As you can tell by my username, I too was heavily influenced by Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. But my reading of it was different than yours - in part because I choose to ignore the existence of any books past the first trilogy - and when the adaptation was announced, I stopped to really think about how it could be portrayed on screen. Obviously, you can't portray the trilogy as-is on television; you have to change or add *something*, because large sections of it are just people talking in blank rooms. But I think it could be done.
And the message I got from the book was that civilization rests on a thin sheet of glass, so fragile it could be broken with a touch, and without men of absolute devotion willing to sacrifice not just their deaths but their lives so that their great-grandchildren can live, civilization will fall and the lamps will all go out.
Picture this: in the first few chapters of the books, Seldon teaches Gaal Dornick the axioms of psychohistory in one afternoon, in a conversation held in a single room. In a TV show, these axioms could take up half the season. They meet on Trantor, as before, but Gaal Dornick is as eager for immediate action as she is smart, wanting to use her math skills ('her', since in this hypothetical we're under AppleTV's casting constraints) to enact immediate change, to start doing things *now* to help people. She insists "People are suffering in incomprehensible numbers, and we have to help them!" For Hari's response, we bring in a line from the book:
"You say that without thinking. What of psychohistory?"
"I hadn't thought of applying it to the problem."
"Before you are done with me, young lady, you will learn to apply pyschohistory to *all* problems as a matter of course."
And so we kick off perhaps episode 2 travelling a few thousand lightyears away for a case study in psychohistory. Here's a town in a region on a planet in that's getting screwed over by a nearby city. Here, carved quickly into the ice or the sand or the stump of a super-redwood tree, are the parameters for the incentive structure governing the relationship between town and city. You want to correct injustice? Start there.
Oh? After an episode of solid effort, you've succeeded? The nice city council members responded to your clever negotiation tactics and game-theoretic explanations of the benefits of cooperation rather than exploitation? Excellent! Pity you didn't factor in the provincial government, though. See, they've been under pressure from the planetary governor to clamp down, after that minor rebellion on the other side of the planet five years ago that never made galactic news and that you've never heard of. Any city that starts to get too friendly with its suburbs starts to make the provincial lords awful nervous about a repeat, and they're extremely suspicious when you bring in words like "Nash equilibrium", so they'll be appointing their own, more cooperative city council members, thanks.
You seriously thought you could get in touch with the planetary governor? Why would he care? He only knows Meyerhoff City as a place on the map and a minor source of uranium (though it's been running a bit slow lately; hard to get good mining engineers these days), and he's never even *heard* of the little town of Gellhorn. This is a tiny planet, yes. Only a billion and a half people on it. Scarcely inhabited, compared to a galaxy. But that's still a mighty big number. If a percent of a percent of a percent of its citizens want to talk to the governor for five minutes, you have a thousand people in line ahead of you. Care to wait? Think it'll help?
Third Axiom of Psychohistory: Human conglomerates possess resistance to deviations from historical trajectories. The greater the deviation, the greater the required force and time.
Thus endeth the lesson.
As the season progresses, we see Gaal start to apply psychohistory more and more to each new planet she and Hari Seldon travel to, until finally they're both arrested and brought back to Trantor for the trial. Naturally, from force of habit, she applies the same math to Trantor itself, thus getting the inevitable reveal that the Galactic Empire is dying.
The book doesn't explicitly explain why Hari had to recruit Gaal from halfway across the galaxy, given that there are billions or trillions (Asimov's inconsistent) of people on Trantor, but I will. There are people too numerous to count consistently, but so few of them are first-rate mathematicians, and so few of the first-rate mathematicians are people who *care* about what will happen beyond their lifetime or at most their children's, that a gigantic net nevertheless catches very few fish.
And why go to all the trouble of taking her across the galaxy? For the same underlying reason that shartening the dark age is so difficult: inertia. They could sit in a room all day, and Gaal could learn the math of it all, but unless you go out there and actually try drawing it out in the sand with real people and real consequences, it doesn't stick. You need a LOT of force to effect a large change, and thus you *have* to take the time with every new recruit, because no level of dedication short of "absolute devotion" is going to be enough.
I know that's not what Asimov *wrote*. But reading the books as a teenager, that's approximately what I read.
You want The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper as the ideal rebuttal to Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
A few generations ago, the planet Poictesme was a major manufacturing depot and supply stockpile in a space war, which, once the war ended, left it economically unsustainable since there was no market for the existing military equipment everywhere, let alone for manufacturing more of it. The problem was further exuberated by Merlin, the titular Cosmic Computer. Merlin was an Artificial Superintelligence, capable of planning and predicting military strategies, inventing and optimizing technologies and in general, doing anything a human genius could do, but better. Originally built as a superweapon to win the war, which it did, Merlin was mysteriously abandoned by its creators in the galactic goverment military shortly after the war's end and its location lost.
This makes developing anything on Poictesme seemingly pointless, since if anyone ever finds Merlin, they'd be able to take its advice to do whatever you did better and you'd have lost whatever money you spent on making your version.
Enter our protagonist, a con artist with the perfect scheme to revitalize Poictesme's economy and make himself obscenely rich in the process. He's going to pretend to have a clue where Merlin is and sell stock in his new company intended to exploit Merlin and resources to get Merlin repaired. Everything would've gone perfectly if he didn't actually find Merlin and discover why its creators had abandoned it.
Merlin had predicted the galaxywide collapse of civilization and essentially recreated Poictesme's problems on a larger scale as all of the galactic government's most powerful who'd heard the prophecy stopped trying to build or maintain anything as pointless since it'd just get destroyed anyway in the collapse and started squirreling away resources to maintain their own power in the aftermath .
So basically the same principle as Foundation. A superintelligent oracle has prophesied doomsday in a space empire. Only here, instead of a benevolent conspiracy of academics trying to save the empire, the powers that be are a bunch of greedy zero-sum survivalists who're directly destroying the empire in the process of stealing everything they can use to build private bunkers and the protagonists are a bunch of blue-collar space trucker types straight out of Alien who're just trying to survive.
Some say that’s why Frank Herbert wrote Dune, where a prescient superman successfully stupefies the scheming tyrants of the galaxy. That’s another tragedy, but at least mankind is affirmed in it.
Ohh I see, d’acc. I’m not too drawn to sci-fi sorry too many pro-leftwing books, I’m a fantasy guy who loves old Medieval books and classical books. But as Isaac argues there’s more to them than meets the eye.
I’m of the same opinion as Gene Wolfe on the matter. He was a great Catholic author whose first book was derided as reactionary schlock and his magnum opus synthesized sci-fi, fantasy and high literature to become the final word on the subject, without selling out an inch.
Haha yeah it is, it’s also just about the only thing I like to write, because I can stick to the ideals and chivalry and stuff of the time-period like Howard & Tolkien did.
That said, arguably Crichten is one of my all time fave sci-fi guys, and I do like SW Eps 1-3 & Transformers 1986 so there’s some great scifi out there. Oh and there’s Gigaheroes too!
I think it's fair to say that sci-fi is a leftist genre. Maybe not inherently, but it definitely started out that way. Even the right-leaning popular sci-fi I can think of like Starship Troopers (the book) or Halo or John Carter has liberal or atheistic viewpoints baked into them. It is what it is.
Of course, all that means is that the genre is enemy territory waiting to be conquered. And there are good efforts made on our behalf. There's CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, Voyage to Alpha Centauri by Michael D. O'Brien (my favorite sci-fi novel), A Canticle for Leibowitz, and many others.
Well said as always mon ami! It also means that with the leftist attempted take over of the inherently traditional fantasy genre by Rowling & Martin that fantasy must be defended and bolstered as one might a fortress, while a contingent of 'troops' are deployed in a sortie or chevauchée to take Sci-Fi.
I have always gravitated towards the Great Man theory of history and often see moments where it falls short (i.e. the great man fails) as historical tragedy but I had never thought to map that same idea onto fiction. Thank you so much for giving me a new lens to enjoy great literature.
Bishop Robert Barron seems to have a similar notion in his "seeds of the faith" movie critiques, and his approach to popular music, particularly Bob Dylan.
I think the approach has merit, but only if it serves as a springboard for true Christian art. If we're stuck forever trying to grasp at seeds, then it's cope.
This is my issue with the current right wing/Christian approach right now with things like Starship Troopers, Helldivers, or 40k. Okay, so you can find themes you like in spite of the people who made them. Cool. But you can only plunder the Egyptians of their gold for so long. At some point, we do need to make the genuine article.
Funnily enough I just started reading Harvest the Stars by Poul Anderson, which tells a very similar story to your take on Foundation: an oppressive technocracy built around a supposed science of history. I can't tell you if it's good yet, but it was interesting to read your essay and then immediately start this book with its Seldon-as-Mao figure.
Is it possible you've convinced me to read Foundation and Earth? I would have thought that thr exists tance if such an argument was mathematically impossible, or at least extremely unlikely.
This might be the inspiration I needed to finally tackle the Foundation series after several false starts.
I imagine you would take a very dim view of Childhood's End as well. The shape Arthur C. Clarke chose for the aliens never sat easily with me. I'll have to revisit that one, as I read it as a gullible teenager who relished transhumanism stories and confused it with transcendence.
This is precisely why I was so disgusted with the first book when I listened to the audiobook. I suppose it is possible to flip it on its head and view to through a reactionary lens, but I honestly want nothing to do with Mr Asimov.
As you can tell by my username, I too was heavily influenced by Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. But my reading of it was different than yours - in part because I choose to ignore the existence of any books past the first trilogy - and when the adaptation was announced, I stopped to really think about how it could be portrayed on screen. Obviously, you can't portray the trilogy as-is on television; you have to change or add *something*, because large sections of it are just people talking in blank rooms. But I think it could be done.
And the message I got from the book was that civilization rests on a thin sheet of glass, so fragile it could be broken with a touch, and without men of absolute devotion willing to sacrifice not just their deaths but their lives so that their great-grandchildren can live, civilization will fall and the lamps will all go out.
Picture this: in the first few chapters of the books, Seldon teaches Gaal Dornick the axioms of psychohistory in one afternoon, in a conversation held in a single room. In a TV show, these axioms could take up half the season. They meet on Trantor, as before, but Gaal Dornick is as eager for immediate action as she is smart, wanting to use her math skills ('her', since in this hypothetical we're under AppleTV's casting constraints) to enact immediate change, to start doing things *now* to help people. She insists "People are suffering in incomprehensible numbers, and we have to help them!" For Hari's response, we bring in a line from the book:
"You say that without thinking. What of psychohistory?"
"I hadn't thought of applying it to the problem."
"Before you are done with me, young lady, you will learn to apply pyschohistory to *all* problems as a matter of course."
And so we kick off perhaps episode 2 travelling a few thousand lightyears away for a case study in psychohistory. Here's a town in a region on a planet in that's getting screwed over by a nearby city. Here, carved quickly into the ice or the sand or the stump of a super-redwood tree, are the parameters for the incentive structure governing the relationship between town and city. You want to correct injustice? Start there.
Oh? After an episode of solid effort, you've succeeded? The nice city council members responded to your clever negotiation tactics and game-theoretic explanations of the benefits of cooperation rather than exploitation? Excellent! Pity you didn't factor in the provincial government, though. See, they've been under pressure from the planetary governor to clamp down, after that minor rebellion on the other side of the planet five years ago that never made galactic news and that you've never heard of. Any city that starts to get too friendly with its suburbs starts to make the provincial lords awful nervous about a repeat, and they're extremely suspicious when you bring in words like "Nash equilibrium", so they'll be appointing their own, more cooperative city council members, thanks.
You seriously thought you could get in touch with the planetary governor? Why would he care? He only knows Meyerhoff City as a place on the map and a minor source of uranium (though it's been running a bit slow lately; hard to get good mining engineers these days), and he's never even *heard* of the little town of Gellhorn. This is a tiny planet, yes. Only a billion and a half people on it. Scarcely inhabited, compared to a galaxy. But that's still a mighty big number. If a percent of a percent of a percent of its citizens want to talk to the governor for five minutes, you have a thousand people in line ahead of you. Care to wait? Think it'll help?
Third Axiom of Psychohistory: Human conglomerates possess resistance to deviations from historical trajectories. The greater the deviation, the greater the required force and time.
Thus endeth the lesson.
As the season progresses, we see Gaal start to apply psychohistory more and more to each new planet she and Hari Seldon travel to, until finally they're both arrested and brought back to Trantor for the trial. Naturally, from force of habit, she applies the same math to Trantor itself, thus getting the inevitable reveal that the Galactic Empire is dying.
The book doesn't explicitly explain why Hari had to recruit Gaal from halfway across the galaxy, given that there are billions or trillions (Asimov's inconsistent) of people on Trantor, but I will. There are people too numerous to count consistently, but so few of them are first-rate mathematicians, and so few of the first-rate mathematicians are people who *care* about what will happen beyond their lifetime or at most their children's, that a gigantic net nevertheless catches very few fish.
And why go to all the trouble of taking her across the galaxy? For the same underlying reason that shartening the dark age is so difficult: inertia. They could sit in a room all day, and Gaal could learn the math of it all, but unless you go out there and actually try drawing it out in the sand with real people and real consequences, it doesn't stick. You need a LOT of force to effect a large change, and thus you *have* to take the time with every new recruit, because no level of dedication short of "absolute devotion" is going to be enough.
I know that's not what Asimov *wrote*. But reading the books as a teenager, that's approximately what I read.
You want The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper as the ideal rebuttal to Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
A few generations ago, the planet Poictesme was a major manufacturing depot and supply stockpile in a space war, which, once the war ended, left it economically unsustainable since there was no market for the existing military equipment everywhere, let alone for manufacturing more of it. The problem was further exuberated by Merlin, the titular Cosmic Computer. Merlin was an Artificial Superintelligence, capable of planning and predicting military strategies, inventing and optimizing technologies and in general, doing anything a human genius could do, but better. Originally built as a superweapon to win the war, which it did, Merlin was mysteriously abandoned by its creators in the galactic goverment military shortly after the war's end and its location lost.
This makes developing anything on Poictesme seemingly pointless, since if anyone ever finds Merlin, they'd be able to take its advice to do whatever you did better and you'd have lost whatever money you spent on making your version.
Enter our protagonist, a con artist with the perfect scheme to revitalize Poictesme's economy and make himself obscenely rich in the process. He's going to pretend to have a clue where Merlin is and sell stock in his new company intended to exploit Merlin and resources to get Merlin repaired. Everything would've gone perfectly if he didn't actually find Merlin and discover why its creators had abandoned it.
Merlin had predicted the galaxywide collapse of civilization and essentially recreated Poictesme's problems on a larger scale as all of the galactic government's most powerful who'd heard the prophecy stopped trying to build or maintain anything as pointless since it'd just get destroyed anyway in the collapse and started squirreling away resources to maintain their own power in the aftermath .
So basically the same principle as Foundation. A superintelligent oracle has prophesied doomsday in a space empire. Only here, instead of a benevolent conspiracy of academics trying to save the empire, the powers that be are a bunch of greedy zero-sum survivalists who're directly destroying the empire in the process of stealing everything they can use to build private bunkers and the protagonists are a bunch of blue-collar space trucker types straight out of Alien who're just trying to survive.
The Mule should have won
Some say that’s why Frank Herbert wrote Dune, where a prescient superman successfully stupefies the scheming tyrants of the galaxy. That’s another tragedy, but at least mankind is affirmed in it.
Ohh I see, d’acc. I’m not too drawn to sci-fi sorry too many pro-leftwing books, I’m a fantasy guy who loves old Medieval books and classical books. But as Isaac argues there’s more to them than meets the eye.
I’m of the same opinion as Gene Wolfe on the matter. He was a great Catholic author whose first book was derided as reactionary schlock and his magnum opus synthesized sci-fi, fantasy and high literature to become the final word on the subject, without selling out an inch.
Interesting, not familiar with him (I know the name but not familiar with his book).
But hey, nobody can lecture you into liking anything, and medievalist fantasy is a heck of a good place to be.
Haha yeah it is, it’s also just about the only thing I like to write, because I can stick to the ideals and chivalry and stuff of the time-period like Howard & Tolkien did.
That said, arguably Crichten is one of my all time fave sci-fi guys, and I do like SW Eps 1-3 & Transformers 1986 so there’s some great scifi out there. Oh and there’s Gigaheroes too!
I think it's fair to say that sci-fi is a leftist genre. Maybe not inherently, but it definitely started out that way. Even the right-leaning popular sci-fi I can think of like Starship Troopers (the book) or Halo or John Carter has liberal or atheistic viewpoints baked into them. It is what it is.
Of course, all that means is that the genre is enemy territory waiting to be conquered. And there are good efforts made on our behalf. There's CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, Voyage to Alpha Centauri by Michael D. O'Brien (my favorite sci-fi novel), A Canticle for Leibowitz, and many others.
Well said as always mon ami! It also means that with the leftist attempted take over of the inherently traditional fantasy genre by Rowling & Martin that fantasy must be defended and bolstered as one might a fortress, while a contingent of 'troops' are deployed in a sortie or chevauchée to take Sci-Fi.
I have always gravitated towards the Great Man theory of history and often see moments where it falls short (i.e. the great man fails) as historical tragedy but I had never thought to map that same idea onto fiction. Thank you so much for giving me a new lens to enjoy great literature.
Childhood's End is one of the scariest books ever written.
Bishop Robert Barron seems to have a similar notion in his "seeds of the faith" movie critiques, and his approach to popular music, particularly Bob Dylan.
I think the approach has merit, but only if it serves as a springboard for true Christian art. If we're stuck forever trying to grasp at seeds, then it's cope.
This is my issue with the current right wing/Christian approach right now with things like Starship Troopers, Helldivers, or 40k. Okay, so you can find themes you like in spite of the people who made them. Cool. But you can only plunder the Egyptians of their gold for so long. At some point, we do need to make the genuine article.
Funnily enough I just started reading Harvest the Stars by Poul Anderson, which tells a very similar story to your take on Foundation: an oppressive technocracy built around a supposed science of history. I can't tell you if it's good yet, but it was interesting to read your essay and then immediately start this book with its Seldon-as-Mao figure.
Is it possible you've convinced me to read Foundation and Earth? I would have thought that thr exists tance if such an argument was mathematically impossible, or at least extremely unlikely.
Don’t do it. As much as I had fun with this interpretation, it isn’t worth it.
I thought Foundation's Edge was pretty bad. Is Foundation and Earth even worse?
There's a plot line about hermaphrodites
Old Zack was ahead of the curve there, wasn't he?
This might be the inspiration I needed to finally tackle the Foundation series after several false starts.
I imagine you would take a very dim view of Childhood's End as well. The shape Arthur C. Clarke chose for the aliens never sat easily with me. I'll have to revisit that one, as I read it as a gullible teenager who relished transhumanism stories and confused it with transcendence.
alright fine, I’ll read my signed copy of the Foundation Trilogy.
Don’t go in thinking it’s secretly based. This is an interpretation made very much in spite of the narrative.
also the RW sci-fi great already exists, Book Of The New Sun is incredible
Oh I understood you, but if I’m going to write a RWish version I should probably know the source material
Good read
This is precisely why I was so disgusted with the first book when I listened to the audiobook. I suppose it is possible to flip it on its head and view to through a reactionary lens, but I honestly want nothing to do with Mr Asimov.