The Foundation Trilogy: Part Six of Eight

[james_davis_nicoll]

Foundation: Flight From The Mule

This follows immediately on the events of the previous episode. Terminus has fallen and it can only be a matter of time before the trader world of Haven follows it. All appears lost and there is a general air of malaise on Haven.
spoilers
The one ray of hope comes from researcher Eblin Mis, who believes that the mysterious Second Foundation, set up at the same time as the Foundation, might prove the Foundation's salvation. Unfortunately the Second Foundation's location is not known, aside from it being at the other end of the galaxy, and so an expedition consisting of Mis, less-newly-weds-than-before Toran and Bayta Darell and Magnifico, who is on the lam from the Mule since leaving his employ, head to the old Imperial capital of Trantor to see if its library has some clue.

Trantor was sacked some time ago and the capital is now on Neotrantor, formerly the world Delicass. It is a sign of how far the Empire has fallen that the quartet have no trouble obtaining an audience with the elderly and rather senile Dagobert IX. Emperor Dagobert is an amiable old duffer who has no trouble authorizing a salvage operation on Trantor but his son, also Dagobert, is a would-be rapist and Magnifico kills the fellow with weaponized music for the insult to Bayta.

Interestingly, while Magnifico is protective of Bayta, he doesn't seem to have much trouble using an area-effect lethal weapon on the man standing near her husband. I also notice that while Magnifico warns Bayta, he does not warn anyone else.

Trantor is now an agrarian world but while its inhabitants are trading away its metals, they have preserved the great library. Mis proceeds to work himself to death looking for the Second Foundation; aided by a curiously talented Magnifico, Mis demonstrates insight and genius he never had before. Indeed, Mis manages to work out where the Second Foundation is from the deliberately unhelpful records on Trantor. Which is the point at which Bayta guns poor Mis down.

Bayta, you see, has put together all the clues: the way calamity followed Bayta, Toran and Magnifico across the galaxy, Mis's odd fervor, his sudden genius, the fact that the Mule is known to be able to alter people emotions and the fact that large parts of Magnifico's back-story makes no sense and she has concluded that Magnifico is none other than the Mule. Since Mis was about to expose the Second Foundation to the Mule and since the Second Foundation might be as unprepared for the Mule as the Foundation was, poor Mis had to die.

Exposed, Magnifico admits he is is the Mule, rues that his affection for Bayta kept him from altering her mind, gives a bit of his tragic back story (and I am sure the Music of Death he felt the need to compose as a young man figures into it) and then leaves to administer his new Empire. The Second Foundation will have to wait.

He leaves Toran and Bayta alive and unharmed. He could force her to love him but what he valued in her was that her emotions were sincere. He has no expectation of establishing a lasting dynasty; Mules are sterile...

This had comparatively few war crimes compared to previous episodes but made it up with the first attempted rape scene in the series. I cannot help but notice that in general Bayta is the focus of a lot of men's attentions and aside from Toran, who is just a bit of drip, most of the men seem to be poorly behaved at best or actual monsters. At least she gets to be the hero in the end.

Which reminds me, compare and contrast the speeches Crown Prince Rapey McBlasterfodder and the Mule make to Bayta.

I did like that there is an explanation in this story for the sometimes odd decisions people make: there's a telepath screwing with people's minds. That explains so much! And given the hints that the Second Foundation may also be exploring psychic realms, some of the odder decisions in previous stories may have involved some tuxedoed man just off-stage, making hypnotic gestures.



Well, perhaps not tuxedoed.

There's an interesting bit about things that could disrupt the Plan. One problematic item is advancements in technology of the sort that Seldon could not foresee. Is the Second Foundation shaping what fields get researched by the Foundation?

Oh, another thing that occurred to me: FTL in this setting is lickity split fast: do we know no extragalactic expeditions were ever made? The distances to the LMC and SMC are not much larger than the width of the galaxy and ships track that all the time.

I wonder how it is ships track each other across parsecs?

Comments

[oh6]

I'm pretty sure you mean "on the lam" where you write "on the lamb".

I suppose these are spoilers so it doesn't really matter, but you refer to Magnifico as the Mule well before his unmasking.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Did I get them all?

[oh6]

Yes, I think that's all of them.

[onyxlynx]

I remembered the great reveal, oddly enough, and Ebling Mis' use of "unprintable" as a curse word (I was fifteen when I first read the Foundation books and substituted "damn," which was the dirtiest word I knew at the time), but I don't remember an attempted rape scene. I suppose I'll have to reread (shuddering because Asimov's prose style, which I ignored at fifteen, now reads to me as clonk clonk clonk) the whole thing.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Handwave - FTL navigation depends on clumpy mass distribution in a way that makes leaving the galaxy difficult or impossible.

ISTR there's exactly one short story set in Asimov's Galactic Empire that involves actual aliens (not just mutants or robots or whatever), and at the end the aliens head for Elsewhere - I assume that was outside the galaxy.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was the Galactic Empire series, it was his Humanoids-everywhere series.

Assuming we're thinking of the same story, of course.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I remember one where there was one alien culture in the whole culture and the only way they'd be allowed to (survive? avoid assimilation?) is if they ran away. The setting was a beta of the Galactic Empire.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Wish I could remember any details. The humanoid civilization had a version of psychohistory, worked best on groups, but humans didn't fit in. So they were going to overwhelm humanity by bringing in different species, who bore resemblances to greek gods.

The one with the non-humanoids plotting to (I believe) steal a ship and go as far away as possible, because they would never be more than a curiosity in the Humanoid Empire.

Ringing any bells?

I agree about it being a beta for psychohistory.

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

Blind Alley? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Alley

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it, I think.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

However, the supervisor has protected himself from any blame associated with the disaster by his masterful documentation.

:D

*This* is why Dash has bureaucracy as a skill in Ashen Stars.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And why James Lester is the true protagonist of Primeval. Everyone else are just his Companions.

[(Anonymous)]

"Homo Sol" had psychology as a rigourous science, and I think it or one of its sequels had the bit about the Greek gods too.

-- Paul Clarke

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Well, it's explicitly and implicitly stated more than once that the hyperspace jump isn't really all that lickity-split fast.[1] Like other instantaneous drives, it has limitations that slow it down considerably despite being able to cover any distance no matter how great in no time at all; in this case, it's the time to compute a jump. Asimov devotes several thousand words of exposition in the series to point out that (a), the calculations are intrinsically difficult and time consuming and (b), you have to have a really good idea of the mass distribution between your departure and arrival points if you don't want to be thrown hopelessly off-course.

I suppose if you were going intentionally going on a one-way trip outside the galaxy this wouldn't matter so much; but otherwise, economics rules. That is, before you can reliably go back and forth to an extra-galactic destination, you have to invest considerable sums in learning the mass-layout of the land in between.

[1]Otherwise it's really just a teleport booth that operates over instellar distances.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, forgot to mention: I knew space flight is really cheap in this universe but I was still a little surprised that it's so cheap the "crooked cop blackmails a couple of hundred bucks out of tourists" routine seems plausible. Of course, it's not like the space cop is paying for his ship and its upkeep.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Heh. Is that why Devers and assorted traders remind me of Ali (a.k.a. peddler-man), what with his wagon-load of wares visiting lonely housewives?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

What always makes me laugh in hindsight is that the Mule isn't even particularly evil, so much as he's a pretty standard way most people play their non-psion 4e Bard PCs – you've got him pulling an AoE attack out, "assisting" with history and wisdom rolls, pulling outrageous diplomacy and bluff checks when they really shouldn't work...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I was wondering what the Mule's long term plan for his empire was. Turns out he doesn't have one. After he dies, it's on its own.

(By the way, are we overdue for a Central Asian threat crashing the civilizations unfortunate enough to be next to Central Asia?)

His descriptions of the Mule are, of course, the way he wishes he was...

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Turns out he doesn't have one.

I think all his plans were contingent on finding and defeating the second foundation, without that any post-mortem plans he set in place would be undone by seldon's psychic society of secret second-foundationers.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

But he didn't know about the Second Foundation until he started talking to the Foundies, did he? Once he found out about their existence, yes, they became Priority Enemy Number One, but his plans for making the entire galaxy bend its collective knee to him pre-dated that.

I think it's more that his motivation was essentially revenge -- the galaxy had been mean to him, so he was going to knock it down and kick it in the face. It didn't seem like he had thought much about what would happen after that.

(Granted, most people could be excused for thinking that when the first entry on your To-Do list is "Conquer the entire galaxy," then you probably don't need to worry too much about what the second entry is.)

It seems entirely possible that, if there had been no Second Foundation, he would have steamrolled the galaxy into his own personal empire, and then almost immediately gotten bored with it and moved on looking for something more challenging.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

To give Toran some credit (and yes, he is a bit of a drip) the Mule is deliberately making him clueless.

[(Anonymous)]

Asimov said that he based Toran on himself, and Bayta on his wife; he did feel at the time (per his autobiography) that she was far more attractive and capable than he was at negotiating any kind of social situation, such as figuring out who was lying.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the Foundation Series since my Golden Age, but I remember the Mule being a remarkably sympathetic villain; unusually so for the era and the space-opera setting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ah, knew I forgot something: Asimov has his characters seriously underestimate how many mutations one might find in a given population or he's using mutation in an idiosyncratic way. Also, people seem to be built on a points systems in Foundation: mutants pay for way awesome powers with disabilities and poor Bayta seems to have paid off her intellectual skills by taking at least two points in Guy Magnet.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Crap, now I'm thinking about how to do Foundation in Tri-Stat.

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

When she shoots Mis, it's highly ironic that she is free to do so because she's probably the only person involved who hasn't worked out what was going on previously and had their mind altered to fix that (if my own memory serves, it's not in the audio but in the original that the Mule mentions people walking in on him while he was using a radio and needing a little light editing). Thus my comment on one of the earlier episode threads about just how Actually Competent Bayta really is.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Well, it doesn't take a whole lot of brains to figure out someone is not who they seem to be if - per your description - you walk in on someone sending coded messages to the enemy.

Bayta uses deduction instead. So I'm guessing that she really is competent.

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

Certainly competent enough to work it out in the end, yes. As you'd hope with somebody with her academic qualifications. And don't get me wrong, I rather approve of Bayta (partly because she's one of the few characters who doesn't mind-control anyone and doesn't regard planet-zapping genocide as just part of a day's work, but still).

To quote the text, though: "You, Toran, were under control. You never suspected me; never questioned me; never saw anything peculiar or strange about me." Doesn't that suggest that the Mule believed Toran would have figured it out if he wasn't being controlled? The Mule also lists examples of his own suspicious behaviour which are more subtle than using a hyperwave transmitter. My previous comment does suggest I thought that the radio was the only giveaway, which isn't so; I hope I've expressed it more clearly here.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The mule might be the product of multiple simultaneous mutations that only work together (and are deleterious otherwise). One can make the probability of such a cluster be as low as one likes, by increasing the number of mutations required.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

From the wikipedia entry on Dagobert IX:

His son, the crown prince Dagobert, who was a clone,

Wait, cloning is available? Then the Mule could have had kids (granted, since his various maladies killed him by 30, maybe he didn't want to inflict them on his off-spring).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't remember his being a clone. It seems like an odd thing to have mentioned in the original stories since who was thinking about cloning humans in 1945 (besides, of course, Clonus, the 1979 cloning horror movie that's pretty good considering it was made for about $250).

On the other hand Asimov did do some editing for the early 80s reissues of the books, and maybe he slipped that in for no really obvious reason?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Actually the first time anyone artificially cloned a vertebrate was 1923 (Sperman et al), a frog in particular, but they used the same technique that was eventually used in the production of Dolly the sheep.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, cloning was done before the 40s, but when was the idea of cloning humans really something anyone was talking about? ... Hang on, let's pull up Google Ngrams for this. Comparing ``cloned human'' to ``cloned animal'' (and I have no explanation for the 1900-1910 range):

Here's the 1900-to-1960 era. Meanwhile, open that up to the rest of the 20th century:

... and, basically, people thought a lot about cloning humans after 1960, but before then?

I guess my question is when did human clones start turning up in science fiction?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Ngrams is very hard to use with the word clone, not only is there a lot of "closed" "clothes" "close" and similar misspellings that come up as cloned and clone and cloning, but google apparently thinks the geological survey is a work of fiction, along with zoology and chemistry journals :^/

Hmmm... a quck bit of googling seems to indicate that while cloning does pop up in sci-fi before this, it's never called cloning, Brave New World has de facto cloning as does The World of Null-A (which was serialised by campbell during the middle of the original foundation stories' run), so yeah I have to agree with you that it's probably a later addition to the text, unless asimov was bizarrely enough the first sff writer to call cloning "cloning" (which is unlikely).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The people in BNW are definitely clones of each other, in large batches. They might not be clones of their parents: it's been a long time since I read the book, and I don't recall whether the egg that seeds the Bokanovsky process has to be fertilized or not. (Of course, in real life it'd have to get the other half of its genome from somewhere, if it's a normal human egg.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It looks like the Bokanovsky process relies on eggs and sperm mixed together, with the growing cells then split off into the separate individuals. I guess that's cloning, though it's obviously not the kind which would have done the Mule any good.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...also, as usual in science fiction (but not in reality), in Brave New World cloning and ectogenesis go hand in hand.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

Joshua, Son of None was published in 1973. Woody Allen's "Sleeper" also came out in 1973 and featured cloning. Well before that, "The Clone" (1959) by Theodore L. Thomas.

"Clone" is difficult to search for in Google Books because it can easily be a mis-OCR for either "close" or "done", or possibly other words ...

[(Anonymous)]

There's a passage in (IIRC) "Forward the Foundation" which shows that either the LMC or the SMC had been colonized. Hari Seldon made sure that the colonies were dismantled to avoid disturbing the Galactic Empire somehow.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

"clone" does not appear (http://books.google.com/books?id=BJcgLVibkrEC&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=dagobert+IX&source=bl&ots=T4w5tZ3Hsg&sig=nghHRy-tnYYaRI4MlJf163bHyvE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2aB7UMqXEsbX0QHI2oH4Aw&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=clone&f=false) in Foundation and Empire.

Hyperwave transmitter

[(Anonymous)]

There are two big problems with Magnifico´s hidden hyperwave transmitter.
One, in previous part of Foundation and Empire, we hear that ultrawave transmission has a limited range. When Devers fled Riose´s base, he tried connecting to the Merchants - with difficulty because of the extreme range. Specified as 500 lightyears.
It follows that Mule, or any non-psychic agent whom Mule may have sent out, could not have kept ultrawave communications with the headquarters of Mule´s army if they were out of the range for listeners of Mule´s army.
Two, Mule could have detected, and given memory gaps, to any people who confronted him when operating his radio transmitter. But how about people elsewhere on the planet listening to ultrawave spectrum for any broadcasts not authorized by their side? Mule would not have been physically near them to tamper with them, and he would not have known where they were.