industry, and commerce; but regarding telepathy, how do you establish authority, demonstration, or distinguish wisdom from foolishness? So, his storytelling climaxes in a deus ex machina. The science trilogy ends with a comical religion, flattering the prejudice that knowledge, power, and morality converge in a kind of cosmic hippie who can defeat techno-tyranny by the ultimate power of positive thinking!
Plausible as that sounds, it is a partial reading. The reviewer takes note of three central characters in the series – the psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the “religion of science” founder Salvor Hardin, and the merchant-politician Hober Mallow, who brings an end to the Foundation’s reliance on the artificial cult – and he alludes to Preem Palver (the “cosmic hippie”), yet he says not a word about the second most consequential (after Seldon) of all the dramatis personae, “The Mule”, who rips Seldon’s “thousand year plan” to tatters.
In the end, it’s true, all gets righted, and history reaches the goal that Seldon intended, yet not by following the predetermined track he had laid out. Instead, Preem Palver’s ingenuity brings about the happy ending without any noticeable help from large scale historical forces. One might easily take away the moral that all-encompassing plans are an illusion. But that would be a partial reading, too.
It isn’t really likely that Isaac Asimov intended that moral or any other. When he began the trilogy, he was a 21-year-old writer who had published his first story only two years before and for whom writing was second to an incipient scientific career. He took an idea that was much in the air, the efficacy of far-sighted central planning, and melded it to a narrative borrowed from Late Antiquity. The upshot was a sub-created history. From it one can draw lessons, just as one can from Edward Gibbon, but it does not dictate any, and the lessons may not always be congruent.
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