Evolution or revolution

The planet Trantor: Fred Gambino Foundation trilogy cover art for Voyager Books

Foundation
by Isaac Asimov.
Voyager, 1995 (1951).

‘A great psychologist such as [Hari] Sheldon could unravel human emotions and human reactions sufficiently to be able to predict broadly the historical sweep of the future.’ — Salvor Hardin

Part II: The Encyclopedists

I was first introduced to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy in the 1970s when listening to the BBC Radio dramatisations (probably in 1973). Though I at first liked the concept of psychohistory which underpins the storylines I became less enamoured of it after reading other fictional future histories, such as Olaf Stapledon’ Last and First Men (1930) or H G Wells’ 1933 classic The Shape of Things to Come – which, though successfully predicting war (beginning in 1940 and ending ten years later), thereafter got it spectacularly wrong in prophesying the demise of religion, the rise of a global benevolent despotism and a subsequent universal utopia.

If short-term prediction (albeit by just one individual) could go so wrong, what chance another fiction-writer postulating any more reliably a future history in millennia to come?

And yet — as I had hoped — a re-read, even one as long delayed as this, has helped me revise some of my first hasty opinions.

The Empire, based on a galaxy that’s neither a long time ago (it’s in our future) nor far, far away (it’s our own Milky Way, of which we are a part), has its capital on Trantor. This is a planet which has been completely covered by an exoskeleton of metal, on which nothing of its original surface can be seen.

From this planet psychologist Hari Seldon is by his own deliberate machinations banished to the periphery, with a one-way ticket to the ominous-sounding planet Terminus. Here, with a select workforce and their families, he founds a community ostensibly dedicated to creating the Encyclopedia Galactica, a record of past and present history. In reality it is a foundation to also monitor the history that is to come, a foundation enshrining the science of psychohistory.

Why the self-imposed banishment? It is for the Foundation even after his own demise to escape the worst of the Empire’s death-throes, the decline and fall of which he had foreseen from his calculations.

What Foundation does is chronicle the events leading up to successive so-called Seldon Crises. These are moments when evolution could so easily give way to revolution, when co-existence could lead to violent overthrow and confident statistical forecasts be torn to shreds. But these crisis points — typically when a hologram of Hari Seldon himself appears to an assembled company on Terminus — can’t be anticipated or they could have what today’s psychologists call the observer effect: where the actual act of observation has an effect on what is being observed, potentially skewing and therefore invalidating the results.

Strangely enough, the anticipation of what is felt to be a coming Seldon Crisis is enough for one man — and in this mid 20th-century novel it is inevitably a man — to seek to resolve the developing situation through non-violent means, because violent conflict could jeopardise the existence of the Foundation. Today we might call this crisis management or conflict resolution; then (and we’re talking now of a 20th-century vision of the future) the saviour of the situation would act the Great Man role as defined by Thomas Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, though re-defined by later writers. “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” Carlyle declared, and apart from the brief appearance of two token females this is essentially a cigar-chomping men-only universe.

The emphasis on peaceful resolution may well reflect Asimov’s reaction to the war raging in Europe when he initially began Foundation as four related short stories between 1941 and 1942; “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” is a phrase much in evidence here, uttered either explicitly or implicitly.

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Hari Seldon with his sidekick Gaal Dornick initiates the move from Trantor to Terminus in the first part ‘The Psychohistorians’. Salvor Hardin dominates proceedings in ‘The Encyclopedists’ set fifty years later on Terminus; his name betrays his role, Salvor being a play on Salvatore meaning ‘saviour’, and incidentally also sharing some syllabic elements of Hari Seldon’s name. Thirty years on and Hardin is still in evidence in ‘The Mayors’, dealing with nearby planets like Anacreon, all breakaway kingdoms from the Galactic Empire and all jostling for power. ‘The Traders’ section focuses on Limmar Ponyets, a pragmatic trader who takes as his motto one of Salvor Hardin’s epigrams, Never let your morals prevent you doing what is right! when dealing with religious superstition.

And with ‘The Merchant Princes’ we come to trader Hober Mallow who, when contact with the Galactic Empire is re-established, realises as the next Seldon Crisis approaches the core principles that psychohistory is based on: “Seldon crises are not solved by individuals but by historic forces. Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweep of economics and sociology.” This is close to later criticism of Carlyle’s Great Men of History postulate: Mallow accepts that “the solutions to the various crises must be achieved by the forces that become available to us at the time” — in other words, individuals arise to take advantage of given situations, not to steer history on a new course of their own choosing.

How much of this Asimov actually subscribed to, and how much he made up for the purposes of his fiction (reportedly the Foundation series was his creative response to Gibbons’ Decline and Fall) I must leave to scholars. It’s enough that since I first read the original trilogy I am in a better position to appreciate the realpolitik of Asimov’s puppet heroes rather than look for the expected closures of traditional narrative arcs.

Developments since the early 1940s (when most of Foundation was written and published as four separate magazine short stories) and, inevitably, the rise of super-computers have meant that statistical modelling of systems (such as weather patterns) have become exponentially more sophisticated, so that Asimov’s scenarios projected tens of millennia into the future seem just a little more plausible. Given that scant decades later Salvor Hardin surmised that this psychohistory could “unravel human emotions and human reactions” [my emphasis] — enough to forecast precisely how social and economic conditions would change in years to come — a super-computer way beyond our imaginings could well number-crunch its way through to anticipating how and when crises would arise and the resulting resolutions.

Asimov trained as a chemist, later migrating to biochemistry. Commentators have compared his psychohistory concept with the workings of Boyle’s Law, which defined the mathematical relationships between the volume of a gas, the pressure exerted by that gas in a given space and its temperature. It’s a short step from predicting how a very large number of gas molecules may react in an environment to imagining how quintillions of human beings in all the inhabitable worlds of just one galaxy might interact over time. As a character (in Foundation and Empire) suggests, “Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball.”

But there was to be a fly in the ointment. “The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.” Seldon, by basing his psychohistory on humans, could not and did not take into account those who might be either non-human (that is, those with alien intelligences working with totally different mental processes) or an advanced human being, whose abilities had evolved beyond normal human capabilities. (Nor, for that matter, could psychohistory predict cosmic events such as, for example, catastrophic meteor strikes.) But this is matter that may be examined in the Foundation sequels.

These days, the discipline of psychohistory is different: psychohistorians look to the past, not the future, interpreting history through the psychology of the individuals and of society living then.

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Though published in book form in 1951 four of the five stories in Foundation had been previously published between 1942 and 1944 under different titles. Even though a fifth part was added for the 1951 publication I’m including the novel in Vintage Science Fiction Month dedicated to SF books “that came out prior to your birth year,” which for me was 1948.

Review first published 23rd November 2015 for a reading challenge, now slightly revised and reposted for the start of a new year. The intention is to read and review the second Foundation title before too long.