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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2012-10-06 11:24 pm
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2012-10-06 11:24 pm
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The Foundation Trilogy: Part One of Eight.
Foundation: The Psychohistorians & The Encyclopedists
The Psychohistorians
In which conveniently naive young mathematician Gaal Dornick arrives on the great urban world of Trantor and in so doing provides an excuse for extensive explanations about Trantor and the Galactic Empire; as the excerpts from the Encyclopedia Galactica shows, Asimov did not actually need any excuses to drop into infodump mode so it's particularly polite of him to have had one.
Short version: no matter how healthy the Empire looks, it's rotten to the core (as the secret police and quasi-legal trials indicate) and quite doomed. Happily, psychohistorian Hari Seldon has a plan, step one of which is to set up a community on Terminus, a distant metal poor world, to work on the Encyclopedia Galactica; this will preserve all human knowledge to dare (the quotation from the EG foreshadows success at this project). Unhappily, he is a manipulative bastard and not the one who is going to pay the price for his grand plans.
Oh, another advantage of having Dornick as the protagonist is that it means what Hari and his pals have set up can be revealed as a grand surprise without any need to show how they managed to arrange matters to work out as they did.
It's made quite clear that women are relegated to second class, lumped in with children and certainly not allowed to commit research. I strongly suspect this is young Asimov being unimaginative but this post-dates the first appearance of Susan Calvin and so it could be Asimov commenting on the Empire's inability to recognize its resources.
Having just listened to the Shatner reading of this section, it seems the BBC decided to edit out some sections. A description of one hall Dornick sees makes it clear at least some of Trantor's vast volume is taken up with grand and impressive spectacles perhaps intended to impress visitors to what is after all very vulnerable world.
The Encyclopedists
Fifty years have passed and the provinces nearest Terminus have split away to become kingdoms, one of which may have designs on Terminus thanks to its strategic position. A second one, Anacreon, definitely has ambitions to take Terminus over. The Board of Trustees is hoping that their alliance to the Empire that was incapable of keeping the Kingdoms within the Empire will protect them from said kingdoms; it's clear this is excessively optimistic on their part. Plan B is "hope for a miracle", which I guess you could say they get in the form of a message from Hari Seldon of the form "neener, neener, you've wasted your lives on a pointless project. Now I will tell you what is really going on for all you know".
It's made clear that the Fall of the Empire has been particularly fast in the provinces; the Kingdoms no longer have atomic power and the Empire itself does not seem much better off. How exactly worlds without atomic power manage starships is not clear.
Terminus really is very metal poor which makes me wonder how happy terrestrial biology is there. The Anacreonians talk about farming the place but even iron has to be imported. It does not sound all that habitable. It is the opposite of Trantor in many ways, not a coincidence, and yet this leaves it in a situation that can be compared to Trantor's; Terminus is utterly dependent on maintaining its off-world ties if it hopes to have any prosperity at all.
I think it gets less true as the series progresses but there are times where this felt as though Shakespeare had decided to write Hamlet or MacBeth entirely from the point of view of some minor characters standing in the wings. There's a lot of talking in this and very little action; I cannot see how this can be faithfully adapted to the silver screen.
The Empire is inspired by Rome but it's different in many ways. Among others, it is the only game in town when the story begins; Rome in contrast always had external enemies. When Asimov decided to make the Empire all of the world instead of all of the Known World, he makes the galaxy a much duller place. Maybe more on this in another post.
There's another difference: there's really nothing to compare to Christianity and by the time of Romulus Augustulus the Empire's state religion had been Christianity for nearly a century. If Asimov had really been pushing the parallels between Rome and the Empire, the events of Pebble in the Sky would have produced a messianic figure, perhaps in the form of a simple tailor. Which actually makes me wonder if the Mule can trace his ancestry back to Earth. Also, no Terran diaspora.
A universal state also raises the question of where the barbarians are to come from and the answer, which would have been painfully obvious to a Jew watching events in Europe in the 1930s, is of course, "from within".
The Psychohistorians
In which conveniently naive young mathematician Gaal Dornick arrives on the great urban world of Trantor and in so doing provides an excuse for extensive explanations about Trantor and the Galactic Empire; as the excerpts from the Encyclopedia Galactica shows, Asimov did not actually need any excuses to drop into infodump mode so it's particularly polite of him to have had one.
Short version: no matter how healthy the Empire looks, it's rotten to the core (as the secret police and quasi-legal trials indicate) and quite doomed. Happily, psychohistorian Hari Seldon has a plan, step one of which is to set up a community on Terminus, a distant metal poor world, to work on the Encyclopedia Galactica; this will preserve all human knowledge to dare (the quotation from the EG foreshadows success at this project). Unhappily, he is a manipulative bastard and not the one who is going to pay the price for his grand plans.
Oh, another advantage of having Dornick as the protagonist is that it means what Hari and his pals have set up can be revealed as a grand surprise without any need to show how they managed to arrange matters to work out as they did.
It's made quite clear that women are relegated to second class, lumped in with children and certainly not allowed to commit research. I strongly suspect this is young Asimov being unimaginative but this post-dates the first appearance of Susan Calvin and so it could be Asimov commenting on the Empire's inability to recognize its resources.
Having just listened to the Shatner reading of this section, it seems the BBC decided to edit out some sections. A description of one hall Dornick sees makes it clear at least some of Trantor's vast volume is taken up with grand and impressive spectacles perhaps intended to impress visitors to what is after all very vulnerable world.
The Encyclopedists
Fifty years have passed and the provinces nearest Terminus have split away to become kingdoms, one of which may have designs on Terminus thanks to its strategic position. A second one, Anacreon, definitely has ambitions to take Terminus over. The Board of Trustees is hoping that their alliance to the Empire that was incapable of keeping the Kingdoms within the Empire will protect them from said kingdoms; it's clear this is excessively optimistic on their part. Plan B is "hope for a miracle", which I guess you could say they get in the form of a message from Hari Seldon of the form "neener, neener, you've wasted your lives on a pointless project. Now I will tell you what is really going on for all you know".
It's made clear that the Fall of the Empire has been particularly fast in the provinces; the Kingdoms no longer have atomic power and the Empire itself does not seem much better off. How exactly worlds without atomic power manage starships is not clear.
Terminus really is very metal poor which makes me wonder how happy terrestrial biology is there. The Anacreonians talk about farming the place but even iron has to be imported. It does not sound all that habitable. It is the opposite of Trantor in many ways, not a coincidence, and yet this leaves it in a situation that can be compared to Trantor's; Terminus is utterly dependent on maintaining its off-world ties if it hopes to have any prosperity at all.
I think it gets less true as the series progresses but there are times where this felt as though Shakespeare had decided to write Hamlet or MacBeth entirely from the point of view of some minor characters standing in the wings. There's a lot of talking in this and very little action; I cannot see how this can be faithfully adapted to the silver screen.
The Empire is inspired by Rome but it's different in many ways. Among others, it is the only game in town when the story begins; Rome in contrast always had external enemies. When Asimov decided to make the Empire all of the world instead of all of the Known World, he makes the galaxy a much duller place. Maybe more on this in another post.
There's another difference: there's really nothing to compare to Christianity and by the time of Romulus Augustulus the Empire's state religion had been Christianity for nearly a century. If Asimov had really been pushing the parallels between Rome and the Empire, the events of Pebble in the Sky would have produced a messianic figure, perhaps in the form of a simple tailor. Which actually makes me wonder if the Mule can trace his ancestry back to Earth. Also, no Terran diaspora.
A universal state also raises the question of where the barbarians are to come from and the answer, which would have been painfully obvious to a Jew watching events in Europe in the 1930s, is of course, "from within".
Re: Mutually oblivious empires.
It seemed like Brin thought of this after the first couple of books were finished, as there wasn't a good explanation for why the systems our heroes traveled through didn't have any noticeable traffic to their high-population-density gas giants or whatever.
Re: Mutually oblivious empires.