All posts tagged Isaac Asimov

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins (1998)

Here is another analogy… (p.12)

Although this book is over 20 years old, the issues it addresses (the anti-scientific tendency of much traditional literature and the inappropriate use of poetic writing in bogus pseudo-science – versus the hard scientific fact and clear scientific thinking Dawkins promotes) are still very current, and since Dawkins is still writing books attacking non-scientific ways of looking at the world (such as his most recent tome, Outgrowing God, published just last year) I think it’s still worth reviewing this one as an analysis of his overall style and approach.

The aim

The full title is Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder and the book’s purpose is simple: For thousands of years humans have written poetry or concocted religious myths and symbols to explain the puzzling world around them. But (Dawkins says) the scientific worldview as we now have it explains more or less everything about the world around us from bacteria to supernovas and, if properly understood, is far more beautiful and inspiring than the poetry, myths and legends it supersedes.

My advice

However, in my opinion, if you want to be inspired, watch a David Attenborough documentary about the natural world or a Brian Cox one about the stars, because this book is a hilariously silly, shallow, ragbag of random quotes, fragments of science mixed up with countless personal anecdotes, snippets from newspapers or TV and, above all, a relentless stream Richard Dawkins’s pet peeves and trite opinions.

Do not read this book.

Dawkins shares his opinion of modern journalists (lamentably anti-science)

Dawkins opens the book with a sustained attack on a shopping list of contemporary authors who have written disparagingly about science, including Bernard Levin (who once wrote an article specifically about Dawkins God, Me and Mr Dawkins 11 October 1996 – hence the enmity), Simon Jenkins, A.A. Gill, Fay Weldon (author of a ‘hymn of hate’ against science in the Daily Telegraph) and so on and so on.

Dawkins quotes articles in the newspapers, or letters he has received, or questions he gets asked at the end of his lectures, or anecdotes about students of his, to demonstrate that anti-scientific prejudice and ignorance is everywhere – There are creationists under the bed and anti-evolutionists hiding in the closet. It isn’t safe to turn on the TV or open a newspaper without someone spouting unscientific rubbish or promoting astrology or showing the deepest scientific illiteracy. Fools! Knaves! Dawkins has no patience with error.

This is dramatically, profoundly, hugely wrong. (p.90)

Dawkins shares his opinion of British poets (lamentably anti-science)

And then – oh dear, oh dear – Dawkins takes it upon himself to be the judge of a raft of classic poets including Keats, Coleridge or Wordsworth, Blake or Yeats or Lawrence.

Dawkins has located quotes from all of these luminaries lamenting the ‘death of romance’ and the role science has played in ‘dis-enchanting the world’ so, as usual, Richard loses no time in telling us that they were all dead wrong in thinking science dis-enchants the world: if only they’d understood modern science, they’d have written poetry ten times as good!!

Dawkins then goes on to prove that he has absolutely no feel for poetic writing or for the luminous quality of poetry:

  1. by the way he quotes schoolboy tags and the most obvious ‘greatest hits’ moments from the most obvious Great Poets
  2. by the way he treats poems as rhythmic verse i.e you can do a prose summary, and then evaluate them on whether or not they show the ‘correct’ attitude to the scientific worldview
  3. and by the way he has rummaged through the diaries and letters and table talk of the Great Poets to find quotes of them stating anti-scientific or anti-rationalist opinions

Which he considers case closed. He cannot entertain the idea that poetry might not be written to put forward clearly defined and logical points of view, but might be an alternative way of perceiving and expressing the world and what it is to be human…

He refers to D.H. Lawrence who (allegedly) refused to believe that moonlight is reflected sunlight (that sounds too pat and too stupid to be true), but even if it were, you kind of know what Lawrence is talking about. We have evolved over tens of millions of years to find night-time eerie and the changing shape and movement of the moon uncanny. Is it possible that part of a poet’s role is to respect ancient beliefs, to excavate and re-express deep ancestral feelings, no matter how irrational?

Not in Dawkins’s view. No! They were all wrong wrong wrong about science and deserve to be sent to the back of the class. He speculates that:

Keats, like Yeats, might have been an even better poet if he had gone to science from some of his inspiration. (p.27)

If only the Great Poets were more like, well, like Richard Dawkins!

Dawkins’s bêtes noirs and pet peeves

He fills the book with his own Daily Mail prejudices and bêtes noirs.

Post-modernism is rubbish Once again we get his shallow critique of ‘post-modernism’ and ‘cultural relativism’ – ‘the meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants‘ – which he dismisses in a sentence as existing merely ‘to impress the gullible’ (p.41).

Now maybe a lot of French post-war philosophy is pretentious twaddle, but, for example, Derrida’s attempt to rethink the entire tradition of writing as a way of encoding authority which constantly undermines itself because of the looseness and deeply unfinishable nature of writing, or Foucault’s histories of how power is wielded by supposedly ‘objective’ academic disciplines and public institutions, or Roland Barthes’ explorations of how texts have lives of their own, determined by structures or levels of activity which have hitherto been overlooked – these are all fascinating intellectual endeavours, certainly more worth spending time reading about than the Daily Mail philistinism of Dr D.

It’s a telling irony that soon after a passage attacking writers and journalists (Bernard Levin, Simon Jenkins et al) for their shallow, ignorant dismissal of science as being a worldview which they don’t like — Dawkins himself carries out just such a shallow, ignorant dismissal of post-modern philosophy, for being a worldview which he doesn’t like.

Could it be that there are multiple worldviews, countless worldviews, and that we get along best by enjoying their diversity? No! Wrong wrong wrong!

Children’s book awards are vulgar Dawkins gives an account of attending an awards ceremony for children’s science books where the audience was encouraged to make insect noises, which he found insufferably ‘vulgar’.

Computer games are vulgar In much the same way, in The Blind Watchmaker, he dismissed ‘vulgar’ arcade computer games (not as dignified and worthy as the computer game he had devised, of course).

The ‘Top 20’ shows how vulgar people are This kind of lofty condemnation of ‘popular’ interests and tastes comes, of course, from a long line of lofty and contemptuous Oxford intellectuals, and sits alongside his fastidious disapproval of the so-called ‘Top 40’ and how easy it is to promote ‘worthless pop singles, an attitude of fastidious elitism which made me laugh at the end of The Blind Watchmaker. Later on he finds the space, for obscure personal reasons, to go out of his way to tell us that the activity of bodybuilding is an ‘odd minority culture’. Possibly. But not as odd as writing a book supposedly about science and going out of your way to include a paragraph disapproving of body building.

The X-Files is anti-scientific Dawkins takes the time to explain why he dislikes the popularity of the TV show The X-Files – namely, because of the way it foregrounds the spooky, irrational explanations for the weird occurrences it depicts (p.28) – which is so frightfully anti-science.

Douglas Adams is masterly By contrast, he wants us to know that he approves of the ‘masterly’ science comedies of Douglas Adams (p.29).

Science fiction is serious literature! Science fiction by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov et al:

seems to me to be an important literary form in its own right, snobbishly underrated by some scholars of literature (p.27)

Oh yes, if Dawkins ran literature departments, things would be different! Out with Derrida and Barthes, in with Douglas Adams and Isaac Asimov!

Dr Dolittle is not racist Dawkins finds time to share his opinion that Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle books do have a little racism in them, but then that was the universal worldview of the 1920s, so it is silly for ‘pompously correct librarians’ to ban them. And, anyway, Dolittle’s love of animals is superior to the speciesism which even the most politically correct of our own time are still prey to (p.53).

Ruskin didn’t understand science I was actively upset when Dawkins quotes a passage of Ruskin about how people prefer myths and stories to the cold empirical facts – and then goes on to ridicule Ruskin’s attitude not by countering his views but by retelling the hoary old anecdote about the great critic and social reformer’s disastrous wedding night.

It stood out to me as a moment of gross insensitivity and schoolboy bullying. Ruskin was a genius, who struggled to transform the way the philistine British thought about art and design and handed his cause on to the young William Morris. To drag up this hackneyed anecdote is in the worst possible vein of Daily Mail ad hominem philistinism.

Summary

a) Dawkins is a modern reincarnation of just the kind of literal-minded, unbending, unsympathetic and impenetrably dense philistine who forced so many of the Great Poets – Shelley and Byron and Browning, Lawrence and Auden – to flee claustrophobic, puritanical, judgemental England for hotter, more laid-back climes.

b) There seems to be no subject too trivial or too minor for Dawkins not to be able to use it as the pretext to share with the reader his trite and obvious opinions and prejudices, or to prompt another anecdote from his endless store of ‘fascinating’ encounters.

Imagine if David Attenborough interrupted his voiceover about humming birds or polar bears to share an anecdote about a distinguished professor he had a squabble with over dinner at his Oxford college, or took a minute to explain to his viewers why Star Trek is better than Dr Who, or why Douglas Adams’ novels are criminally under-rated.

You’d think he’d gone mad. But that’s what most of this book is like.

Snobbism

Although Dawkins goes out of his way to sound reasonable he can’t help quite frequently sounding like a snob, fastidiously distancing himself from the ghastly taste of the mob. Richard – alongside the Daily Mail – laments how standards have slipped and once-mighty institutions have pandered to popular taste. O Tempora! O mores!

In his chapter rubbishing horoscopes and astrology, Dawkins quotes surveys in which most people say they read horoscopes just for entertainment:

Their taste in what constitutes entertaining fiction is evidently different from mine!

Indeed. Dawkins has told us several times that he cycles through the streets of leafy Oxford. I wonder if he’s ever thought about people like me who have to fight their way onto over-crowded tube trains, or flop exhausted at the end of the day onto a muggy bus, brain dead and pick up a copy of the Metro or Standard to leaf through, treating the horoscopes as much the same as all the other brainless twaddle in it which helps pass the time if you are very, very tired. Different strokes for different folks. Live and let live, maybe…

I chortled when he referred to the Radio Times as ‘that once-respected organ of the BBC’ (p.124). Could anyone sound more pompous?

After taking part in a BBC programme promoting a faith healer who claimed to be the reincarnation of a 2,000-year-old dead doctor, Dawkins clashed with the commissioning editor of this programme. He was horrified that the BBC should:

lend the weight of its long built-up reputation by appearing to accept the fantasy at face value (pp.125-6)

It’s so often the BBC which draws the ire of the Mrs Angry’s from Tunbridge Wells… and so it is for Dawkins. I smiled when he described David Frost as:

a veteran British television personality whom some government saw fit to knight… (p.126)

‘Whom’. I know it’s technically correct but I don’t like using ‘whom’ precisely because Dawkins is typical of the kind of people who still use it, the kind of people who perpetually think the BBC is going to the dogs.

The long chapter demolishing astrologers and fake magicians is an orgy of supercilious superiority to the immoral tricksters who make money be exploiting a gullible public, aided and abetted by intelligent people in places like the BBC who really should know better!

Dawkins’s personal stories and gossip

I’ll begin with a personal anecdote. (p.138)

The book is jam packed with chatty stories and anecdotes from people he’s met, and letters he’s received, and newspapers articles he’s read, and debates he’s taken part in, and lectures he’s given, and children he’s chatted to, and anecdotes about his wife, and his mother-in-law, and his parents, and uncle and aunt.

  • I am told on good authority that defence lawyers in the United States sometimes object to jury candidates on the grounds that they have had a scientific education (p.83)
  • A colleague tells me of a time when he was up for selection on a jury… (p.84)
  • I had a schoolfriend who claimed that he could recognise any member of the 80-strong residence in which we lived purely by listening to their footsteps. (p.88)
  • I had another friend from Switzerland who claimed that when she walked into a room she could tell, by smell, which members of her circle of acquaintances had just left the room. (p.88)
  • I once received a lawyer’s bill, the last item of which was ‘Time spent making out this bill’ (p.106)
  • My wife Lalla Ward recalls an occasion when an American starlet approached the director of the film they were both working on with a ‘Gee, Mr Preminger, what sign are you?’ and received the immortal rebuff, in a thick Austrian accent, ‘I am a Do Not Disturrrb sign.’ (p.118)
  • I once met a woman who was employed full time to invent these stories [Elvis sighted on Mars-type stories] for an American publication… (p.124)
  • I recall an entertaining dinner with a philosopher who told me the following story: One day in church he noticed that a priest, in a kneeling position, was hovering nine inches above the church floor. (p.133)
  • I remember once trying to amuse a six-year-old child at Christmas time by reckoning with her how long it would take Father Christmas to go down all the chimneys in the world. (p.141)
  • I used a similar illustration in one of my Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 1991. (p.145)
  • My wife once bought for her mother a beautiful antique watch with a pink face. (p.154)
  • During this particular minute, my thoughts have strayed to a schoolfellow called Haviland (I don’t remember his Christian name, not what he looked like) whom I haven’t seen or thought of for 45 years. (p.159)
  • Daniel Dennett has told me of a conversation with a philosopher colleague who had read Wonderful Life as arguing that the Cambrian phyla did not have a common ancestor – that they had sprung up as independent origins of life! (p.207)

He spends a page and a half describing the time his parents persuaded little Richard and his sister to put on blindfolds and led them out to the garden where they sat them in a wooden frame which they persuaded the children was an airplane, trundled it along the ‘runway’ and then lifted it into the air and zoomed it around the garden, sometimes brushing against low-hanging branches of trees.

This anecdote is the basis of a couple of pages of complete speculation about why credulity, the ability to believe anything they’re told, might be an evolutionary advantage in human children – but how adults should grow out of it and apply serious scientific standards of scepticism and an informed understanding of statistics to every aspect of their lives.

But why? Why can’t people believe what they want to? In reality they already do, and always have, and always will. Charming, page-long anecdotes about Richard’s upper-middle-class childhood aren’t going to change anyone’s minds, they just warm the hearts of the upper-middle-class book reviewers who, as a result, shower his books with praise (enthusiastic blurbs on the back of this book come from A.S. Byatt [private school and Oxford] and Matt Ridley [the fifth Viscount Ridley, Eton and Oxford]).

On and on it goes in an endless burbling stream of jolly gossip which is entertaining because it’s so inconsequential and vain, a self-satisfied family album of preening opinions.

Sometimes there are bits of science…

Why rainbows appear like they do, sound waves, how we can read the chemical composition of different stars, DNA fingerprinting – there are interesting fragments of actual science, reasonably clearly explained, buried amid all the gossip and personal prejudices.

There’s another explanation of the structure of the eye (repeated from River Out of Eden), a page about qasars, and 4 or 5 pages about ‘Skinner boxes, and the behaviouralist B.F. Skinner’s experiments rewarding animals (pigeons and rats) which led him to notice that animals, too, appear to develop superstitious rituals i.e. if they happened to be doing something (pecking a particular part of the box, or huddling on one particular corner) when some food pops through the chute into the box, then they will repeat the same behaviour again and again in the hope that lightning strikes twice. Like humans who carry out lucky tics and rituals.

There’s a lengthy passage (pp.193-209) attacking Stephen Jay Gould. It’s typical of Dawkins in that he says he respects the great American populariser of evolution, but then goes on to systematically demolish every aspect of Gould’s book Wonderful Life. Gould uses the fossil discoveries in the Burgess Shale to assert that the Cambrian period when they were laid down saw a spectacular and unprecedented explosion of evolutionary growth and diversity, hundreds of wacky designs for life forms, many of which flourished and disappeared. Dawkins powerfully disagrees that evolution works in such bursts and spurts, and lines up a barrage of critics and authorities to demolish Gould’s position, concluding with a quote from Peter Medawar claiming it was a shame that Gould had (before his death in 2002) become the pre-eminent popular exponent of evolutionary theory in the United States because his ideas are ‘confused’ and totally unrepresentative of the mainstream of evolutionary thought (‘in fact the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with…’, p.207).

OK so there’s some science in this passage, as Dawkins explains why he disagrees with Gould but, as you can tell, the explication of the facts of what was found in the Burgess Shale take a poor second place to Dawkins’s argufying about it. The point of these fifteen pages or so is not to explain the thing to you, it’s to convince you that Gould was wrong wrong wrong!

The passage I liked best explained how evolution, among other things, has selected for the correct shapes of key proteins – some crucial proteins have multiple shapes and versions: the correct shapes are the ones which allow them to carry out their life-enabling activities, but it explains why things go disastrously wrong if the body, for whatever reason, starts to produce wrong-shaped alternatives: which is what happens in mad cow disease, when an alternative shape of the prion protein occurs and then triggers a cascade of mishapen prions throughout the body, which leads to holes forming in the brain, and madness.

Moments like this are obviously interesting, but they are oases of sense in a book most of whose text is made up of anecdotes, stories, far-fetched analogies, pitifully simplistic opinions about Great Literature, and a wholesale misunderstanding of human nature.

Conclusion

As to Dawkins’s central point that all kinds of people think unscientifically, don’t understand statistics or probabilities or how DNA fingerprinting works or how the rainbow is made, and instead believe gibberish about horoscopes and astrology and magic tricks… well, so what?

People have always been fools, always will be, as John Gray points out (see my review of his most recent book, The Soul of the Marionette). On the whole, people don’t burn witches or lynch strangers or march gaily off to war like they used to, so that’s progress of a sort.

But expecting everyone to suddenly abandon junk TV, sensationalist tabloid journalism, horoscopes and the countless promises of overnight diets and anti-ageing creams, and suddenly, miraculously, become hyper-intelligent, private-school educated, Oxford academic experts in DNA and astronomy is… well… a fatuous fantasy.

Dawkins and Junior

When my son (22 and studying Biology at university) discovered that I was reading Dawkins’s books, he was genuinely outraged. He crossly told me that all Dawkins’s contributions to biology have been discredited, and that his only achievement has been to create in many people’s minds a vision of science and scientists as narrow-minded, intolerant, anti-religious and bigoted – a view which my son has personally found himself having to extricate himself from in student conversations, and which has been extremely socially unhelpful.

P.S.

One last Dawkins anecdote to finish with:

In a previous book I gave away the number of the combination lock on my bicycle. I felt safe in doing so because obviously my books would never be read by the kind of person who would steal a bicycle. Unfortunately somebody did steal it, and now I have a new lock with a new number. (p.147)

This vignette perfectly captures Dawkins’s spirit of winning naivety and complete ignorance of human nature. Maybe you can see why, in my review of The Blind Watchmaker, I dubbed Dawkins the Mr Bean of Biology.

Credit

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins was published by Penguin in 1998. All references are to the 1999 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other science books

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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2020

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I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (1950)

I, Robot is a ‘fixup’ novel, i.e. it is not a novel at all, but a collection of science fiction short stories. The nine stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950, and were then compiled into a book for stand-alone publication by Gnome Press in 1950, in the same way that the Foundation trilogy also appeared as magazine short stories before being packaged up by Gnome.

The stories are (sort of) woven together by a framing narrative in which the fictional Dr. Susan Calvin, a pioneer of positronic robots and now 75 years old, tells each story to a reporter whose been sent to do a feature on her life.

These interventions don’t precede and end every story; if they did there’d be eighteen of them; there are in fact only seven and I think the stories are better without them. Paradoxically, they make a more effective continuous narrative without Asimov’s ham-fisted linking passages. Calvin appears as a central character in three of them, anyway, and the comedy pair of robot testers, Powell and Donovan appear in another three consecutive stories, so the stories already contained threads and continuities…

A lot is explained once you learn that these were pretty much the first SF stories Asimov wrote. Since he was born in 1920, Robbie was published when he was just 20! Runaround when he was 21, and so on. His youth explains a lot of the gawkiness of the language and the immaturity of his view of character and, indeed, of plot.

So the reader has a choice: you can either judge Asimov against mature, literary writers and be appalled at the stories’ silliness and clunky style; or take into account how young he was, and be impressed at the vividness of his ideas – the Three Laws, the positronic brain etc – ideas which are silly, but proved flexible and enduring enough to be turned into nearly 40 shorts stories, four novels, and countless spin-offs, not least the blockbusting Will Smith movie.

Introduction

The introduction is mostly interesting for the fictional timeline it introduces around the early development of robots. In 1982 Susan Calvin was born, the same year Lawrence Robertson sets up U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Inc. The ‘now’ of the frame story interview is 75 years later i.e. 2057.

  • 1998 intelligent robots are available to the public
  • 2002 mobile, speaking robot invented
  • 2005 first attempt to colonise Mercury
  • 2008 Susan Calvin joins U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Inc as its first robopsychologist
  • 2015 second, successful, attempt to colonise Mercury
  • 2006 an asteroid has a laser beam placed on it to relay the sun’s energy back to earth
  • 2037 the hyperatomic motor invented (as described in the story, Escape!)
  • 2044 the Regions of earth, having already absorbed and superseded ‘nations’, themselves come together to form a global Federation

What this timeline indicates is Asimov’s urge to systematise and imperialise his stories. What I mean is that other short story writers write short stories are always part of a larger narrative (systematise) and the larger narrative tends to be epic – here it is the rise of robots from non-talking playmates to controllers of man’s destiny. Same as the Foundation series, where he doesn’t just tell stories about a future planet, or a future league of inhabited star systems – but the entire future of the galaxy.

1. Robbie (1940, revd. 1950 first appearance in Super Science Stories)

It is and 1996 and George Weston has bought his 8-year-old daughter, Gloria, a mute robot and playfellow. The story opens with them playing and laughing and Gloria telling Robbie stories, his favourite treat. However, Gloria’s mother does not like the thought of her daughter being friends with a robot so gets her husband to take it back to the factory and buy a dog instead. Gloria is devastated, hates the dog and pines away. To distract her her parents take her on a trip to futuristic New York. Gloria is excited but, to her mum’s dismay, chiefly because she thinks the family are going there to track down Robbie, who she’s been told has ‘run away’. When told that’s not the case she returns to sulking. Dad has a bright idea, to take her to a factory where they make robots in order to show Gloria that Robbie is not human, doesn’t have personality, is just an assemblage of cogs and wires. Unbeknown to Gloria or his wife, George has in fact arranged for Robby to be on the production line. Gloria spots him, goes mad with joy and runs across to him – straight into the path of a huge tractor. Before any of the humans can react, Robbie with robot speed hurtles across the shop floor and scoops Gloria out of danger.

This story, like the others, is supposed to give rise to some kind of debate about whether robots are human, have morals, are safe and so on. Well, since it is nearly 2019 and we still don’t have workable robots, that debate is fantasy, and this is a sweet, cheapjack story, written with flash and humour.

2. Runaround (March 1942 edition of Astounding Science Fiction)

It is 2005 and two robot testers, Powell and Donovan, have been sent to Mercury along with Robot SPD-13, known as ‘Speedy’. Ten years earlier an effort to colonise Mercury had been abandoned. Now the pair are trying again with better technology. They’ve inhabited the abandoned buildings the previous settlers left behind but discovered that the photo-cell banks that provide life support to the base are low on selenium and will soon fail.

The nearest selenium pool is seventeen miles away Donovan has sent Speedy to get some. Hours have gone by and he’s still not returned. So the story is a race against time.

But it is also a complicated use of Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics. The pair discover down in the bowels of the abandoned building some primitive robots who carry them through the shade of low hills as close to the selenium pool and Speedy as they can get. (If they go into the direct light of the sunlight they will begin to be irreparably damaged, even through spacesuits, by the fierce radioactive glare.)

They see and hear Speedy (by radio) and discover he appears to be drunk, reciting the words to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The Three Laws of Robotics are:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Now because Speedy was so expensive to build, the Third Law had been strengthened to preserve him and he has discovered something neither spaceman anticipated, which is that near the selenium are pools of iron-eating gas – much of Speedy being made of iron. When Donovan sent him to get some selenium he didn’t word the command particularly strongly.

So what’s happened is that, in Speedy’s mind, the second and third laws have come into conflict and given Speedy a sort of nervous breakdown. Hence the drunk-like behaviour. He approaches the selenium in obedience to the second law; but then detects the gas and backs away.

The astronauts try several tactics, including getting their robots to fetch, and then lob towards the selenium pool, canisters of oxalic acid to neutralise the carbonic gas. Eventually they tumble to the only thing which will trump laws 2 and 3, which is law 1. Powell walks out of the shadow of the bluff where they’ve been sheltering, into full sunlight, and calls to Speedy (over the radio) that the radiation is hurting him and begging Speedy to help. Law one overrides the other two and Speedy, restored to full working order, hurtles over, scoops him up and carries him into the protective shade.

At which point they give Speedy new instructions to collect the selenium, emphasising that it is life or death for them whether the photo-cell banks are replenished. With the full force of Law One behind him, this time Speedy overrides Law three (self protection) fetches loads of selenium, they fix the cells, everyone happy.

3. Reason (April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction)

A year later the same ill-fated couple of spacemen are moved to a space station orbiting the sun whose task is to focus the sun’s energy into a concentrated beam which is then shot back to a received on earth. They finish constructing one of the first of a new range of robots, QT-1, who they nickname ‘Cutie’, and are disconcerted when it starts to question them. Specifically, it refuses to believe that they made it. In a series of increasingly rancorous conversations, Cutie dismisses the men as flimsy assemblages of blood and flesh, obviously not built to last.

Cutie eventually decides that the main power source of the ship must be the ‘Master’.He dismisses all the evidence of space, visible from the ship’s portholes, and all the books aboard the ship, as fables and fantasies designed to occupy the ‘lower’ minds of the men.

No, Cutie has reasoned itself into the belief that ‘There is no Master but Master, and QT-1 is His prophet.’ Despite this it carried on going about its duties, namely supervising the less advanced robots in the various tasks of keeping the space station maintained. Until the guys realise, to their further consternation, that Cutie has passed his religion on to them and they now refuse to obey the humans. In fact they pick up the humans, take them to their living quarters and lock them in under house arrest.

Powell and Donovan become very anxious because a solar storm is expected which will make the immensely high-powered beam to the earth waver and wobble. Even a little amount will devastate hundreds of square miles back on earth. But to their amazement, and relief, Cutie manages the beam perfectly, countering for the impact of the solar storm far better than they could have. At some (buried) level Cutie is still functioning according the 1st and 2nd laws i.e. protecting humans. The pair end up wondering whether a robot’s nominal ‘beliefs’ matter at all, so long as it obeys the three laws and functions perfectly.

Although marked by Asimov’s trademark facetious humour, and despite the schoolboy level on which the ‘debate’ with the robot is carried out, and noting the melodramatic threat of the approach of the solar storm – this is still a humorous, effective short story.

4. Catch That Rabbit (February 1944  issue of Astounding Science Fiction )

It’s those two robot testers, Powell and Donovan, again. They’re jokey banter is laid on with a trowel and reeks of fast-talking, wise-cracking comedians of the era.

Powell said, ‘Mike — you’re right.’
‘Thanks, pal. I knew I’d do it some day.’
‘All right, and skip the sarcasm. We’ll save it for Earth, and preserve it in jars for future long, cold winters.’

The plot is comparable to the previous story. Now they’re on an asteroid mining station where a ‘master’ robot – nicknamed Dave because his number is DV-5 – is in charge of six little worker robots – nicknamed the ‘fingers’ – digging up some metal ore. Problem is they’re not  hitting their quotas and, when Powell and Donovan eavesdrop on the worker robots via a visi-screen, they are appalled to see that, as soon as their backs are turned, Dave leads the other six in vaudeville dance routines!

After much head-scratching and trying out various hypotheses – as in the previous story – they eventually tumble to the problem. The trouble seems to kick off whenever Dave encounters a slight problem. So it would seem that supervising six robots is simply too much of a strain, when an additional problem is added. Solution? Eliminate one of the robots. Dave can handle the remaining five, plus whatever issues arise in the blasting and mining operation, just fine.

There is, however, a typically cheesy Asimov punchline. So what’s with the chorus line dancing? Donovan asks. Powell replies that when Dave was stymied and his processors couldn’t decide what to do – he resorted to ‘twiddling his fingers‘ boom boom!

5. Liar! (May 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction)

Accidentally, a robot is manufactured which can read human minds. With typical Yank levity it is nicknamed Herbie, since its number is RB-34. U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Inc mathematician Peter Bogert and robopsychologist Susan Calvin, at various points, interview it. Now Herbie, as well as answering their questions, reads what’s on their minds, namely that Bogert wants to replace Lanning as head of U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Inc, and that Calvin is frustratedly in love with a young officer at the firm, Milton Ashe.

To their delight, Herbie tells Bogert that Lanning has handed in his resignation and nominated Bogert to replace him, and tells Calvin that Ashe is in love with her too.

Their happiness doesn’t last. When Bogert confronts Lanning with news of his resignation, the latter angrily denies it. Calvin is on the point of declaring her feelings for Ashe, when the latter announces that he soon to marry his fiancee.

In the climactic scene the four character confront Herbie with his ‘lies’ and it is Calvin who stumbles on the truth. Herbie can read minds. He knows what his human interlocutors wish. He knows revealing that those wishes are unrequited or untrue will psychologically damage them. He is programmed to obey the First Law of Robotics i.e. no robot must harm a human being. And so he lies to them. He tells them what they want to hear.

Beside herself with anger (and frustration) Calvin taunts the cowering robot into a corner of the room and eventually makes its brain short circuit.

Little Lost Robot (March 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction)

On Hyper Base, a military research station on an asteroid, scientists are working to develop the hyperspace drive. One of their robots goes missing. US Robots’ Chief Robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin, and Mathematical Director Peter Bogert, are called in to investigate.

They are told that the Nestor (a characteristic nickname for a model NS-2 robot) was one of a handful which had had its First Law of Robotics amended. They learn that, as part of their work, the ether scientists on Hyper Base have to expose themselves to risky levels of gamma rays, albeit for only short, measured periods. They and their managers found the Nestors kept interfering to prevent them exposing themselves, or rushing out to fetch them back in – in rigid obedience to the first law, which is to prevent any humans coming from harm.

After the usual red herrings, arguments and distractions it turns out that a nervy physicist, Gerald Black, who had been working with the missing robot, had gotten angry and told it to ‘get lost’. Which is exactly what it proceeded to do. A shipment of 62 Nestors had docked on its way off to some further destination. Next thing anyone knew there were 63 Nestors in its cargo hold and nobody could detected which of the 63 was the one which had had its First Law tampered with.

As usual Asimov creates a ‘race against time’ effect by having Calvin become increasingly concerned that Nestor 10 has not only ‘got lost’ but become resentful at being insulted by an inferior being’, and might carry on becoming more resentful until it plans something actively malevolent.

Calvin carries out a number of tests to try and distinguish Nestor 10, and becomes genuinely alarmed when entire cohorts of the nestors fail to react quickly enough to save a human (placed in a position of jeopardy for the sake of the experiment).

Finally, she catches it out by devising a test which distinguishes Nestor 10 as the only one which has received additional training in dealing with gamma radiation since arriving at the Hyper Drive base, the other 62 remaining ignorant.

After Nestor 10 has been revealed, Calvin sharply orders it to approach her, which it does, whining and complaining about its superiority and how it shouldn’t be treated like that and how it was ordered to lose itself and she mustn’t reveal its whereabouts… and attacks her. At which Black and Bogert flood the chamber with enough gamma rays to incapacitate it. it is destroyed, the other 62 ‘innocent’ nestors are trucked off to their destination.

Once again, this story is a scary indictment of the whole idea of robots, if it turns out that corporations can merrily tamper with the laws of robotics in order to save money, or get a job done, well, obviously they will. In which case the laws aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Escape! (August 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction)

Published in the month that the War in the Pacific – and so the Second World War – ended, after the dropping of the two atom bombs on Japan.

In that month’s issues of Astounding Science Fiction readers learned that U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Inc. possess a Giant Brain, a positronic doodah floating in a helium globe, supported by wires etc. Reassuringly, it is a chattily American brain:

Dr. Calvin said softly, ‘How are you, Brain?’
The Brain’s voice was high-pitched and enthusiastic, ‘Swell, Miss Susan.’

A rival firm approaches U.S. Robot etc. It too is working on a hyperdrive and, when its scientists fed all the information into their supercomputer, it crashed. Tentatively, our guys agree to feed the same info into The Brain. Now the thing about the Brain is it is emotionally a child. Dr Calvin thinks that this is why it manages to process the same information which blew up the rival one: because it doesn’t take the information so seriously – particularly the crucial piece of information that, during the hyperdrive, human beings effectively die.

It swallows all the information and happily agrees to make the ship in question. Within a month or so the robots it instructs have built a smooth shiny hyperdrive spaceship. It is over to the two jokers we’ve met in the earlier stories, Powell land Donovan, Mike and Greg, to have a look. But no sooner are they in it than the doors lock and it disappears into space. Horrified at being trapped, the two men wisecrack their way around their new environment. Horrified at losing two test pilots in a new spaceship Dr Calvin very carefully interviews The Brain. Oh, they’ll be fine, it says, breezily.

Meanwhile, Mike and Greg undergo the gut-wrenching experience of hyperspace travel and – weird scenes – imagine themselves dead and queueing up outside the Pearly Gates to say hello to old St Peter. When they come round from these hallucinations, they look at the parsec-ometer on the control board and realise it is set at 300,000.

They were conscious of sunlight through the port. It was weak, but it was bluewhite – and the gleaming pea that was the distant source of light was not Old Sol.
And Powell pointed a trembling finger at the single gauge. The needle stood stiff and proud at the hairline whose figure read 300,000 parsecs.
Powell said, ‘Mike if it’s true, we must be out of the Galaxy altogether.’
Donovan said, ‘Blazed Greg! We’d be the first men out of the Solar System.’
‘Yes! That’s just it. We’ve escaped the sun. We’ve escaped the Galaxy. Mike, this ship is the answer. It means freedom for all humanity — freedom to spread through to every star that exists — millions and billions and trillions of them.’

Eventually the spaceship returns to earth, joking Mike and Greg stumble out, unshaven and smelly, and are led off for a shower.

Dr Calvin explains to an executive board (i.e. all the characters we’ve met in the story, including Mike and Dave) that the equations they gave The Brain included the fact that humans would ‘die’ – their bodies would be completely disassembled, as would the molecules of the space ship – in order for it to travel through hyperspace. It was this knowledge of certain ‘death’ which had made the rivals’ computer – obeying the First Law of Robotics – short circuit.

But Dr Calvin had phrased the request in such a way to The Brain as to downplay the importance of death. (In fact this is a characteristic Asimovian play with words – Dr Calvin’s instructions to The Brain made no sense when I read them, and only make sense now, when she uses them as an excuse for why The Brain survived but the rival supercomputer crashed.

Like most of Asimov’s stories, there is a strong feeling of contrivance, that stories, phrases or logic are wrenched out of shape to deliver the outcome he wants. This makes them clever-clever, but profoundly unsatisfying, and sometimes almost incomprehensible.)

Anyway, The Brain still registered the fact the testers would ‘die’ (albeit they would be reconstituted a millisecond later) and this is the rather thin fictional excuse given for the fact that the Brain retreated into infantile humour – designing a spaceship which was all curves, providing the testers with food – but making it only baked beans and milk, providing toilet facilities – but making them difficult to find, and so on. Oh, and ensuring that at the moment of molecular disintegration, the testers had the peculiar jokey experience of queueing for heaven, of hearing their fellow waiters and some of the angels all yakking like extras in a 1950s musical. That was all The Brain coping with its proximity to breaking the First Law by retreating into infantile humour.

Follow all that? Happy with that explanation? Happy with that account of how the human race makes the greatest discovery in its history?

Or is it all a bit too much like a sketch from the Jerry Lee Lewis show?

Lanning raised a quieting hand, “All right, it’s been a mess, but it’s all over. What now?’
‘Well,’ said Bogert, quietly, “obviously it’s up to us to improve the space-warp engine. There must be some way of getting around that interval of jump. If there is, we’re the only organization left with a grand-scale super-robot, so we’re bound to find it if anyone can. And then — U. S. Robots has interstellar travel, and humanity has the opportunity for galactic empire.’ !!!

Evidence (September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction)

A story about a successful politician, Stephen Byerley. Having been a successful attorney he is running for mayor of a major American city. His opponent, Francis Quinn, claims he is a robot, built by the real Stephen Byerley who was crippled in a car accident years earlier.

The potential embarrassment leads U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men Inc. to send their top robosychologist test whether Byerley is a robot or not.

  • She offers him an apple and Byerley takes a bite, but he may have been designed with a stomach.
  • Quinn sends a journalist with a hidden X-ray camera to photograph Byerley’s insides, but Byerley is protected by some kind of force shield

Quinn and Calvin both make a big deal of the fact that Byerley, if a robot, must obey the three Laws of Robotics i.e. will be incapable of harming a human. This becomes a centrepiece of the growing opposition to Byerley, stoked by Quinn’s publicity machine.

During a globally broadcast speech to a hostile audience, a heckler climbs onto the stage and challenges Byerley to hit him in the face. Millions watch the candidate punch the heckler in the face. Calvin tells the press that Byerley is human. With the expert’s verdict disproving Quinn’s claim, Byerley wins the election.

Afterwards, Calvin visits Byerley and shrewdly points out that the heckler may have been a robot, manufactured by Byerley’s ‘teacher’, a shady figure who has gone ‘to the country’ to rest and who both Calvin and Quin suspect is the real Byerley, hopelessly crippled but with advanced robotics skills.

This is one of the few stories where Asimov adds linking material in which the elderly Calvin tells the narrator-reporter than Byerley arranged to have his body ‘atomised’ after his death, so nobody ever found out.

All very mysterious and thrilling for the nerdy 14-year-old reader, but the adult reader can pick a million holes in it, such as the authorities compelling Byerley to reveal the whereabouts of the mysterious ‘teacher’ or compelling him to have an x-ray.

The Evitable Conflict (June 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction)

The Byerley story turns out to be important because this same Stephen Byerley goes on to become the head of the planetary government, or World Co-Ordinator, as it is modestly titled

The story is a fitting end to the sequence because it marks the moment when robots – which we saw, in Robbie as little more than playthings for children in 1998 – taking over the running of the world by the 2050s.

Byerley is worried because various industrial projects – a canal in Mexico, mines in Spain – are falling behind. Either there’s something wrong with the machines which, by this stage, are running everything… or there is human sabotage.

He calls in Susan Calvin, by this stage 70 years old and the world’s leading expert on robot psychology.

She listens as Byerley gives her a detailed description of his recent tour of the Four Regions of Earth (and the 14 year old kid reader marvels and gawps at how the planet will be divided up into four vast Regions, with details of which one-time ‘countries’ they include, their shiny new capital cities, their Asian, Africa and European leaders who Byerley interviews).

This is all an excuse for Asimov to give his teenage view of the future which is that rational complex calculating Machines will take over the running of everything. The coming of atomic power, and space travel, will render the conflict between capitalism and communism irrelevant. The European empires will relinquish their colonies which will become free and independent. And all of humanity will realise, at the same time, that there is no room any more for nationalism or political conflicts. It will become one world. Everyone will live in peace.

Ahhh isn’t that nice.

Except for this one nagging fact — that some of the projects overseen by the Machines seem to be failing. Byerley tells Calvin his theory. There is a political movement known as the Society for Humanity. It can be shown that the men in charge of the Mexican canal, the Spanish mines and the other projects which are failing are all members of the Society for Humanity. Obviously they are tampering with figures or data in order to sabotage project successes, to reintroduce shortages and conflicts and to discredit the Machines. Therefore, Byerley tells Calvin, he proposes having every member of the Society for Humanity arrested and imprisoned.

Calvin – and this is a typical Asimov coup, to lead the reader on to expect one thing and then, with a whirl of his magician’s cape, to reveal something completely different – Calvin says No. He has got it exactly wrong. the Machines, vastly complex, proceeding on more data than any one human could ever manage, and continually improving, acting under an expanded version of the First Law of Robotics – namely that no robot or machine must harm humanity – have detected that the Society for Humanity presents a threat to the calm, peaceful, machine-controlled future of humanity – and so the machines have falsified the figures and made the projects fail — precisely in order to throw suspicion on the Society for Humanity, precisely to make the World Co-Ordinator arrest them, precisely in order to eliminate them.

In other words, the Machines have now acquired enough data about the world and insight into human psychology, as to be guiding humanity’s destiny. It is too late to avert or change, she tells Byerley. They are in control now.

Despite its silliness, it is nonetheless a breath-taking conclusion to the book, and, as with the Foundation stories, makes you feel like you really have experienced a huge and dazzling slab of mankind’s future.

Comments

The inadequacy of the Three Laws epitomises the failure of all attempts to replicate the human mind

I suppose this has occurred to everyone who’s ever read these stories, but the obvious thing about them is that every single story is about robots going wrong. This doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence about a robotic future.

A bit more subtly, what they all demonstrate is that ‘morality’ is a question of human interpretation: people interpret situations and decide how to act accordingly. This interpretative ability cannot be replicated by machines, computers, artificial intelligence, call them what you will. It probably never will for the simple reason that it is imperfect, partial and different in each individual human. You will never be able to programme ‘robots’ with universal laws of behaviour and morality, when these don’t even exist among humans.

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics sound impressive to a 14-year-old sci-fi nerd, or as the (shaky) premise to a series of pulp sci-fi stories – but the second you begin trying to apply them to real life situations (for example, two humans giving a robot contradictory orders) you immediately encounter problems. Asimov’s Three Laws sound swell, but they are, in practice, useless. And the fact that the robots in the stories seem to do nothing but break down, demonstrates the problem.

Neither the human mind nor the human body can be replicated by science

Asimov predicted that humans would have developed robots by now (2018, when I write), indeed by the 1990s.

Of course, we haven’t. This is because nobody understands how the human brain works and no technologists have come anywhere near replicating its functionality. They never will. The human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. It has taken about three billion years to evolve (if we start back with the origin of life on earth). The idea that guys in white coats in labs working with slide rules can come anywhere close to matching it in a few generations is really stupid.

And that’s just human intelligence. On the physical side, no scientists have created ‘robots’ with anything like the reaction times and physical adroitness of even the simplest animals.

We don’t need robots since we have an endless supply of the poor

Apart from the a) physical and b) mental impossibility of creating ‘robots’ with anything remotely like human capacities, the most crucial reason it hasn’t happened is because there is no financial incentive whatsoever to create them.

We have cheap robots already, they are called migrant workers or slaves, who can be put to work in complex and demanding environments – showing human abilities to handle complex situations, perform detailed and fiddly tasks – for as little as a dollar a day.

Charities estimate there are around 40 million slaves in the world today, 2018. So why waste money developing robots? Even if you did develop ‘robots’, could they be as cheap to buy and maintain as human slaves? Would they cost a dollar a day to run? No.

Only in certain environments which require absolutely rigid, inflexible repetitive tasks, and which are suitable for long-term heavy investment because of the certainty of return, have anything like robots been deployed, for example on the production lines of car factories.

But these are a million miles away from the robots Asimov envisaged, which you can sit down and chat to, let alone pass for human, as R. Daneel Olivaw does in Asimov’s robot novels.

All technologies break

And the last but not the least objection to Asimov’s vision of a robot-infested future is that all technologies break. Computers fail. Look at the number of incidents we’ve had just in the past month or so of major breakdowns by computer networks, and these are networks run by the biggest, richest, safest, most supervised, cleverest companies in the world.

On 6 December 2018 around 30 million people use the O2 network suffered a complete outage of the system. The collapse affected 25 million O2 subscribers, customers of Tesco Mobile and Sky Mobile, business such as Deliveroo, the digital systems on board all 8,500 London buses, and systems at some hospitals.

In September 2018 Facebook admitted that at least 50 million accounts had been hacked, with a poissible 40 million more vulnerable. Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp are also affected along with apps and services such as Tinder that authenticate users through Facebook.

In April 2018 TSB’s banking online banking service collapsed following a botched migration to a new platform. Some customers were unable to access their accounts for weeks afterwards. About 1,300 customers were defrauded, 12,500 closed their accounts and the outage cost the bank £180 million.

These are just the big ones I remember from the past few months, and the ones we got to hear about (i.e. weren’t hushed up). In the background of our lives and civilisation, all computer networks are being attacked, failing, crashing, requiring upgrades, or proper integration, or becoming obsolete, all of the time. If you do any research into it you’ll discover that the computer infrastructure of the international banks which underpin global capitalism are out of date, rickety, patched-up, vulnerable to hacking but more vulnerable to complex technical failures.

In Asimov’s world of advanced robots, there is none of this. The robots fix each other and all the spaceships, they are – according to the final story – ‘self-correcting’, everything works fine all the time, leaving humans free to swan around making vast conspiracies against each other.

This is the biggest fantasy or delusion in Asimov’s universe. Asimov’s fictions give no idea at all of the incomprehensible complexity of a computerised world and – by extension – of all human technologies and, by a further extension, of human societies.

Asimov breaks the English language

Asimov is a terrible writer, hurried, slapdash, trying to convey often pretty simple emotional or descriptive effects through horribly contorted phraseology.

As I read I could hear a little voice at the back of my mind, and after a while realised it was the voice of the English language, crying out as if from a long distance away, ‘Help me! Save me! Rescue me from this murderer!’

The main corridor was a narrow tunnel that led in a hard, clatter-footed stretch along a line of rooms of no interdistinguishing features.

Harroway had no doubt on the point of to whom he owed his job.

Dr. Lanning smiled in a relief tangible enough to make even his eyebrows appear benevolent.

The signal-burr brought all three to a halt, and the angry tumult of growingly unrestrained emotion froze.

The two giant robots were invisible but for the dull red of their photoelectric eyes that stared down at them, unblinking, unwavering and unconcerned. Unconcerned! As was all this poisonous Mercury, as large in jinx as it was small in size.

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov (1956)

‘You had a plainer motive, too, Dr Leebig. Dr. Rikaine Delmarre was in the way of your plans, and had to be removed.’
‘What plans?’ demanded Leebig.
‘Your plans aiming at the conquest of the Galaxy, Dr. Leebig,’ said Baley.
(Chapter 17, A Meeting is Held)

It is 3,000 years in the future. Humanity is dived between ‘Spacers’, who have colonised 50 of the ‘outer planets’ which rely heavily on robot labour, and have developed cultures and laws of their own – and earth, packed to the brim with 8 billion citizens, all raised in the subterranean cells and covered domes of 200 vast super-cities, terrified of ‘the outdoors’, used to cramped living space, rationed artificial food, and a rigidly hierarchical society.

Detective Elijah Baley, who we first met in The Caves of Steel, has been promoted to grade C-6. Despite his protests he is assigned another murder case, but this time on a remote planet out there in space somewhere, Solaria.

Baley’s agoraphobia

As usual, Asimov’s description of many of the appurtenances of his imagined future are genuinely interesting and effective, especially around Baley’s fear of the open. Asimov powerfully conveys Baley’s terror at being forced to catch a plane from New York to Washington – over and again he fixates on how there’s only an inch or so of steel between you and… nothingness! – and then petrified at taking a spaceship. He is horrified when he lands on Solaria to learn that the human population has windows in its buildings and wander around outside.

It is one of the themes of the book how Baley he tries to nerve himself to get used to being ‘outside’: these are interesting attempts to convey how generation after generation of humans living in completely covered urban ‘wombs’ would create a new human nature and psychological conventions.

Baley is pretty much blackmailed to take the case by his boss, Under-Secretary Minnim. If he refuses, he’ll be ‘declassified’ i.e. he and his family will lose all their privileges in the city. And Minnim asks him not only to solve the case, but to keep his eye open and record everything he observed about the outer Worlds, their strengths and weaknesses. ‘Be a spy?’ asks Baley.

It comes as a huge relief when, there to greet him on his spaceship’s arrival on Solaria, is the advanced, humanoid robot, Daneel Olivaw, who had worked with on the case described in the prequel, The Caves of Steel.

Solaria’s peculiarities

Another prominent element is the drastically ‘different’ customs of the Spacers who live on Solaria. Here people, from birth, avoid personal contact, and live on huge estates which are worked by vast populations of specialised robots. There are only some 20,000 humans on the whole planet but two hundred million robots – that’s ten thousand robots to every human!

People live either alone or with a spouse but physical contact – even being in the same room – ‘seeing’ someone in the flesh – is regarded with disgust. Instead, communication is carried out through holography (referred to as ‘viewing’). Only then are the Solarians truly relaxed about what they wear or say.

As the leading Solarian sociologist tells him, when Baley, insists on actually visiting him, in the flesh:

‘You’ll forgive me, Mr. Baley, but in the actual presence of a human, I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me. I keep shrinking away. It is most unpleasant.’

The plot

As to the plot, it kicks off like hundreds of thousands of detective stories, with a murder. Rikaine Delmarre is a prominent Solarian and a foetologist by profession and he is found, at his house, with his head smashed in as with a blunt implement. Unfortunately, his household robots clean up the crime scene so efficiently and even dispose of the body by incinerating it, that there isn’t a shred of evidence left at the scene of the crime.

It’s only well over half way through the book that we discover what this means, when Baley visits what he expects to be a laboratory and discovers it is in fact the baby farm which provides all of Solaria’s population. He is shown round by Delmarre’s assistant, Kiorissa Cantoro, who explains how ‘growing’ babies in test tubes is the logical extension of the Solarians’ distaste for being physically near anyone. In the same way, the babies, once hatched, are raised entirely by robots, lacking any contact with adults.

Ordinarily, Delmarre’s wife, Gladia, would be the prime suspect, since no-one else had access to or was anywhere their joint home (not that she was physically anywhere near him at the time; robots summoned her after the murder and she discovered a robot had been present but had a nervous breakdown due to its failure to implement Asimov’s First Law of Robots:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

On first arriving at the house (which has been built specially to accommodate him during his stay and will be demolished after he leaves) Baley has several holographic interviews with the man who asked for his services, Hannis Gruer, the Head of Security on Solaria. Hannis explains that they have no crime on Solaria, none at all. So a murder has really thrown them, but they had heard of his reputation through his involvement with the murder of a Spacer which was heavily publicised in the Outer Worlds (the subject of the first novel in the series, The Caves of Steel).

About the third time they’re chatting via hologram during a meal, Hannis takes a swig of his glass and is immediately poisoned, saying his throat is burning, falls to the floor and passes out with Baley, of course, unable to do nothing. Hannis is replaced, as Baley’s contact point with Solario authorities, by Corwin Attlebish.

Baley has an interview with the planet’s leading sociologist, Anselmo Quemot, who boasts about his theory that Solario has reached an optimum human-robot population. Henceforward the human population will not grow. And how, eventually all planets, even earth, will become like this. A finite, controlled human population surrounded by vast hordes or robot slaves.

And he also meets Dr Jothan Leebig, Solario’s premier roboticist. With him Baley points out the flaw in the First Law of Robotics. Ostensibly the law says no robot may harm a human. But it doesn’t take account of intention. It should really read that no robot may intentionally harm a human.

The climax

After all the effort put into creating an entirely new world with its own rules and conventions, and into creating half a dozen characters, with whom Baley has elaborate, and sometimes interesting, conversations, the climax is straight from an Agatha Christie novel, with Baley playing the role of Hercules Poirot.

He arranges a conference holographic call with all the characters we’ve met so far, namely: Gladia, Kiorissa, Attlebish, Quemot, Leebig, plus the doctor who attended the scene of the original murder, Dr Altim Thool.

Asimov employs the tried and tested formula of proceeding slowly and leveling an accusing finger at each of the people present one by one until… with a grand flourish, he reveals the true murderer. It is Dr Jothan Leebig.

His motive? He had several. One, he was susceptible to the charms of Gladia Delmarre, young and good looking who, in her first scenes with Baley we had witnessed casually walking about half-undressed (because it was only via ‘viewing’, not in-the-flesh ‘seeing’). She is frustrated by the lack of attention from her dry-as-dust husband, Rikaine, not enough to murder him, but enough to flirt, maybe unconsciously, with other men.

Leebig offered her a job as his secretary but when she turned it down his adoration, as so often in these kind of picturebook versions of human nature, turned to hatred and he devised the murder to take his revenge on both the Delmarres.

‘You despised yourself for your weakness, and hated Mrs. Delmarre for inspiring it. And yet you might have hated Delmarre, too, for having her.’

But why kill the doctor at all? Because Delmarre knew about Leebig’s experimental work into expanding robot capabilities. In particular he knew about Leebig’s plan to create spaceships controlled by positronic brains. Now, ordinarily, a robot simply cannot harm a human: their positronic brains are wired in such a way that they would short-circuit. Even witnessing harm to humans damages them, as the way the brain of the robot who witnessed Delmarre be murdered had completely fried.

But Leebig was planning to make spaceships with positronic brains which would assume that any spaceships which opposed it were also manned only by robots and positronic brains and that it could therefore destroy them with impunity. Such spaceships would behave more logically than ones captained by humans, and would almost certainly win all their battles. Or, as Baley puts it:

‘But a spaceship that was equipped with its own positronic brain would cheerfully attack any ship it was directed to attack, it seems to me. It would naturally assume all other ships were unmanned. A positronic-brained ship could easily be made incapable of receiving messages from enemy ships that might undeceive it. With its weapons and defenses under the immediate control of a positronic brain, it would be more maneuverable than any manned ship. With no room necessary for crewmen, for supplies, for water or air purifiers, it could carry more armor, more weapons and be more invulnerable than any ordinary ship. One ship with a positronic brain could defeat fleets of ordinary ships. Am I wrong?’

Leebig was, in other words, working on a plan to take over the galaxy!!

As a grown-up reader, it was difficult not to smile at the sheer pulp grandiosity of this motive.

The murder weapon – which Baley and robot Daneel have cudgelling their brains trying to figure out and which provided many a red herring throughout the book? The robot which had been in attendance on Delmarre throughout the murder. What? How? It was one of a new range Delmarre himself was working on with detachable limbs. Get it yet? The murder walked up to Delmarre and his robot, ordered the robot to give him his arm, the robot did so, Leebig smashed Delmarre’s head in with it, then clipped the arm back onto the robot which, by this stage, had gone into meltdown.

How did Leebig manage to sneak up on Delmarre? Because Delmarre was a ‘good Solarian’ who had given up ‘seeing’ people in the flesh when he was still a boy. thereafter all his interactions were via hologram. Therefore, when Leebig arrived at his house and entered his room and walked up to him… he simply couldn’t believe, until the last minute, that he was not a hologram. Too late.

I was smiling through all this explication, a smile which got broader when all the (holographic) faces in this meeting turn to Leebig who furiously denies it all, until… Baley plays his master-stroke and reveals that his assistant Daneel Olivaw has, all this time a) been at Leebig’s laboratory securing the records of all his research there which will no doubt prove the positronic spaceship theory but now b) is on his way to Leebig’s house to arrest him in person.

Now Asimov had carefully planted in Baley’s holographic interview with Leebig that the latter was really hysterically afraid of face-to-face contact with humans. When Baley had threatened to do it, Leebig had been reduced to sucking his thumb like a boy and crying. Now, at the threat of another human entering his personal space, Leebig collapses:

‘But I won’t see him. I can’t see him.’ The roboticist fell to his knees without seeming aware of the motion. He put his hands together in a desperate clasped gesture of appeal. ‘What do you want? Do you want a confession? Delmarre’s robot had detachable limbs. Yes. Yes. Yes. I arranged Gruer’s poisoning. I arranged the arrow meant for you. I even planned the spaceships as you said. I haven’t succeeded, but, yes, I planned it. Only keep the man away. Don’t let him come. Keep him away!’

In other words, the accused man makes a full and free confession in front of all his peers. And then – as if that wasn’t cheesy enough – as we hear the arrival of Daneel, we see Leebig fall to the floor, beg to be left alone, then scrabble in his pockets for something which he outs into his mouth, is seized with a spasm of agony, and collapse dead on the floor.

The irony, laid on with a planet-sized trowel, is that the ‘human’ whose proximity drove Leebig to suicide, is none other than Daneel who is, of course… a robot!

If you’re not roaring with laughter by this stage then you are probably the kind of 14-year-old boy this kind of story was originally aimed at.

Coda 1 – last scene with Gladia

There’s more, more clichés. In a final scene Baley has a last interview with Gladia. She is going to Aurora (traveling with Daneel, since Auroroa is his home planet). She has to get away from the scene of this awful murder! He is surprised that she agrees to be there in person i.e. she has agreed to ‘see’ him.

‘Why have you decided to see, rather than view?’
‘Well’ – she smiled weakly – ‘I’ve got to get used to it, don’t I, Elijah? I mean, if I’m going to Aurora.’
‘Then it’s all arranged?’
‘Mr. Olivaw seems to have influence. It’s all arranged. I’ll never come back.’
‘Good. You’ll be happier, Gladia. I know you will.”
I’m a little afraid.’
‘I know. It will mean seeing all the time and, you won’t have all the comforts you had on Solaria. But you’ll get used to it and, what’s more, you’ll forget all the terror you’ve been through.’
‘I don’t want to forget everything,’ said Gladia softly.
‘You will.’ Baley looked at the slim girl who stood before him and said, not without a momentary pang, ‘And you will be married someday, too. Really married, I mean.”
Somehow,” she said mournfully, “that doesn’t seem so attractive to me – right now.’
‘You’ll change your mind.’
And they stood there, looking at each other for a wordless moment.
Gladia said, ‘I’ve never thanked you.’
Baley said, ‘It was only my job.’

Aw shucks, John Wayne.

Asimov may have set out to demonstrate that science fiction wasn’t a genre but a topic or theme which could be applied to any genre. But in these books he merely proved that science fiction can be just as larded with corny characters and hammy scenarios as any 3rd-rate Hollywood B-movie.

As usual, the plot and lots of the characterisation are laughable, they would make a writer of Mills and Boon romances blush with shame.

Again a silent moment while they faced each other at ten paces. Then Gladia cried suddenly, ‘Oh, Elijah, you’ll think it abandoned of me.’
‘Think what abandoned?’
‘May I touch you? I’ll never see you again, Elijah.’
‘If you want to.’
Step by step, she came closer, her eyes glowing, yet looking apprehensive, too. She stopped three feet away, then slowly, as though in a trance, she began to remove the glove on her right hand.
Baley started a restraining gesture. ‘Don’t be foolish, Gladia.’
‘I’m not afraid,’ said Gladia.
Her hand was bare. It trembled as she extended it.
And so did Baley’s as he took her hand in his. They remained so for one moment, her hand a shy thing, frightened as it rested in his. He opened his hand and hers escaped, darted suddenly and without warning toward his face until her fingertips rested feather-light upon his cheek for the barest moment.
She said, ‘Thank you, Elijah. Good-by.’
He said, ‘Good-by, Gladia,’ and watched her leave.

BUT – the book is sort of worth reading for not one but two extended tropes, which are thought provoking – maybe it’s better so say imagination-provoking – and which it dramatises at length, namely:

  • Baley’s struggle to cope with being outdoors generated by the entrenched claustrophobia of an overpopulated underground earth culture
  • and the opposite, the repulsion at physical contact or even proximity, created by the exact opposite type of planet, so sparsely populated that individuals almost never meet, except via cam

These two worldviews or psychological states dominate the book and it is interesting to do the thought experiment of thinking your way into these kinds of altered states. Despite Asimov’s rickety plot and execrable English, nonetheless, what if…?

Coda 2 – Baley reports back to Minnim

Remember how Minnim had asked Baley to be a spy. He is thrilled with Baley’s findings because they appear to show that Solaris has become decadent, individuals living too long, and too isolated. Baley expresses this as the fact that they have stopped being tribal of having to co-operate and also conflict. Minnim joyfully sees this as confirmation that Earth will not be conquered by the Spacers who will decline.

But Baley hasn’t finished. He goes on to prove the exact opposite. He says that Solaris is an exception to the outer Worlds, the planet most like Solaria is Earth. Earthers have buried themselves in underground cities and locked themselves away from the rest of the galaxy.

Earthers need to get out, leave earth, go and colonise, face a brave future. that turns out to be the epiphany he had as he faced the outdoors for the first time in his life. He didn’t like it, but he realised it brought a whole new dimension to his life, and that all mankind must face up to it as he has.

Baley felt as though a touch of madness had come over him. From the very first the open had had its weird attraction over him; from the time in the ground-car when he had tricked Daneel in order to have the top lowered so that he might stand up in the open air.

He had failed to understand then. Daneel thought he was being perverse. Baley himself thought he was facing the open out of professional necessity, to solve a crime. Only on that last evening on Solaria, with the curtain tearing away from the window, did he realize his need to face the open for the open’s own sake; for its attraction and its promise of freedom.

There must be millions on Earth who would feel that same urge, if the open were only brought to their attention, if they could be made to take the first step.

So, despite the detective novel trappings, deep down the book turns out to have been a sort of primer, explaining how humans did decide to escape earth. It sets up the origins of the Galactic Empire described in the Foundation books. If all this requires is for Baley’s character and beliefs to undergo a 180 degree transformation, well, too bad for character and plausibility. it was never Asimov’s prime concern. His Visions of Great Futures are his prime concern.

He had told Minnim the Cities were wombs, and so they were. And what was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb. And once left, it could not be re-entered.
Baley had left the City and could not re-enter. The City was no longer his; the Caves of Steel were alien. This had to be. And it would be so for others and Earth would be born again and reach outward.
His heart beat madly and the noise of life about him sank to an unheard murmur.
He remembered his dream on Solaria and he understood it at last. He lifted his head and he could see through all the steel and concrete and humanity above him. He could see the beacon set in space to lure men outward. He could see it shining down. The naked sun!

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Posted by Simon on December 14, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/the-naked-sun-isaac-asimov/

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (1954)

‘Before the Cities, human life on Earth wasn’t so specialized that they couldn’t break loose and start all over on a raw world. They did it thirty times. But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.’ (Dr. Fastolfe)

Elijah Baley is 40 years old, with a long face and brown eyes like a sad cow. He is married to Jessie, has a 16-year-old son, Bentley, and lives in New York, where he is a police detective.

So far, so straightforward. The only catch is… this is all 3,000 years in the future. The population of the earth has ballooned to over 8 billion. Most people now live in the 200 or so megacities which are, like New York, completely covered over and enclosed from the environment. The ‘caves of steel’ of the title refer to these cities, blocked out from sunshine or natural air, hermetically sealed, artificially-lit environments.

Oil ran out centuries ago, so everything is powered by atomic energy. Population density means most people live in communal dormitories and share communal facilities. Meat is occasionally available, but most people most of the time live on rations made on hydroponic farms in Long Island or at the huge yeast vats in New Jersey. Some tobacco is still grown, which allows Elijah to indulge his habit of smoking a pipe, but it’s getting rarer and more expensive.

Elijah is a grade C-5. Everyone in the city is graded and their grade entitles them to specific types of accommodation, food and so on. Baley has never got over the way his father was blamed for an accident in a power station and went from being a high-grade physicist to becoming ‘declassified’ – forced to do manual labour, becoming a drunk, dying when Elijah was just 8.

You might have thought that’s enough to be going on with, but all this is just background. There are two other big developments which dominate the book: one is the invention and perfection of ‘the positronic brain’ which has allowed the development of very nearly lifelike robots. This much I expected from a novel which I knew to be part of Asimov’s ‘robot’ series of stories and novels.

What I hadn’t at all anticipated was the central importance of the ‘Spacers’. For it turns out that mankind has, for some time, been colonising other planets, occupying some 50 to date, and taking advantage of the invention of ‘hyperspace travel’.

The colonies are much more sparsely populated than earth, which is one reason why the ‘Spacers’ have developed a significantly different culture from Earthers. The Spacers have more space to live in, and robots are completely integrated into their society, meaning most of them lead lives of luxury.

So wide has the gap grown between Earthers and Spacers that, a hundred years before the story starts, Earth riots in which some Spacers were killed led a fleet of Spacer ships to retaliate. In the war that followed the ramshackle old Earth ships were simply vaporised, Space technology being far more advanced. Now the Spacers don’t exactly rule the Earthers, they just intimidate them.

For the Spacers have built settlements just outside most of the big cities – Spacetowns – protected by security guards and airlocks to prevent earth infections being passed to the prim and pure Spacers. All this explains why gritty Earther types like detective Baley really hate Spacers.

The plot

So much for the background. The plot is straightforward detective fodder – in fact, Asimov is on record as saying the book (and its sequels) were attempts to show that science fiction isn’t a genre, but a subject which could be applied to any genre. Here he is trying to prove it with this detective story set in the future.

A Spacer is found murdered. Not just any old Spacer, but Roj Nemmenuh Sarton, a Spacer Ambassador and robot designer.

In the classic style, Baley is called in by his harassed overworked boss, Commissioner Julius Enderby, and told that a) he, Baley, has been given the case to solve – which disgruntles him, because he hates Spaces and b) he has also been lumbered with a new generation robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, to be his assistant.

The story, then, is not only about Baley’s attempts to solve the crime – but equally as much about him overcoming his dislike of Spacers and his loathing of robots.

The book proceeds through a variety of scenes which I felt I have seen hundreds of times, in countless American TV cop shows and crime thrillers. The basic pattern is Baley goes out, has an encounter or adventure, comes back and reports it to his increasingly exasperated boss, before going home to his worried wife.

Initially, the story is about confrontations and menace. Baley and Daneel get caught up in a minor riot in a department store when robots refuse to serve a customer and an anti-robot crowd assembles and threatens violence until Daneel jumps on a table and threatens to blast them all. The crowd disperses. Baley is appalled since Daneel’s behaviour breaks the First Law of Robotics. We are introduced to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics which feature in all the robot novels and stories:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

When he learns that Daneel is so perfectly human in appearance because he is an identical copy of his designer, Sarton, the incident in the shop leads Baley to make a rash declaration in front of a Spacer officer, Dr Fastolfe, and with his boss present via hologram, that Daneel is actually a human and that the dead body of Sarton was actually a robot.

This stab in the dark is quickly disproved when Daneel unpeels some of his skin to reveal his robotic metal and wire interior. Baley faints. When he comes round he’s aware that Daneel has just slipped a hypno-sliver into his bloodstream. It was a drug which makes him vulnerable to suggestions, and Dr Fastolfe, gives a speech explaining how earth could overcome its paranoid crammed culture by mass migration to the planets, which Baley finds himself agreeing with.

A later scene has a good, movie-style excitement to it. Baley and Daneel are travelling on the complicated moving sidewalks. these run at different speeds, winding in and out of each other throughout the city’s vast expanse, meaning that pedestrians are continually having to leap from one to the next, or across several moving strips to get to the one they need (you can see why this is a totally impractical idea, though it does have tremendous visual possibilities.)

Daneel identifies that they are being followed – always a key ingredient in a thriller, and then that some of the followers were in the almost-riot at the shop. Baley then leads the pursuers a merry chase by hopping across and onto a complex sequence of moving sidewalks, before arriving at a vast power station, where one of the suspects has been identified as working.

The next major event is that one of the robots which was used in the police offices, R. Sammy, is found dead or, more precisely, has had its positronic brain scrambled by a nuclear wand.

Commissioner Enderby is as upset about this as anyone else, and then begins slowly and regretfully pointing out to Baley that he, Baley, is looking like a prime suspect. Baley hates robots. Baley was always complaining about R. Sammy. And the nuclear wand which scrambled him has been traced back to the same power plant Baley visited earlier that day.

In the novel’s climactic scene, confronted by his boss accusing him of the murder, Baley proves that Enderby did it. But no-one can smuggle atom blasters into Spacertown, and he certainly couldn’t obtain one inside. How did he do it? Baley shows that Enderby ordered R. Sammy to carry an atom blaster out of one of the city’s 500 or so exits, go across country to Spacertown, enter Spacertown at a different place from Enderby, rendezvous with Enderby and hand him the blaster. Enderby then intended to blast the new super-advanced robot he had heard that Sarton had just developed. Unfortunately, Enderby wears glasses, it is part of his pose of preferring the ‘good old days’, an attitude sometimes described as Medievalism. In his nervousness at performing an act of violence (relatively rare in the future) Enderby drops his glasses which shatter. At that moment, in a panic, the door to Sarton’s apartment opens and Enderby, thinking it is the robot, blasts Sartor, disintegrating the top half of his body. Then stumbles back to where R. Sammy was waiting, gives him the blaster, R. Sammy makes his own way out of the city, leaving Enderby to be allowed to leave the city with no weapon. The alarm about Sartor’s murder was only raised an hour or so later, once Enderby was well clear.

Assessment

Asimov makes what I take to be an elementary mistake of thriller writers, which is – he tries to make the plot too convoluted. I won’t describe the convolutions here but there are plenty of other incidents – such as Baley’s wife Jessie somehow discovering that Daneel is a robot (which is meant to be a well kept secret); and the evening when, after being followed, Daneel and Baley hole up in a police ‘safe apartment’ from ‘them’, whoever it is that’s pursuing them – only for Baley’s son, Bentley, to pretty easily find him and get admitted to the apartment… There are a number of false trails and fake leads designed to puzzle Baley, and the reader.

But the big, big, big problem with the book is that the elaborate motivation Asimov provides for the murder – and its wider consequences – doesn’t make sense, even on Asimov’s own terms.

In the last pages Asimov/Baley pulls it all together by saying that: Enderby is a member of a secret society of Medievalists. His preference for glasses and for having ‘windows’ in his office proves this. Medievalists want to rid the world of robots, end the cities and return everyone to living on the land, like in the good old days.

Because of his regular contacts with Spacers he knew that Sarton had developed a new generation robot, indistinguishable from a human, and so his group of Medievalists allotted him the task of destroying it. But, as we’ve seen, he muffed the job and killed the human inventor instead.

The fact that his murder relied so heavily on R. Sammy explains why it was Enderby who scrambled him, and planted the nuclear wand to discredit Baley.

But it turns out that the Spacers have a political aim as well. Some of them feel Spacer culture is stagnant or declining. They want to persuade Earthers to migrate and inject new blood into Spacer colonies. They want to encourage humans to leave overcrowded earth.

Here’s what doesn’t make sense. Both Enderby and Baley dislike robots and Baley hates Spacers. And yet the final pages of the book try to persuade us that both Baley and Enderby come round to agreeing with the Spacers… and here’s the thing which really doesn’t make sense: they try to persuade us that Enderby’s anti-robot, anti-Spacer, back-to-the-soil Medievalism can be converted into a belief that humans can go back to the soil… in off-world colonies. That the Medievalists’ anti-science and technology stance can be twisted round into a wish to adopt modern science and technology.

All the paraphernalia of the detective thriller (right at the end Baley has just 90 minutes to prove his theory before Daneel is taken off the case, which injects some traditional urgency and suspense) cannot conceal the fact that, at the end, it becomes utterly incoherent and illogical. Like the Foundation stories, the conclusion feels forced and contrived.

Futuristic features

Future novels like this have two elements. One is the plot which, as I’ve explained, although frenetic is, in the end, deeply disappointing.

But the other, and possibly more gripping element for SF fans, is the throwaway references to all kinds of intriguing aspects of life 3,000 years hence, the references to inventions and gadgets which help to create and pad out a plausible imaginary world.

  • atom blasters – equivalent of handguns
  • cerebroanalysis –  the interpretation of the electromagnetic fields of the living brain cells
  • hypo-sliver – futuristic version of an injection
  • Medievalism – widespread belief in the superiority of the good old days, when people did not live in ‘caves of steel’
  • plastofilm – what Elijah slips on his feet instead of slippers
  • retch gas – used by the police on rioting crowds
  • somno vapour – used by the police on rioting crowds
  • spy-beam – high-powered microphones for eavesdropping
  • strips – moving walkways which pedestrians have to jump between to change speed or direction
  • subetheric hand disruptors – Space weapons
  • trimensional personification – appearing by hologram
  • zymoveal – food made mostly from fungus

Bigger in scale than these gadgets, and far more interesting than the ‘plot’ is Asimov’s imagining of future customs and conventions. Apparently, a massive taboo has arisen about people’s behaviour in the communal washrooms, namely that it is extremely rude to look at or even acknowledge someone else washing.

Powerful is Asimov’s imagining of how the inhabitants of the steel caves have, over the centuries, developed a deep phobia about being ‘outside’, about being stuck under the open sky and exposed to the elements. Baley has panic attacks when he thinks about it.

Similarly, it’s an imaginative stroke that the Spacers are not only scared of catching earth germs and diseases from inhabitants of the packed, unhygienic cities – so far, so logical – but that this has developed into physical repulsion at the presence of Earthers, who Spacers have come to believe smell and are intrinsically dirty. It is almost a kind of racism, and it is imaginative insights like this into the psychology of his future worlds which make Asimov’s books worth reading. Not the plots, though.

Covers

When you borrow or buy these old books, the modern cover illustrations might mislead you into thinking they are in any way up to date or ‘serious’. But a quick glance at the original covers of the magazines which these stories appeared in makes you realise in a flash what cheap pulp audiences they were originally aimed at, and what a mistake it is to expect too much from them in the way of writing, psychology or thought.

Asimov wrote The Caves of Steel after completing the Foundation stories. It was serialised in Galaxy magazine, from October to December 1953, and published in book form in 1954. This cover brings out the sense of a) the completely enclosed nature of the cities and b) the highly visual impact of the moving walkways. It is in the details and appurtenances of his stories that Asimov strikes deepest.

Cover of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in which The Caves of Steel was first serialised in 1953

Cover of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in which The Caves of Steel was first serialised in 1953

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Posted by Simon on December 13, 2018

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Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1953)

This is the third and final part of Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy of books although, as explained in my reviews of the previous two, the books are not really ‘novels’ at all. They are more like volumes into which the original, linked but separate short stories which Asimov wrote about the Foundation for Astounding Science Fiction magazine, were later collected.

This third volume contains the final two stories of the original eight Foundation yarns which Asimov wrote between 1941 and 1950, namely:

  • Search By the Mule (originally published in the January 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title “Now You See It—”)
  • Search By the Foundation (originally published in the November and December 1949 and January 1950 issues of Astounding Science Fiction under the title “—And Now You Don’t”)

1. Search By the Mule (74 pages)

It is just five years since the events of the previous story i.e. about 315 years since the establishment of the Foundation or 315 F.E. (Hard core fans of the stories can read a detailed timeline of the events in the original and all the later spin-off stories, on Wikipedia.)

The human mutant known only as ‘The Mule’ has taken over the Foundation and used it as a base to expand his power across that Quadrant of the Galaxy. He is now referred to as the First Citizen.

During the previous story, the Mule had learned that there is a Second Foundation, somewhere at the opposite end of the galaxy. The dying psychologist Ebling Mis had been on the verge of telling him its location when he (Mis) was blasted to oblivion by his companion, Bayta Darell, thus temporarily frustrating the Mule’s plans to locate and conquer this Second Foundation.

So this story opens with the Mule commissioning two men to set off together to locate the Second Foundation – Han Pritcher, originally a Foundation man opposed to the Mule, who has been ‘converted’ by into a slavish follower of the mutant by the latter’s psychic powers; and Bail Channis, an ‘unconverted’ man who has impressed the Mule with his unscrupulous ambition.

As to the characters’ speculation about whether a Second Foundation exists, the reader can be pretty sure it does, given that, after just one chapter, Asimov inserts the first of what turn out to be five INTERLUDES in which we overhear the thoughts of the Executive Council of the Second Federation as it reacts to news that the Mule is looking for them. So a) it definitely exists and b) its officials know the Mule is trying to find their location.

So where should Pritcher and Channis start in the quest for the Second Foundation which the Mule has allotted them? Well, Channis has a theory the Second Foundation is on a star system named Tazenda, so that’s whither he and Pritcher head in their hyperspace-travelling space ship.

As they travel Pritcher broods on the Mule’s account of what he had seen, via telepathy, in the mind of the dying psychologist, Ebling Mis at the end of the previous book. The Mule had seen that Mis, just at the moment he’d discovered where the Second Foundation is located, had been surprised. There was something unexpected about the Second Foundation. But then his assistant blasted him to kingdom come and the book ended on a cliff-hanger. Why was Mis surprised?

Oooh, the suspense!

As they travel to planet Tazenda we discover that Channis and Pritcher dislike each other. They land on the planet Rossem, an outlier of the sector where Channis thinks the Second Foundation is located. There are some quite entertaining descriptions of the peasant inhabitants of this out-of-the-way planet – in effect caricature peasants out of a children’s book about the Dark Ages transplanted into a sci-fi environment.

But the real thrust of the story, as so often in Asimov, is nothing to do with planets or aliens or space: it is a power struggle between humans, in this case the odd couple Channis and Pritcher.

The latter becomes convinced that Channis is a Second Foundation plant. He pulls out an atom blaster and confronts him. Channis replies by pointing out that he’s noticed Pritcher getting more and more moody. Is it possible that Second Foundation telepaths have been interfering with Pritcher’s mind. As Channis describes why they might do this and what it would feel like, Pritcher begins to doubt his own moods and motivations.

As they stand in this tableau, Pritcher covering Channis with his atom blaster, the Mule walks into the room! Yes, he has been following them!

The Mule adds his interpretation to what is going on, initially making Pritcher think that he is indeed under Second Foundation mind-control but then – switching things round to accuse Channis of being a Second Foundation spy, thus proving initial Pritcher’s suspicions correct.

Hopefully it’s as obvious to you as it is to me that, in its basic structure, this is next to nothing to do with science fiction. It bears much more resemblance to a detective story, even to an Agatha Christie mystery where the great Hercules Poirot commands a grand final scene in which he reveals the true identity of the murderer.

Like a Christie novel, Asimov is very talky. There’s little or no action. The ‘interest’ is in the revelation of the ‘real’ motives of the characters. And ever since he introduced the idea that the Mule is a telepath who can take over people’s minds, and that the Second Foundation are also telepaths who can take over people’s minds, the result is that even the main characters come to doubt their own motives. Nobody knows what’s going on.

There’s a tense moment when the Mule, having taken the atom blaster from Pritcher, and having proved to both of them that Channis is indeed the traitor – at just the moment the Mule is about to pull the trigger and obliterate Channis, the latter uses his telepathic powers to remove the ‘conversion’ from Pritcher’s mind – in other words, removes Pritcher from the Mule’s control.

In that split second the Mule feels a surge of hatred from Pritcher – once his bitter enemy and now restored to that position – and Channis points out that if he, the Mule, zaps him, Channis, that will give Pritcher the milliseconds he needs to throw himself upon the Mule, grab the blaster and zap him, the Mule.

In actual fact, a moment’s reflection suggests this isn’t so – that the Mule could zap Channis then turn and zap the newly liberated Pritcher, as we have all seen happen in literally thousands of American cop shows and movie thrillers. But it’s enough of a pretext for the trio to be brought to an impasse.

Cut to the next scene in which just the Mule and Channis confront each other, because Pritcher, under the mental strain of having been liberated from the Mule’s mental control, has lapsed into unconsciousness.

Except that now the First Mind of the Foundation is also present in the dialogue. In a series of telepathic conversations the Mule tells the First Voice that he knows that Tazenda is the Second Foundation, which is why his fleet has just destroyed it and is now on its way to collect him from Rossem.

Under extreme emotional pressure from the Mule, Channis reveals that Tazenda is not the Second Foundation, Rossem (where they are standing) is. So the Mule announces that his fleet will now come to Rossem and destroy it.

At which point the First Speaker reveals that he and the other Second Foundationers had brainwashed Channis into thinking Rossem is the Second Foundation – but it isn’t!! What??

The Mule hesitates a moment at this new revelation and, it turns out, this is the moment the entire plan has been waiting for. In that millisecond of hesitation, the First Speaker slips into the Mule’s mind, bringing him a new peace and contentment.

The Mule looked up and said: ‘Then I shall return to Kalgan?’
[First Speaker] ‘Certainly. How do you feel?’
‘Excellently well.’ His brow puckered: ‘Who are you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course not.’ He dismissed the matter, and touched Pritcher’s shoulder: ‘Wake up, Pritcher, we’re going home.’
It was two hours later that Bail Channis felt strong enough to walk by himself. He said: ‘He won’t ever remember?’
[First Speaker] ‘Never. He retains his mental powers and his Empire – but his motivations are now entirely different. The notion of a Second Foundation is a blank to him, and he is a man of peace. He
will be a far happier man henceforward, too, for the few years of life left him by his maladjusted
physique. And then, after he is dead Seldon’s Plan will go on – somehow.’

So, as with all of these stories, there’s little or no science or outer space-type content: a) what it boils down to is the confrontation of just a few human characters and their psychological powerplays and b) it ends with a twist.

The multiple revelations of who was controlling whose mind to reveal multiple levels of deceit all turn out to be decoys leading up to that one moment of weakness the First Speaker had been waiting for all along, the moment when his telepathic powers could infiltrate the Mule’s mind and pacify it.

And it works. The Mule goes quietly away and lives out the remaining five years of his life in peace and contentment, ceases looking for the Second Foundation, rules wisely on an empire centred on the planet Kalgan. Then dies.

Search By the Foundation (146 pages)

Twice the length of the previous story, Search by the Foundation is an even more contorted version of bluff, double bluff, triple bluff, quadruple bluff, before bringing the series to an unlikely and rather disappointing conclusion.

It starts 60 years after the first part, 55 years after the Mule’s death by natural causes. Asimov centres the entire long story on a teenage girl, the grand-daughter of the heroic Bayta Darrell who we followed in The Mule. Arcadia Darell is 14, a wide-eyed innocent who likes dressing up like movie stars, wishes she was a grown-up, plays with make-up, her head full of romantic ideas.

We are introduced to her father and a small group of Foundation experts who are concerned about the existence of the Second Empire. The premise of the story is that the Foundation itself risks falling into complacency under the illusion that the mysterious Second Foundation, wherever it is, will protect them forever. Arcadia’s father and his small group are concerned not only about this, but with the fear that the Second Foundation is actively taking over people’s minds.

Which is why he is developing the science of electroencephalography i.e. the reading of people’s brain waves in order to a) identify them, like fingerprints b) identify who has been taken over by telepaths.

The group of five meet in top secrecy, convinced that ‘they’ are out to get them. They decide to send one of their number, Homir Munn, an academic with the largest home collection of Muliana, to the planet Kalgan, in order to enter the Palace which has been kept locked up since the Mule died, and find out if the solution to the mystery is there.

They think the Second Foundation must be on Kalgan. Why? Anthor, the newest youngest recruit to the band of conspirators argues this theory based on the fact that a) although it was not his planet of origin, the Mule chose to make Kalgan the base for his short-lived rule. Anthor argues that the Mule did that, because he was influenced by the Second Foundation to stay close to their base, to stay under their control.

Long story short – Arcadia, full of school girl naughtiness, stows away on Munn’s little spaceship and hops a ride with him to Kalgan. After his initial surprise and dismay, he discovers she’s a confident girl / young lady and they get along fine. Indeed, Arcadia turns out to be useful when they get to Kalgan.

Kalgan is now under the rule of an heir to the Mule, Lord Stettin, and he turns out to be under the thumb of his tubby, ageing mistress, Lady Callia. The idea is that, although Lord Stettin is tall, brutal and imperious, and is constantly vowing to rid himself of her simpering presence, somehow Lady Callia lingers on in the court, continues – to his great irritation – to call him ‘Poochie’, and somehow the Lord ends up making the decisions that she first suggests.

After various melodramatic scenes in which Munn is at first refused permission, and then granted permission, to enter the Mule’s old palace – and after the rather embarrassing scenes where Asimov takes it upon himself to describe encounters between a skittish schoolgirl and an aged courtesan – Arcadia has a sudden insight: she realises that plump Lady Callia is in fact a Second Foundation agent; and she realises where the Second Foundation is!!!

She realises all this while the Lady Callia herself helps Arcadia to run away because the beastly Lord Stettin is thinking about making her (Arcadia) his new consort!!

Evading Munn and the First Lord’s police, Arcadia makes her way to Kalgan’s space travel terminus, where she bumps into a kindly married couple, Preem Palver and wife. They cover for her when the police come to check everyone’s identity papers, and then take her with them to Trantor (which, as you’ll remember, was once the capital city of the First Galactic Empire, before it was sacked by barbarians and fell into ruin).

Why Trantor? Because,now that she knows where the Second Foundation is based, she wants to throw the bad guys off the scent.

Settled into the nice suburban household of Pappa and Mamma (as Preem and wife call each other) on Trantor, Arcadia is horrified to learn that war has broken out between the Lord of Kalgan and the Foundation, in which the Kalgan forces destroyed a Foundation fleet.

Through a convoluted bit of explication, Asimov persuades us that this Pappa figure is head of an agricultural combine on Trantor; and that it’s occurred to the now-pastoral Trantorese that the Foundation planets, currently under siege, will need food.

So Preem sets off to visit Terminus (location, in case you’ve forgotten, of the First Foundation). Under this pretext Preem will be able to visit Arcadia’s father and she (Arcadia) gives Preem her father’s address and a message to give to her father. It consists of just five words: A circle has no end!

It is a riddle. But what does it mean?

The final scenes take place in Arcadia’s dad’s house, among the ‘conspirators’.

What Asimov does is have each of the characters present, with lots of evidence, their version of where the Second Foundation is. Munn, just returned from the Mule’s Palace on Kalgan, is now convinced that The Second Foundation doesn’t exist.

There’s a lot of palavah with Dr Darell’s new encephalography machine to determine whether he is under the control of Second Foundation telepaths.

In fact, the encephalography machine shows that Munn has been telepathically interfered with. This gives the fiery young gun, Pelleas Anthor, the chance to leap up and harangue the group, saying this proves that Kalgan is the home of the 2nd Foundation, and he has a few pages to pull together the evidence making his case.

Darell then takes the floor and blinds his fellow conspirators (and the reader) with the supposed science behind the Big Idea he’s been working on – namely the possibility of a Mind Resonating Organ, which can control human minds.

He has built it to try and replicate the effects of telepathy. But simultaneously, he has been working on a Mental Static device which counters telepathic control.

Now Darell reveals to his startled colleagues that the Second Foundation is here, on planet Terminus!

He reaches that conclusion by interpreting the ancient words of Hari Seldon, namely that he placed the 2nd Foundation at ‘the other end of the galaxy’. But the galaxy has no end. It is not a straight line, it is a circle. If you follow a circle right the way round you arrive back… where you started!

Thus Darell believes the Second Foundation has grown up among the First Foundation without anyone realising it! Which means that everyone on Terminus will need a copy of Darell’s new invention, the Mental Static device, to protect them from Second Foundation mind control.

So the assembled conspirators decide to try the Mental Static device on themselves and… Anthor falls to the ground in agony!

Yes. Anthor is a second Foundation infiltrator!!

Under questioning the weakened Anthor now admits that a) he is an agent of the 2nd Foundation b) the 2nd Foundation is worried by increasing animosity against it c) they know Darell was on the brink of discovering anti-telepathy technology d) they have fifty or so agents scattered around Terminus and beyond but e) Terminus is not the home of the Second Foundation.

The conspirators arrange for the Second Foundation agents to be rounded up.

A few weeks later Arcadia is now safely back in the suburban home of Dr Darell. He quizzes her and she tells him (and for the first time reveals to the reader) that at the key moment, when Lady Callia was dressing her to escape Lord Stettin’s palce in disguise, that was when she realised, in a flash, through intuition, that Terminus was the seat of the second Foundation. She explains how she gave Preem the message to pass on to her dad, and then fled to Trantor in order to throw them off the scent.

But Darrel panics. He realises that this moment of ‘intuition’ came to Arcadia when she was with Lady Callia – who has been confirmed as a Second Foundation agent!

In other words, the thought that Terminus was home of the Second Foundation was planted in her mind!

In panic fear Darell now runs his famous Encephalographic test on his daughter and… she passes!

Arcadia is not under mind control. The Second Foundation is indeed on Terminus, as she said and Anthor said. And having captured the fifty telepaths they have solved the problem and broken its power.

Can you see why, by this stage of the book, I just didn’t care where the bloody Second Foundation was? It is quite clear it has no real importanceto the story. Figuring out its location doesn’t affect anything, since the conspirators have postulated that a) it doesn’t exist b) it’s on Kalgan c) it’s on Terminus, and none of the options made a scrap of difference. Obviously it doesn’t really matter much where it is.

I was on my knees with boredom when I came to the last few pages of the book. Here, in the final chapter in the story and thus of the original Foundation sequence, is (as so often in Asimov) a dialogue which reveals the real story behind events. The wise old First Speaker of the Second Foundation explains everything to a young trainee telepath, tying up all the loose ends and tucking us into bed.

It is, as so often, more like the denouement of a detective story than the climax of a science fiction epic.

Here at last we learn that the Second Foundation is on Trantor!

When Seldon said he planted the Second Foundation at the ‘other end of the galaxy’ he knew that the galaxy is neither a sphere nor a circle: it is a spiral. The other end of a spiral from the outermost tip where Terminus is, is not the opposite end of the rim, but the centre of the spiral.

Trantor – former capital city of the Empire, where all its resources were.

When the barbarians sacked it they unaccountably left the Great Library untouched – because the Second Foundation telepaths prevented them from entering.

When Ebling Mis expressed surprise after all his research in the Trantor archives – it was surprise to find that the secret was under their very noses!

And when Arcadia passed the encephalography test? It was because she was born on Trantor and the Second Foundation took control of her mind, as soon as she was born. Her brain patterns were consistent all the way through her life, and also after her trip to Kalgan when she had been decoyed away from the truth by the telepath Lady Callia – because Arcadia had spent her entire life under Second Foundation control. They had foreseen that she would have a vital role to play. they had co-opted her as a baby.

Now, having fooled the Foundation, the Second Foundation can let it proceed peacefully on its allotted course to rebuild civilisation and remake a Second Empire more glorious than the first – under the impression that they are doing all this free from fiendish Second Foundation telepath control – but in fact the Second Foundation will continue to guard and protect it.

All according to the great Hari Seldon’s plan.

Ta-dah!

But Asimov has one last gag up his sleeve. The identity of the First Speaker, the solemn, all-wise figure who has guided the Second Foundation through this crisis and successfully preserved its secret identity and location and who is even now explaining all of this to the young trainee?

Preem Palver, the supposedly bumbling, kindly old man who took Arcadia under his wing when she was fleeing to Trantor, and who she then begged to take her father a message! It was all a cunning plot after all.

Boom boom!!!!

Asimov’s style

I took Asimov’s style to pieces in my previous post, maybe a bit harshly. A lot of the time he writes fairly clearly and comprehensibly. For example, I’ve just read this scene, where Channis is using a 3-D map of the galaxy to explain something to General Pritcher:

The Lens was perhaps the newest feature of the interstellar cruisers of the day. Actually, it was a complicated calculating machine which could throw on a screen a reproduction of the night sky as seen from any given point of the Galaxy.

So far, so good. But as soon as he tries to describe emotion, intent, or interaction between characters, Asimov’s cack-handedness kicks in:

‘What is it you’re trying to show me?’ Pritcher’s level voice plunged icily into the gathering enthusiasm of the other.

Not elegant phraseology, is it? You can see what he’s driving at, but have to help him out a bit. Then comes a good, clear descriptive paragraph.

Pritcher had watched the phenomenon of Lens Image expansion before but he still caught his breath. It was like being at the visiplate of a spaceship storming through a horribly crowded Galaxy without entering hyperspace. The stars diverged towards them from a common center, flared outwards and tumbled off the edge of the screen. Single points became double, then globular. Hazy patches dissolved into myriad points. And always that illusion of motion.

Good, strong, clearly visualised images conveyed in clear declarative prose. Unfortunately, as so often happens, Asimov then strives for an effect which he can’t quite put into words –

The darkness was spreading over the screen. As the rate of magnification slowed, the stars slipped off the four ends of the screen in a regretful leave-taking. At the rims of the growing nebula, the brilliant universe of stars shone abruptly in token for that light which was merely hidden behind the swirling unradiating atom fragments of sodium and calcium that filled cubic parsecs of space.

The ‘regretful’ thought could have been expressed more clearly, more elegantly. And I don’t understand the second sentence.

So it might be fairer to summarise Asimov’s style as frequently clear enough to convey his meaning – but routinely disfigured by a striving for visual, logical or emotional effects which he lacks the skill, as a writer, to bring off. By a regular flatfooted cack-handedness.

The Elders of this particular region of Rossem were not exactly what one might have expected. They were not a mere extrapolation of the peasantry; older, more authoritative, less friendly… The dignity that had marked them at first meeting had grown in impression till it had reached the mark of being their predominant characteristic.

What? All through the book are numerous occasions on which the reader sort of understands what Asimov appears to be driving at but has to give the writing quite a lot of help. It’s like watching a toddler learning to ride a bicycle – long stretches of unexpected success, but then – whoaaah! – he falls off and needs to be helped back onto the bike with a few words of encouragement.

There are perhaps men in the Galaxy who can be confused for one another even by men at their peaceful leisure. Correspondingly, there may be conditions of mind when even unlikely pairs may be mis-recognized. But the Mule rises above any combination of the two factors.

What does that mean? Even when Asimov is writing Flash Gordon / Dan Dare-type dialogue, chances are he will trip over his own shoelaces.

‘You clumsy fool! Did you so underestimate me that no combination of impossible fortuities struck you as being too much for me to swallow?’

Worldly wise

One element of the appeal of the thousands of space opera sagas like this is the way they flatter the reader.

Asimov – still only in his 20s – is able to assume lofty man-of-the-world pose in his prose (despite knowing little or nothing about the actual world we live in) because he has created a world, a galaxy, about which he can make grand sweeping statements, without having to worry about contradiction.

And those readers who buy into this premise enjoy the benefits of bethinking themselves into his shoes, colossuses who bestride planetary systems, star quadrants, sectors of the galaxy, who eat imperial politics up for breakfast.

Rossem is one of those marginal worlds usually neglected in Galactic history and scarcely ever obtruding itself upon the notice of men of the myriad happier planets.

Ah, one of those systems, eh? Yes, I know all about them, a seasoned old hyperspace traveller like myself.

And this is connected to the theme of the series, the decline and fall of great empires. In reality actual, real-world history is extremely difficult and contested. I have now read enough books on the subject to realise that modern historians no longer speak of a Dark Age after the fall of the Roman Empire. The legal and economic structures of the Roman Empire lingered on for centuries, and were co-opted in different ways by successive non-Roman rulers. It is an extremely complicated and contradictory picture, which modern archaeology is making more complex all the time.

By contrast, this space opera trilogy not only uses cardboard cutout characters (goodies versus baddies, the shrewd versus the dumb) in often grating prose and painful dialogue – but it is based on a cartoonishly simple-minded caricature of how history and politics work.

A cartoon version which allows Asimov to make great sweeping gestures, untroubled by having to deal with the inconvenient complexities which characterise actual human history. This can be hugely enjoyable. so long as you’ve switched your brain off.

Imperial history flowed past the peasants of Rossem. The trading ships might bring news in impatient spurts; occasionally new fugitives would arrive – at one time, a relatively large group arrived in a body and remained – and these usually had news of the Galaxy.

It was then that the Rossemites learned of sweeping battles and decimated populations or of tyrannical emperors and rebellious viceroys. And they would sigh and shake their heads, and draw their fur collars closer about their bearded faces as they sat about the village square in the weak sun and philosophized on the evil of men.

Hairy old peasants sitting in the sunshine reflecting on the evils of men. It is like a scene from Asterix the Gaul.

Preposterous premises

The plot immerses you straight into its world of Galactic Empires and drags the reader along into its thriller-style, detective story mechanisms of suspense quickly enough to nearly make you overlook the fundamental problems of the entire conception. In the Foundation books:

  1. The entire galaxy is populated with human beings, and no other life forms.
  2. All humans speak the same language – all the characters from no matter which planets, no matter how many billions of miles apart, speak and understand English, and American English at that – I enjoyed how the taxi driver on Trantor who gives Arcadia a lift is made to talk like a New York taxi driver – it’s another of Isaac’s little jokes, but symptomatic of the oddly parochial feel of the stories.
  3. All these people without exception understand and use the same technologies, whether they’re at the supposed agriculture or coal-and-oil, or atomic power levels of civilisation. I.e. none of the characters, even the peasants, are confused by anything they see or hear. Everything is clear.
  4. There are no alien species anywhere in this galaxy. The more I think about it, the weirder that is, for science fiction.
  5. Which is just part of the way that there is little or no surprise or confusion or wonder or awe in any of the stories. The only surprises are the Hercules Poirot style revelations at the climax of each story when we realise is was the butler all along.
  6. Nothing at all happens which can’t be explained by basic GCSE-level history or psychology.  At bottom, the same thing happens in all of the stories; one bunch of people try to outwit another bunch, the good guys win, but there’s a surprise twist in the tail.

There is, in other words, a complete absence of the weird, the strange, the uncanny, the inexplicable, the horrifying – all the qualities which I, personally, enjoy in the best science fiction.

Instead it is just a preposterous space opera told in barely literate English.

Book covers

The original 1950s Gnome Publishing editions of Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation

The original 1950s Gnome Publishing editions of Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation

Space opera

Only now, having read and reflected on the trilogy, do I feel I understand what space opera is. Having looked it up, I learn that ‘space opera’ is defined by two critics, Hartwell and Cramer, as:

colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.

Foundation ticks these boxes. It is set not just in the future, but in the far distant future. It is entirely in outer space i.e. earth makes no appearance. The protagonist of each story is usually a clean-cut hero, from wise old Hari Seldon to swashbuckling trader Hober Mallow: there is certainly never any doubt who the good guys are. The stakes could hardly be higher – the future of the Galaxy.

And, what for me is the defining characteristic, it is optimistic in tone. The good guys win. Society is saved. Everything’s going to be just dandy, reflecting the enormous optimism of 1940s America. Honey, I’m home and the boss just gave me a raise!

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth and they rebel
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, an engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover unimaginable strangeness

1930s

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the vastest vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic, Ransom, and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars, where mysteries and adventures unfold

1940s

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with vanished Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – a night of flashing green lights in the sky from an alleged comet leaves the entire population of the earth blinded except for a tiny handful of survivors who have to preserve human society while fighting off the rapidly expanding population of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of all ships, attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements round the world and then, in the final phase, melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small gang of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism in order to reach the remote valley which his brother had told him he was going to plant with potatoes and other root vegetables and which he knows is an easily defendable enclave
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

1960s

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes, as in a scientific report, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s

1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together the author’s key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap; but Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s

1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop with a heart of gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson –

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Posted by Simon on December 6, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/06/second-foundation-isaac-asimov/

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov (1952)

Originally there were three Foundation novels, each one a packaging-up of some of the eight linked short stories which Asimov wrote for John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine from 1941 to 1948.

Thus this, the second book in the original Foundation trilogy, is not a novel at all. It consists of two long short stories, The General (75 pages) and The Mule (149 pages).

And although they were brought out in book form in 1952, they had both been published much earlier, The General in the April 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title Dead Hand, and The Mule in two parts in the November and December 1945 issues.

The two stories continue the narrative of the Foundation, established 12,000 years into the era of the Galactic Empire by the leading psychohistorian of the day, Hari Seldon. Seldon had predicted that the Galactic Empire, then at its peak, was in fact destined to collapse over the following 500 years, a collapse which would lead to a dark age which would last for 30,000 years.

He arranged for the establishment of the Foundation and ensured it was based right at the periphery of the Galaxy on a remote planet named Terminus, in such a way that it could rise from the ashes of the ruined Empire, and restore civilisation in a much shorter period of time, hopefully – if his plans went right – only one thousand years.

The five short stories collected in volume one of the trilogy, Foundation, each zeroes in on a particular moment of crisis, when the Foundation faced a threat to its existence, and each one showed how key protagonists used the Seldon Principles of Psychohistory to a) understand how the crisis would play out and b) take advantage of the crisis to enable the Foundation to triumph and evolve.

The two long stories in this volume take the story forward into the third century after the establishment of the Federation, showing how the complex unfolding of events still embodied the importance of Seldon’s principles and foresight.

1. The General

Although it has withdrawn from the Periphery of the Galaxy, the Empire still has keen advocates and military leaders true to its traditions, One such is charismatic and successful General Bel Riose who launches an attack against the Foundation. The leaders of the Foundation discuss how, rather than forcing a direct confrontation, they can maybe use their network of traders to infiltrate and neutralise the attacking force.

They concoct a plan. The Foundation trader Lathan Devers lets himself be captured and taken prisoner by Riose’s battleship where he encounters Ducem Barr, a venerable senator from the planet Siwenna. (Riose had earlier visited Barr and invited him on his expedition, to advise him about the rumours that the Foundation employs ‘magicians’. And readers of the first book will recognise that Ducem is the son of the Onum Barr who we met in the story, The Merchant Princes.)

After a great deal of dialogue and argument – and as they learn that the Imperial fleet is one-by-one reconquering and garrisoning star systems closer and closer to the Foundation territory – Devers and Barr are brought before General Riose. When he threatens to use a Psychic Probe on them, old Barr, to Devers’ surprise, bashes the general over the head with a stone bust, knocking him out.

Devers and Barr promptly leave the general’s rooms and walk quickly to the landing bay, where they get into Devers’ high-powered trading ship which blasts its way free and escapes into hyperspace.

Once safely escaped and tucking into space rations, Barr reveals to Devers that, as they fled, he had pinched the message which had just come through to the general from the Emperor’s much-hated advisor, Brodrig.

They both look at the message and realise that the ambiguity of its phrasing could be interpreted to look as if Brodrig and the general are in a conspiracy to overthrow the emperor.

Aha. They could use the message as evidence to sway the Emperor against his swashbuckling general – and thus rescue the Foundation.

So they travel through hyperspace to the capital planet of the Empire, Trantor, with a view to putting the message before the Emperor, Cleon II.

However, with its population of 40 million, Trantor is a jungle of bureaucracy and our guys have only bribed their way to about the second of ten levels when the interviewing bureaucrat reveals that he is in fact a lieutenant of the Imperial Police, that their ‘conspiracy to assassinate the Emperor’ has been identified, and that they are under arrest.

At which point Devers and Barr have to shoot their way out of the interview room, leg it back to their spaceship and blast their way into Trantor’s stratosphere and so into hyperspace.

It’s too dangerous to try to contact the emperor now, so they abandon their plan and make easy jumps through hyperspace right back out to the Periphery and to Terminus, the planet of the Foundation.

Here they report to the board of leaders of the Foundation (who we had met much earlier in the story), the guys who we saw weighing the encroaching threat of Riose and sending Devers off on his mission.

It is only now that Devers and Barr find out that Riose’s slow advance through neighbouring star systems towards the Foundation has been called off because Riose has been recalled to the Imperial capital planet, Trantor, under a cloud, tried and executed for treason.

And here comes the USP, the Foundation Scene, the Hari Seldon element —

Because it is only now that Devers realises that all this – Riose’s recall – would have happened regardless of anything the individual characters had done. It was a structural inevitability. A weak emperor must always live in fear of a strong general (considering how many generals had overthrown the emperor and taken the crown for himself).

Regardless of anything the council or Devers or Barr could have done, Riose would have failed anyway.

Once again the wisdom of Hari Seldon is proved to have been right – to the characters in the story, and to the admiring reader!

2. The Mule

In a foreword written years later, in the 1980s, Asimov confesses that The Mule was his favourite Foundation story and you can see why. It hangs together better than most of the others, the characters rise above the cardboard pulp level of most of the other ‘characters’, and there are scenes which almost prompt something like emotion in the reader.

It’s a hundred years since the previous story. Trantor, the great capital planet of the Empire has undergone ‘The Great Sack’ by a barbarian fleet. Most of the Galaxy has split up into barbaric kingdoms. The Empire itself has entered into an even more rapid phase of decline and civil wars. So far, so exactly like the actual history of ancient Rome transposed into a science fiction context.

The Foundation has become the dominant power in its quadrant of the galaxy, partly because of its preservation of advanced tech, plus the extensive trading policy we saw being established in the previous stories. Believing itself invulnerable, the leaders of the Foundation have become despotic and complacent.

This has led leaders of the Independent Traders’ Alliance to consider a rebellion against the Foundation. However, before they can make a move they and the Foundation come under attack from a mysterious warlord known only as ‘the Mule’.

The story follows a young couple, Toran and Bayta Darell, who have just got married. Toran’s father is a former trader, his uncle one of the would-be rebel traders. They are among the many who gather to watch another of Hari Seldon’s scheduled hologram messages. Imagine everybody’s horror when Seldon does not mention the Mule, but assumes that a civil war has been fought with the traders from which the Foundation emerged victor. For the first time in Foundation history – Seldon has got it wrong!

That civil war was exactly what was about to happen – until the Mule emerged. Could it be that the Mule is the kind of one-off, individual event which Seldon’s psychohistorical theories did not take account of? Has the comforting sense of inevitability about the Foundation’s rise come to a grinding halt?

Toran and Bayta Darell are the key characters. They fall in with a kind of rebel psychologist, Ebling Mis, and one ‘Magnifico Giganticus’, a clown they rescue at a planetary resort on their honeymoon, who seems to be fleeing the Mule himself. He is about to be arrested when Toran intervenes to save the odd, gawky, clumsy clown, and they take him off in their spaceship.

It looks as if they are to play a more central role than they expected, when this protective move is presented as the ‘kidnapping’ of his clown by the Mule and cited as a pretext for attacking the Foundation.

To everyone’s horror, the outer planets fall to the Mule’s assaults, and then the Foundation’s fleet itself mysteriously surrenders.

Determined to find out why, Toran, Bayta and Ebling Mis conceive the idea of travelling through hyperspace to the Galaxy’s former capital planet, Trantor, to look into the Imperial archives in search of a clue as to the Mule’s origins and behaviour.

Here the book for once fleetingly catches some real imaginative feeling, the kind of feeling H.G. Wells’s novels are full of, when Toran, Bayta and Mis touch down on Trantor to find it a ruin. Amid the buildings wrecked by the Great Sack, a new generation of agriculturalists are clearing away the great metal skyscrapers, to reveal the raw soil and living a primitive agricultural existence.

Tentatively our heroes make peace with these suspicious tribes, who allow them into the ruins of the old Imperial Library. There isn’t in all of Asimov a droplet of the awe and emotion conveyed in H.G. Wells’s description of entering the ruined Great Museum in The Time Machine, but these pages come the closest.

At the Great Library, Ebling Mis works continuously until his health is undermined, but in the climactic last few pages, he reveals a massive new twist in the narrative. He says that his researches show that the Foundation, the one they come from, is only one of two Foundations which Hari Seldon established 300 years earlier. And all the researches Mis have done suggest that their Foundation is the less important one!

Maybe it was a decoy all along, precisely to draw ambitious warlords like the Mule towards it – all the while ensuring that the Second Foundation could go about its work of regenerating civilisation in peace.

Mis, with his dying breath, is just about to reveal the location of the Second Foundation when… Bayta blasts him to oblivion with an atom blaster gun!! What???

Bayta explains to her outraged husband why. She points out to him (and the reader) that they have been at the heart of a whole series of coincidences: present on Terminus when the Seldon hologram appeared; present on another planet, Haven, just before that fell; there was another coincidence when they were pulled over in an unknown quadrant on their way to Trantor, by an unknown spaceship which turned out to be carrying a Foundation official they had met earlier in the story, Han Pritcher; and then – in a massive coincidence – this same Han Pritcher had turned up just a few days earlier on Trantor, apparently, followed them all the way from the Periphery of the Galaxy.

How come all these coincidences? Someone has been spying on them. Someone has been following their progress and their discoveries from the start. But who?

She turns to the spindly ‘clown’, who has been their constant companion since they saved him from an angry mob back on their honeymoon, back in the early pages of the story – Magnifico.

Bayta reveals that Magnifico… is the Mule himself!!!!!!

Magnifico stops cringing and speaking in his irritating fake courtly manner which he has maintained ever since we met him a hundred pages earlier. He straightens up and introduces himself suavely. Yes. He is the Mule. He is a mutant, one of the millions born every year across the galaxy, but with a unique power: he can control people’s emotional moods. Thus he forced a local warlord into such a state of depression that he handed over his fleet to the Mule. Thus he created a sense of despair among the populations of the outer planets, which supinely submitted to him.

It was using this power that he made most of the Foundation fleet simply surrender to him, suddenly overcome with despair and convinced their battle was futile. And it was this mind control which he used on Mis at his researches in the old Galactic Library, forcing him to work himself literally to death to discover the location of the Second Foundation.

So Bayta was right, right to stop Mis revealing its location with his dying words!

What will happen now? Well, after briefly threatening to force Bayta to become his consort – a prospect which makes her shiver with revulsion – the Mule rather adolescently declares that, since the couple genuinely befriended him and looked after him – as so many people didn’t in his wretched, outcast life (sob) he will… let them live. And he walks out the room.

The Darells are left on Trantor. The Mule leaves to reign over the Foundation and the rest of his new empire. The existence of the Second Foundation (as an organization centred on the science of psychology and mentalics, in contrast to the Foundation’s focus on physical sciences) is now known to the Darells and to the Mule.

Now that the Mule has conquered the Foundation he stands as the most powerful force in the galaxy, and the Second Foundation is the only threat to his eventual rule over the entire galaxy.

Before he leaves the Mule vows that he will find the Second Foundation, but Bayta declares it has already prepared for him and that he will not have enough time before the Second Foundation reacts.

What will happen next? Tune into next week’s exciting episode.

Or, in this case, move right on to reading the last two stories in the series, contained in the final book of the trilogy, Second Foundation.

Immaturities

When I first read the Foundation novels aged 12 or 13, I was absolutely gripped, riveted, enthralled by their profound insights into human life and history and society. I remember my sense of horror and thrill when events finally began to diverge from Hari Seldon’s prophecies. What was going to happen?

The trouble is that, since then, I have grown up (I hope). I have certainly read a lot more books, Chaucer and Shakespeare among them, 17th and 18th century satires on courts and kings and emperors, as well as countless histories of the Roman Empire, and other ancient empires, as well as numerous books about politics, philosophy and economics, as well as biographies of actual kings and emperors and political leaders.

My point being that proper literature and actual history are all much better, much more sophisticated, much better written, much more psychologically subtle, than anything in Asimov.

And all have the massive extra value of being true and, therefore, forcing you to think hard about the mysteries of actual history and actual human nature – not human nature out of a bubblegum packet.

Asimov freely admitted that he based the characters of the Emperor Cleon II and his General Bel Riose on the historical Roman Emperor Justinian I and his general Belisarius, as described in Robert Graves’s novel, Count Belisarius.

Years later, when I read Count Belisarius, I realised that it is much, much better than anything Asimov ever wrote, in every measurable way: deeper understanding of human beings and behaviour, vastly better prose style, and giving its reader an in-depth insight into real history.

Psychohistory as twaddle

When I was 12 or 13 I was barely beginning an education in the humanities. Every book I read which touched on history or economics or psychology, no matter how superficially, opened up vast new vistas to me, since it was the first time I’d encountered them. Thus, emotionally naive, inexperienced in anything of life, profoundly ignorant of most intellectual disciplines, books like Asimov’s introduced me to a world of new ideas – how emperors and their slimey sycophants behave – how empires rise and fall – how councils and committees are run – how grown-ups debate things, discuss strategy, make plans.

But the trouble is that I went on not only to read huge numbers of more serious books for my humanities and literature A-levels and degree – but to work in current affairs TV, attending countless editorial meetings, dealing with difficult situations, budgets, live broadcasts – and then, latterly, to work in the civil service, attending countless meetings, presentations, strategy boards, getting a feel for the labyrinthine politics of the civil service and the complexity of real-world politics.

Discovering, at every turn, that pretty much everything Asimov describes and presents is, in fact, a child’s eye, profoundly superficial, immature and depthless version of all these matters. Profoundly immature and simplistic.

Fake wisdom

The conceit is that the trilogy gives the reader immense insight into human history. But it doesn’t, it really doesn’t.

Symptomatic is the central premise that Hari Seldon was a genius who had unprecedented insight into the functioning of human history. Thus we are from time to time treated to some of Seldon’s profound sayings sprinkled through the text for our admiration.

But, when you actually read them, they are twaddle. When Asimov strains to authorly wisdom – just like when he strains to say anything meaningful about human nature, about human relationships, about power politics and so on – he is embarrassingly trite.

‘Seldon’s rules of psychohistory on which it is so comforting to rely probably have as one of the contributing variables, a certain normal initiative on the part of the people of the Foundation themselves. Seldon’s laws help those who help themselves.’ (The Magicians)

‘Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!’ (The Traders)

‘Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.’ (The Mule)

‘There’s a saying on Haven that when the cave lights go out, it is time for the righteous and hard-working to sleep.’ (The Mule)

When the lights go out, it’s time to go to bed! Wow. Wisdom for six-year-olds.

Just as the narratives give the appearance of insight into history and human society without doing anything of the sort, these trite sayings have the appearance of pithy wisdom and humour – but are neither funny nor witty, interesting or useful.

Anthropocentric

The Empire rules over quadrillions of planets in billions of star systems spread across the entire galaxy. And all of them are inhabited by men (and I really do mean men – there are hardly any women in these stories). No aliens, no alternative life forms, nada.

With the result that nothing really strange or alien or uncanny happens in any of these stories.

Although ostensibly science fiction, and certainly featuring space ships and atom blasters, there isn’t a single alien form of life, or alien disease, or alien problem. There aren’t solar winds or gas clouds or unexpected radiation or all the other perils which you might associate with science fiction.

Instead, what you get is a succession of scenes in which adult men (almost no women until Bayta in The Mule, but no children and no emotional ties worth mentioning) discuss power and strategy, trying to tease out how to manipulate and beat each other.

The conflicts are entirely human. It is an entirely human galaxy.

The style, the dialogue

My God, Asimov’s presentation of character through dialogue, and his efforts at dramatic confrontation are scandalously bad!

Most of the scenes are just that – scenes, as if from a play – in which small groups of characters discuss, argue and accuse each other.

They didn’t have TV in the 1940s when Asimov wrote all this, so I’m guessing he owed a lot of how he arranged and wrote these scenes to the conventions of radio drama. That might explain why there are few if any descriptions of things. The Imperial planet Trantor does give rise to a few paragraphs conveying how it is totally covered in manmade structures and habitations, but that’s about it. We get next to nothing about conditions on any of the other planets, and only the slightest descriptions of space ships. These are referred to often enough, but left largely undescribed.

Maybe it was a convention of the pulp sci-fi magazines Asimov was writing for. Maybe the emphasis was all about the human drama, leaving out all unnecessary technical details or prose descriptions. Maybe that was deliberately left to the illustrators to fill out as they saw fit.

Whatever the reason, almost the entire weight of the text and the narrative is thrown onto the dialogue, to explain what’s going on, and to move the plot forward – and, my God, is it cheesy!

Imagine the crappiest dialogue from a cheesy Hollywood historical ‘epic’ and then go down several notches. Cross it with scenes of The Prisoner of Zenda-style swashbuckling heroics. And then have everyone dressed up in costumes from Flash Gordon.

The senior lieutenant of the Dark Nebula stared in horror at the visiplate.
‘Great Galloping Galaxies!’ It should have been a howl, but it was a whisper instead, ‘What’s
that?’ (The Merchant Princes)

Great galloping galaxies! It sounds like Robin’s expletives in the cheesy 1960s TV series of Batman – ‘Holy Uncanny Photographic Mental Processes, Batman!’

The use of ‘Galaxy!’ as a universal oath or expletive by the characters is symptomatic: it is intended to make the whole story feel truly outer-worldly, futuristic, science fictiony. But it comes over as cheap and crass.

‘He may be the proof I need – and I need something, Galaxy knows – to awaken the Foundation.’ (The Mule)

‘When the Galaxy was this?’ (The Mule)

Instead of inspiring awe, or making me feel like I was transported to another dimension – I kept bursting out laughing at this, and at most of the rest of the dialogue’s appalling hamminess.

Characters who are clichés

Asimov has fun trying to create a range of characters, from the ‘Hi honey’ couple the Darells, to the dastardly Regent Wienis and his whiny nephew Lepold, to the stolid Foundation officer Pritcher. The only trouble is that, as soon as he departs from cardboard cutouts, he lapses into staggering cliché. And when he tries for comedy… My God, he is so embarrassing.

In Foundation he has the bright idea of creating a lisping, foppish diplomat named Lord Dorwin, Asimov’s pulp version of the pomaded dandies who infest Restoration drama. Here he is Lord Dorwin in full flood:

‘Ah, yes, Anacweon.’ A negligent wave of the hand. ‘I have just come from theah. Most bahbawous planet. It is thowoughly inconceivable that human beings could live heah in the Pewiphewy. The lack of the most elementawy wequiahments of a cultuahed gentleman; the absence of the most fundamental necessities foah comfoht and convenience – the uttah desuetude into which they – ‘
Hardin interrupted dryly: ‘The Anacreonians, unfortunately, have all the elementary requirements for warfare and all the fundamental necessities for destruction.’
‘Quite, quite.’ Lord Dorwin seemed annoyed, perhaps at being stopped midway in his sentence. ‘But we ahn’t to discuss business now, y’know. Weally, I’m othahwise concuhned.’ (The Encyclopedists)

Maybe Asimov’s original teenage sci-fi addicts found this kind of thing hilarious, but it gets very tiresome very quickly. Especially since, like most Asimov characters, Dorwin says nothing either remotely funny or acute. It is like a schoolboy dressing up in adult clothes – looks great but… he has no idea what to say or how to handle himself among adults.

In Foundation and Empire the central character turns out to be the Mule’s court jester, Magnifico. For most of the story, until he is unmasked as the Mule himself, Magnifico is made to speak in a deliberately cod medieval style, which gets as wearing as quickly as Jar Jar Bink’s disastrous mannerisms in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace:

‘My lady,’ he gasped, ‘it is indeed of an effect the most magical. It is of balance and response
almost beyond hope in its delicacy and stability. On this, it would seem I could work wonders.
How liked you my composition, my lady?’ (The Mule)

There are literally hundreds of paragraphs of dialogue like that. The characterisation of wicked Prince Regent Wienis rubbing his hands and cackling over his spoilt and impressionable teenage nephew, the teenage King Lepold I is like something out of pantomime. I enjoyed these passages because they were so preposterously bad.

‘Lepold!.. Now will you attend?’
The king shrugged and gravitated to the end table where he nibbled at a Lera nut in quite an unregal sulk. He did not dare to meet his uncle’s eyes. Wienis said, by way of preamble, ‘I’ve been to the ship today.’
‘What ship?’
‘There is only one ship. The ship. The one the Foundation is repairing for the navy. The old Imperial cruiser. Do I make myself sufficiently plain?’
‘That one? You see, I told you the Foundation would repair it if we asked them to. It’s all poppycock, you know, that story of yours about their wanting to attack us. Because if they did, why would they fix the ship? It doesn’t make sense, you know.’
‘Lepold, you’re a fool!’
The king, who had just discarded the shell of the Lera nut and was lifting another to his lips, flushed.
‘Well now, look here,’ he said, with anger that scarcely rose above peevishness, ‘I don’t think you ought to call me that. You forget yourself. I’ll be of age in two months, you know.’ (The Mayors)

Summaries of the plots of the Foundation stories (and I’ve read quite a few) have the effect of making them look intelligent and thoughtful. Actually reading them, though, plunges you into a world of embarrassing stereotypes and clichés.

Illiterate

If the dialogue is stagey beyond belief, the narrative prose is often worse. Routinely the reader comes across sentences, or expressions, which only barely make sense. Asimov is an appalling writer of English prose.

Mayor Indbur – successively the third of that name – was the grandson of the first Indbur, who had been brutal and capable; and who had exhibited the first quality in spectacular fashion by his manner of seizing power, and the latter by the skill with which he put an end to the last farcical remnants of free election and the even greater skill with which he maintained a relatively peaceful rule. Mayor Indbur was also the son of the second Indbur, who was the first Mayor of the Foundation to succeed to his post by right of birth – and who was only half his father, for he was merely brutal. So Mayor Indbur was the third of the name and the second to succeed by right of birth, and he was the least of the three, for he was neither brutal nor capable – but merely an excellent book keeper born wrong. Indbur the Third was a peculiar combination of ersatz characteristics to all but himself. (The Mule)

In the cities, the escapers of the Galaxy could take their varieties of pleasure to suit their purse,
from the ethereal sky-palaces of spectacle and fantasy that opened their doors to the masses at the jingle of half a credit, to the unmarked, unnoted haunts to which only those of great wealth were of the cognoscenti. (The Mule)

The “hangar” on Kalgan is an institution peculiar unto itself, born of the need for the disposition of the vast number of ships brought in by the visitors from abroad, and the simultaneous and consequent vast need for living accommodations for the same. (The Mule)

The Mule’s clown who had reported that within his narrow compass of body he held the lordly name of Magnifico Giganticus, sat hunched over the table and gobbled at the food set before him. (The Mule)

‘I tell you, Mis, there’s not a thing there that breathes anything but order and peace – ‘ The door at the far, long end opened, and, in far too dramatically coincident a fashion to suggest anything but real life, a plainly-costumed notable stepped in. (The Mule)

There was an atmosphere about the Time Vault that just missed definition in several directions at once.

Randu, as newly-appointed co-ordinator – in itself a wartime post – of the confederation of cities on Haven, had been assigned, at his own request, to an upper room, out of the window of which he could brood over the roof tops and greenery of the city. Now, in the fading of the cave lights, the city receded into the level lack of distinction of the shades.

What?

Wise.. or wally?

Asimov wants to be taken as a man-of-the-world author, dispensing insightful generalisations about the human condition as suavely and wittily as Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde. But he comes across as a shallow and pretentious jerk, who mistakes pompous sonority for wit and manages to avoid any inkling of genuine insight.

He said, ‘What is the meaning of this?’
It is the precise question and the precise wording thereof that has been put to the atmosphere on such occasions by an incredible variety of men since humanity was invented. It is not recorded that it has ever been asked for any purpose other than dignified effect.

Juddee, the plain, snub-nosed, indifferent blonde at the dining unit diagonally across had been the superficial one of the nonacquaintance. And now Juddee was crying, biting woefully at a moist handkerchief, and choking back sobs until her complexion was blotched with turgid red. Her shapeless radiation-proof costume was thrown back upon her shoulders, and her transparent face shield had tumbled forward into her dessert, and there remained.
Bayta joined the three girls who were taking turns at the eternally applied and eternally inefficacious remedies of shoulder-patting, hair-smoothing, and incoherent murmuring.

‘The precise wording thereof…’

The prose is almost all like this – routinely managing to be either pretentious (in the sense of pretending to a wit and wisdom which it conspicuously lacks) or teetering on the brink of unintelligibility.

A Star Wars note

Lathan Devers is a rough tough inter-galactic trader who flies the fastest little trading ship in the galaxy, always ready with a plan and a bit of blarney to talk his way out of trouble.

Remind you of anyone? Reminded me of Han Solo from Star Wars. So I sat bolt upright when, in chapter 2 of The Mule, we are introduced to a – Captain Han Pritcher! Han. Not a common name, is it? He goes on to play quite a role in The Mule and appears in the final book, too. So when I googled a comparison I was not surprised to discover I among the last people on earth to notice the resemblance, just of the name, but of lots of structural elements between the Foundation stories and the Star Wars movies.

  • Mankind is spread over the entire Galaxy
  • There’s a Galactic Empire with a bureaucratic capital world (Trantor / Coruscant)
  • There are outer provinces whose inhabitants are mainly smugglers and scavengers.
  • Ships jumps into hyperspace for shortening traveling time.
  • The Republic holding out against the Empire (Star Wars) resembles the Foundation holding out against the Empire.
  • Both Hober Mallow (Foundation) and Han Solo (Star Wars) are smugglers who become agents and fighters for their respective worlds, and fly spaceships which can outrun any Empire ship.

Devers bent over the little dead globe, watching for a tiny sign of life. The directional control was slowly and thoroughly sieving space with its jabbing tight sheaf of signals. Barr watched patiently from his seat on the low cot in the comer, He asked, ‘No more signs of them?’
‘The Empire boys? No.’ The trader growled the words with evident impatience. ‘We lost the scuppers long ago. Space! With the blind jumps we took through hyperspace, it’s lucky we didn’t land up in a sun’s belly. They couldn’t have followed us even if they outranged us, which they didn’t.’ (The General, chapter 8)

  • Princess Leia resembles Bayta Darell; while Leia battled against Darth Vader, Bayta battled against the Mule.
  • The Foundation was set up on the ‘outer rim of the galaxy’ and Luke’s home planet of Tatooine is also in ‘the outer rim’.
  • The inhabitants of the Second Foundation have enormous mental powers and their minds can control people and objects. In the Universe of Star Wars this power is called The Force.

Asimov himself saw the connection.

I modeled my ‘Galactic Empire’ (a phrase I think I was the first to use) quite consciously on the Roman Empire. Ever since then, other science fiction writers have been following the fashion, and have written series of their own after the fashion of the Foundation series. In fact, in the late 1970s the Galactic Empire reached the movies in the enormously popular Star Wars, which, here and there, offered rather more than a whiff of the Foundation. (No, I don’t mind. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I certainly imitated Edward Gibbon, so I can scarcely object if someone imitates me.)
(From Asimov’s essay Empires, 1983)

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Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/foundation-and-empire-isaac-asimov/

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)

Asimov

Born in Russia of Jewish descent, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was taken by his parents to New York while still a toddler and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

He was a prodigy. He sold his first science fiction story at 18, and by his early 20s was selling SF short stories to John Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

One of the most prolific authors of all time, Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books, plus hundreds of articles for magazines, encyclopedias and so on. That fact alone should prepare you for his superficial and slapdash prose style.

Out of this vast output, probably his most famous works are two groups of short stories and novels, one clustered around the Robot idea – I, Robot, the Caves of Steel and so on – the other, the seven novels of the Foundation and Empire series.

The story behind Foundation

Late in life Asimov himself gave a detailed account of the origin of the original Foundation stories which he wrote in the 1940s, and then of the various sequels and prequels he was persuaded to write in the 1980s.

For me, the key facts are that the first eight stories were:

  1. written as short stories
  2. for a popular sci fi magazine
  3. when Asimov had only just turned 21

They were never intended for book publication, they were certainly never intended to be considered ‘novels’, they were hacked out for the transient existence of a gee-whizz sci-fi magazine.

But, apparently, the start of the 1950s saw a big transformation of the SF market in America: for the first time proper book publishers became interested in it. No longer was it the preserve of fans and collectors of luridly illustrated magazines. And, as they started publishing SF books, publishers discovered there was an untapped audience for it in the broader book-buying public.

So, where to get the material to satisfy this market? They could approach tried and tested SF writers with book contracts. Bit slow. And they could also trawl back through the vast pulp magazine content produced over the previous decades, cherry picking popular stories which could be reversioned for book publication.

Thus it was that in 1951 – three years after Asimov had had the final Foundation story published in Astounding Science-Fiction – that a small publisher (Gnome Books) suggested republishing all the stories in book format. When Asimov agreed, Gnome went on to suggest that the series, as it stood, started too abruptly and that Asimov should write an introductory story setting the scene and explaining the backstory. Which he promptly did.

Taken together these facts explain the Foundation series’ pulpy worldview, the uneven and often very bad prose style, the errors in grammar and spelling, the very poor proofreading in all versions of the stories, and the looseness with which they hang together.

Foundation and its two sequels were not conceived or written as novels. In fact at just this time, in 1950, the expression ‘fix-up novel’ was coined to describe a ‘novel’ created by just such a glueing together of pre-existing short stories that had been previously published and may, or may not, have had much in common. The stories’ plots could be tweaked to make for consistency, have new connecting material written for the novelisation, or – a popular device – have a new frame narrative and narrator created who could introduce and contextualise each story or ‘episode’.

In the rush to capitalise on the new popularity of SF, ‘fix-up’ became a very apposite description, first applied to a classic SF author, A.E. van Vogt. Loads of the old hacks who’d been churning out sci-fi stories by the bucket load and flogging them to the steaming jungle of pulp sci-fi magazines, suddenly had a cash incentive to cobble the stories together and present them as ‘novels’.

Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series, as well as Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, are classic examples of ‘fix-ups’.

The afterlife of the Foundation stories

So all this explains why the book titled Foundation and published in 1951 in fact consists of the following linked short stories:

  1. The Psychohistorians – the introductory story to the series written at Gnome’s request (1951)
  2. The Encyclopedists – originally published in the May, 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction under the title of Foundation
  3. The Mayors – originally published in the June 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as Bridle and Saddle
  4. The Traders – originally published in the October 1944 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as The Wedge
  5. The Merchant Princes – first published in the August 1944 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as The Big and the Little

The stories got longer as Asimov wrote them, and the second volume – Foundation and Empire – contains just two long stories, or a short story and a novella, The General and The Mule (published in November and December 1945).

Similarly, the third and final volume of the original trilogy – Second Foundation – also contains a short story and a novella:

  1. Search by the Mule was originally published in the January 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title Now You See It…
  2. Search by the Foundation was originally published in the November and December 1949 and January 1950 issues of Astounding Science Fiction under the title … And Now You Don’t

So, in total, there were eight original Foundation stories, written over a period of eight years, 1940 to 1948, plus the introductory one commissioned by Gnome in 1951. Nine.

As it turned out Goblin Publishers weren’t great at promoting the books, which hardly sold. It was only in 1961, when Asimov had cemented a good book deal with Doubleday, the major American publishers, that they discovered this item from his back catalogue was underperforming. They promptly bought it off Goblin and undertook a big marketing campaign and, slightly to everyone’s surprise, the Foundation trilogy was, for the first time, a bestseller, becoming a phenomenon.

By 1966 a special category of the SF Hugo Awards was created to honour trilogies of novels and the Foundation trilogy promptly won.

By the time I was getting into SF in the early 1970s, the trilogy, alongside Asimov’s Robot books, and numerous volumes of short stories and other novels, thronged the shelves in shiny paperback editions with wonderful covers designed by Chris Foss, and I took them to be among the defining works of the genre.

Foundation cover art by Chris Foss

Foundation cover art by Chris Foss

Posthumous Foundations

Then, twenty years after their first appearance in book form, in 1981, Doubleday asked Asimov to write a sequel to the trilogy. Initially reluctant, Asimov reread the series and realised he had more to say, much more.

He quickly wrote and published Foundation’s Edge (1982), then a follow-up to that, Foundation and Earth (1986). These were followed, after Asimov’s death, by Foundation and Chaos, published in 1998, written by Greg Bear with the permission of the Asimov estate and, in 1999 Foundation’s Triumph, written by David Brin, incorporating ideas from Asimov short stories.

Before his death Asimov also went back before the events covered in Foundation, to describe them in two prequels – Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation, published posthumously in 1993. These have been complemented by Foundation’s Fear (1997) by Gregory Benford.

Like the novels about James Bond or Jason Bourne which were written after their creators died, there’s no reason why new Foundation novels shouldn’t roll off the production line for the foreseeable future.

Foundation and Robot

Not only this but as early as the 1960s Asimov began to link the Foundation stories and their ‘universe’ with the ever-growing world of the Robot stories, by writing stories which feature characters, or issues, or planets, common to both – thus creating an enormously complicated fictional universe.

As you might expect from this huge ‘fix-up’ approach, the resulting ‘universe’ contains plenty of plot holes and inconsistencies for fans and fellow authors to happily crawl over and debate forever.

Now comes news that the Foundation stories are about to be made into a major TV series by HBO, home of Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones. I’d be surprised if they don’t tweak, edit, and amend the original texts to make the content more suitable for TV and the plots fit into one-hour episodes. Plus catering to modern sensibilities by having more female and black leads.

All of which will lead to an even greater ferment of comment and critique online. Thus the endless proliferation and unstoppable afterlife of American cultural products.

The premise of the Foundation stories

It’s a struggle to clamber free of this jungle of backstories, overlapping universes, and real-world developments in order to get back to the primal experience of reading the stories as they were first conceived nearly 80 years ago.

Asimov tells us the original idea was inspired by his reading (not once, but twice!) of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What, he thought, if he wrote about the decline of a Galactic Empire – from the vantage point of the Second Empire which eventually rose to replace it, after a prolonged dark age? A vast epic history looking back over the decline and collapse of a space empire…

Back in 1940 this appears to have been (surprisingly) a fairly original story. One of the classic early SF tales – H.G. Wells’s Time Machine gives the reader a poignant sense of the passage of vast periods of time, but doesn’t give a detailed chronicle.

Similarly, Olaf Stapledon’s epic SF classic, Last and First Men, deals with the rise and fall of countless human civilisations on a mind-boggling scale, but again it doesn’t go into detail to describe the nitty-gritty events or characters of any of them.

But it’s still a trope – the collapse of empire – familiar to artists and poets for centuries. The twist, the gimmick, the unique selling point which gives the Foundation series its distinctive quality, is the idea that, amid the teeming trillions of the Empire, spread across all the habitable planets of the entire galaxy, a scientific discipline has arisen, known as Psychohistory.

Psychohistorians try and predict human history, based on the vast amount of data by that point amassed about human and social behaviour. And it is this idea which underpins the entire Foundation universe.

Hari Seldon’s role in the Foundation stories

For one of these psychohistorians is the extremely brilliant Hari Seldon, who has used the discipline to map out a precise vision of events which will unfold over thousands of years into the future.

The fundamental premise of the original series is that Seldon can see that the Empire’s fall is inevitable and that, other things being equal, it will be followed by a thirty thousand year-long dark age, until civilisation rises again.

But Seldon thinks he was worked out a plan whereby this thirty thousand year period can be abbreviated to just a thousand years. His plan is to create a ‘Foundation’ of committed men and women who will create a Galactic Encyclopedia which will preserve all the knowledge of the Empire through the dark age and hasten the rise of the Second Empire.

Thus, in the first story Seldon gathers round him enthusiastic devotees of the plan and confronts the sceptical powers-that-be. Then each of the following five stories describes a crisis moment facing the Foundation over the ensuing hundreds of years.

But – and here’s where the psychohistory thing really comes into its own – at each of these crises, Seldon turns out to have already seen and anticipated the outcome. In fact, he turns out to have stage-managed things in order to secure the outcome he wanted.

The technique is exemplified in the first story. This describes young, naive Gaal Dornick arriving on the planet Trantor, magnificent capital of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire to meet the famous psychohistorian. Dornick has barely arrived and met the legendary Seldon than the latter is arrested and Dornick attends his trial.

Seldon is accused of treason by the aristocratic members of the Committee of Public Safety who, nowadays, rule the Empire (the actual emperor being a puppet figure). He outrages the committee by explaining that in just 500 years the empire will collapse and enter its 30,000 year dark age.

The committee find him guilty of treason but, not wanting to create a martyr, offers Seldon exile to a remote world, Terminus, accompanied by the others who wish to help him create the Encyclopedia. And he accepts.

But here’s the kicker, which is revealed to an adoring Dornick right at the end of the first story: Seldon knew that’s what the Committee would do.

He knew they would offer exile (to hedge their bets – to get rid of him but keep him alive, just in case what he says is true) and he was almost certain that he’d be sent as far away as possible, with the result – as he explains to an awed Dornick – that he has already prepared his community of 100,000 to travel to Terminus! Ta-dah!

Each of the four following stories zeroes in on a similar crisis moment in the Foundation’s history, 30, 50 or 100 years apart. In each one we are introduced to new characters, who face a plight or challenge to the Foundation. And in each story it turns out – right at the end – that Seldon had foreseen the challenge… and secretly planned, or created the conditions, for the challenge to be overcome!

Or, in the words of the hero of the fifth story, the trader Hober Mallow (who overcomes the challenge of his day and, in doing so, becomes the first of the Merchant Princes of Foundation):

‘When the Galactic Empire began to die at the edges, and when the ends of the Galaxy reverted to barbarism and dropped away, Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists planted a colony, the Foundation, out here in the middle of the mess, so that we could incubate art, science, and technology, and form the nucleus of the Second Empire.’
‘Oh, yes, yes – ‘
‘I’m not finished,’ said the trader, coldly. ‘The future course of the Foundation was plotted according to the science of psychohistory, then highly developed, and conditions arranged so as to bring about a series of crises that will force us most rapidly along the route to future Empire. Each crisis, each Seldon crisis, marks an epoch in our history. We’re approaching one now – our third.’

So each story occurs in a new period – features entirely new characters – and presents them with a challenge thrown up by the ongoing collapse of the Empire, and the survival of the Foundation. Each of the characters in question beats the challenge and then, they either see a hologram of Seldon (which, we are told, are scheduled to return at regular intervals into the future) which confirms that nature of the challenge and how they’ve overcome it. Or is made to realise (by Asimov’s guiding hand) the nature of the crisis they’ve just passed through and how it adhered to Seldon’s Laws of Psychohistory.

Either way, the characters (and the reader) come to reverence the memory and extraordinary foresight of Hari Seldon even more.

So the Foundation stories are more than just ‘chronicles of the future’: each one contains a trick in the tail reminiscent of a classic detective story, the kind which reveals whodunnit at the end.

You read partly to find out what happens in each story – but also to find out how Asimov will reconcile each new crisis with Seldon’s omniscient prophecies.

1. The Psychohistorians

12,000 years into the history of the Galactic Empire psychohistorian Hari Seldon realises it is doomed to collapse and manipulates the Committee of Public Safety into sending him and 100,000 followers to the remote planet of Terminus to create a Galactic Encyclopedia.

2. The Encyclopedists

Fifty years later, the Foundation is well-established on planet Terminus. The creation of Seldon’s Encyclopedia is proceeding under the control of a board of scientists known as Encyclopedists. The nominal figurehead of the state, Salvor Hardin, realises Terminus is under threat from the four neighbouring prefects of the Empire, which have declared independence from the Empire. By skillful diplomacy Hardin defuses a demand from the Kingdom of Anacreon to establish military bases on Terminus, and also overthrows the Encyclopedists in a coup. To his surprise, when Seldon makes his next scheduled appearance by hologram recording, it turns out Seldon had anticipated the coup and approves of it as the inevitable next stage in the Foundation’s evolution. He also reveals – shockingly – that the Encyclopedia Galactica was always a pretext to allow the creation of the Foundation. It was just a way of getting everyone focused and unified while the real structural consolidation of Foundation society proceeded alongside it.

3. The Mayors

It is 80 years into the history of the Foundation – in other words we are in Year 80 of the Federation Era or F.E. Having preserved its technological knowledge while other imperial star systems are losing theirs, the Federation is well placed to exert power over the four neighbouring kingdoms, but has developed a policy of doing this under cover of a Religion of Science.

Salvor Hardin is now the well-established ruler of the Foundation, but, as the story opens, is threatened by a new political movement led by city councillor Sef Sermak, the ‘Actionist Party’, which wants to attack and conquer the Four Kingdoms.

The kingdom which gives most concern is Anacreon, ruled by Prince Regent Wienis and his nephew, the teenage King Lepold I. (This gives rise to scenes between regent and pimply king which kept reminding me of black and white movies of The Prisoner of Zenda in their camp cheesiness.)

When Wienis launches a direct attack against Terminus, using an abandoned Imperial space cruiser redesigned by Foundation experts, he discovers that the Foundation have installed devices in the ship to prevent it firing. Wienis had planned the attack for the night of his nephew’s coronation as king. Hardin attends this ceremony, out of diplomatic courtesy, but is arrested while the arch-fiend Wienis rubs his hands and cackles like Ming the Merciless,

Little does he know that Hardin has a cunning plan. 1. He has agreed with Anacreonian High Priest Poly Verisof to create a popular uprising against Wienis. 2. The Imperial space cruiser’s weapons turn out to have been neutralised so that they can’t attack Terminus. 3. Instead, the leader of the fleet is forced to make an Anacreon-wide broadcast that he has been compelled to lead a treacherous and ‘blasphemous’ attack against the Federation by the wicked Wienis – which crystallises the popular rebellion against the regent. And then – all technology on Anacreon shuts down. the Foundation maintain it; they have planned for it all to close down. Anacreon is plunged into darkness.

Wienis turns in fury on Hardin and tries to zap him with a ray gun, but the latter is protected by Foundation tech i.e. a personal force field. In fury, Wienis turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.

Thus Hardin is vindicated: the narrator had given the impression that the Actionist Party was gaining the upper hand in the Foundation and threatening his rule. But the calm, clever way he handles the crisis entirely restores his power.

This is confirmed by another scheduled appearance of Hari Seldon by hologram, who confirms his expectation that the Foundation’s immediate neighbours, the Four Kingdoms, will now be virtually powerless and incapable of resisting the Religion of Scientism’s advance.

4. The Traders

It is 135 F.E. If the religion of ‘Scientism’ was the focus of the previous story, this one reveals how trading will be the next stage in the Foundation’s expansion.

The story demonstrates this through a complicated plot involving the imprisonment of one the Foundation’s lead traders (and spies) Eskel Gorov by the authorities on a planet in a nearby system, Askone.

He is rescued by a fellow Foundation trader, Linmar Ponyets, who conspires with an ambitious and rebellious Askonian councilor, Pherl, to overthrown Askone’s council.

Ponyets makes Pherl a device which can transmute any metal into gold – enough to corrupt anyone – but has also plants a video recorder in it. Now, meddling with this kind of old tech is regarded by the Askone council as blasphemous. When Pherl tries to renege on his deal to set Gorov free, Ponyets shows him the tape he’s made recording Pherl committing the blasphemy of using Foundation tech.

Thus (the Foundation’s) Ponyets He can blackmail (Askone’s) Pherl. He promptly gets him to have Gorov released, and to hand over a load of metal ore which the Foundation needs.

On the spaceship back to Terminus, Pherl explains his success to Gorov. Not only has Pherl a) released Gorov b) bartered a big supply of tin out of him but c) since Pherl is likely to become the next Grand Master of Askone, he has also neutralised it as an enemy.

When Gorov criticizes his techniques, Ponyets quotes one of Salvor Hardin’s alleged sayings: ‘Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!’

5. The Merchant Princes

Twenty years late i.e. about 155 F.E., the Foundation has expanded to subjugate the neighbouring Four Kingdoms and is expanding. But there is resistance. Three Foundation vessels have vanished near the planets of the Republic of Korell. Master Trader Hober Mallow is sent to find out why and assess Korell’s state of technological development.

A long complicated plot ensues in which the Foundation’s Foreign Secretary Publis Manlio and Mayoral Secretary Jorane Sutt are both out to incriminate Mallow, but he a) handles a diplomatic crisis with Korell b) establishes relations with Korell’s authoritarian ruler, Commdor Asper Argo.

Noticing the atomic handguns carried by the Commdors’ bodyguards – a technology mostly lost on the Periphery of the Empire – Mallow suspects the Empire of reaching out to the Korellians. Mallow travels to the planet Siwenna, which he believes may be the capital of an Imperial province, and where he finds the impoverished former patrician Onum Barr, amid the ruins of the planet’s former glories.

Barr explains that a previous viceroy to Siwenna rebelled against the Emperor, and that Barr took part in a revolution which overthrew him. The Imperial fleet despatched to put down the rebellion ended up massacring the population, including killing all but one of Barr’s children. The new viceroy of Siwenna is now planning his own rebellion against the Empire.

(This idea of the permanent rebellion of the provinces under a succession of rulers, each of them aspiring to become emperor, quite obviously copies the pattern of the later years of the Roman Empire.)

Mallow goes spying at a Siwellian power plant, noting that it is atomically powered (atomic power is the benchmark of technical civilisation in the Empire) but that the technicians – the tech-men – don’t actually know how to maintain it.

With this and other information Mallow becomes convinced that the ‘religious’ phase of the Foundation’s expansion is over. Henceforward its power must rest on its ability to trade goods which nobody out here on the Periphery has or can fix.

Mallow is elected Mayor of Terminus, and has his opponents, Manlio and Sutt, who were planning a coup against him, are arrested.

But then there follows a real Seldon Crisis – namely that Korell declares war on the Foundation, using its powerful Imperial flotilla to attack Foundation ships. Oh dear. But instead of counterattacking, to everyone’s surprise, Mallow takes no military action at all – he just ceases trading with Korell.

In his Seldonian wisdom he has realised that almost all Korell’s society – including its battle fleet – runs on technology which only the Foundation understands and can repair. Sure enough, without Foundation input, Korell’s economy collapses, and its attack is called off.

Wisdom and understanding – not main force – win the day.

Comments

The stories – and the way they hang together to create a history of the future – generate a sense of scale and vastness which thrills the adolescent mind.

The cleverness of the way Seldon is revealed – at every major turning point of the future – to have anticipated the future, creates the exciting sense of an omniscient hero, comparable to the pleasure the reader gets from identifying with Sherlock Holmes – except on a galactic scale!

BUT the actual plots of the stories themselves – and especially the style, the prose style, and the phrasing of the dialogue – are often execrable. Sometimes Asimov’s jumping between scenes, and the obscurity of characterisation and dialogue, make it hard to understand what is going on – to grasp which moments or details are important or not important.

I only really understood what happened in any of these stories when I read the Wikipedia summaries. Reading about the Foundation stories is quite a lot clearer and more compelling than actually wading through the texts themselves.

Asimov was only just into his twenties when he began the series, writing fast against the clock to flog the stories to a pulp SF magazine.

The scale and ambition of the series are still impressive, and the idea of a master historian able to use advanced maths and sociology to predict the future, and the way each crisis confirms the often unexpected aspects of his thinking – all these are great ideas.

But Asimov’s youth, the hasty writing, and the way so many scenes are straight out of Dan Dare or Flash Gordon or cannibalise other boys adventure clichés – the ragged prose, the derivativeness of so many actual scenes, and the paper-thinness of all of the characters – make reading the book really hard work.

Hari Seldon depicted by Michael Whelan

Hari Seldon depicted by Michael Whelan

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/04/foundation-isaac-asimov/

The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis (1981)

Science fiction is a pessimistic medium… Most of it is about things going wrong.
(Kingsley Amis in the preface)

Amis

Kingsley Amis was a grumpy old bugger. This judgement is based not only on reading his articles and reviews in the 70s and 80s when he was still alive (he died in 1995), but having recently read and reviewed all twenty of his novels for this blog.

Amis was deliberately middle-brow, pragmatic and adaptable. He wrote a James Bond novel (under the pseudonym Robert Markham), a lot of light poetry, reviews and articles, as well as several, very odd, science fiction novels.

In fact he was a science fiction hound, a real addict, and tells us in the introduction that he leaped at the chance to deliver a series of lectures on the subject at Princeton University in 1959. These lectures were then published as a book purporting to review the history of science fiction as it had led up to the state of the genre in 1960, garishly titled New Maps of Hell.

Twenty years after New Maps of Hell, in 1981, Amis was asked to make a selection of his favourite science fiction short stories and to write an introduction. Hence this book.

Amis’s introduction

With typical glumness, Amis reckons science fiction has had its glory days and is in decline. He judges this decline to have started at more or less the moment he delivered those lectures, back at the start of the 1960s. He describes how, in the 1940s and 1950s, science fiction belonged to ‘an embattled few’ – hard-core fans who read everything they could get their hands on, despite the sniggers of their parents or teachers. (A bit like the ‘hot jazz’ which he and his buddy Philip Larkin liked listening to, while their mothers and girlfriends told them they ought to be listening to Haydn.)

But all this changed in the 1960s. Up till then Amis and other fans had called it SF. During the 60s it became rebranded as ‘sci-fi’, symptomatic of the way it got infected with all the other radical experiments of the decade.

Suddenly there was ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ ‘sci-fi’, as there was free poetry, rock music, women’s lib and hosts of other innovations which Mr Grumpy objects to. The first two university courses on science fiction were opened in 1961, and Amis thinks that as soon as you start teaching literature or film, you kill its originality.

Only twelve years separate the hilariously kitsch Forbidden Planet (1956) from the slick and sophisticated 2001: A Space Odyssey (released in 1968, and which Amis found repellently self-indulgent) but they inhabit different cultural universes.

The New Wave

The young writers with their trendy experimental approaches to science fiction who came in with the 1960s, became known as the New Wave. Fans argue to this day about when New Wave started, but most agree a tipping point was when Michael Moorcock became editor of New Worlds magazine in 1964, for Moorcock, along with J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss, were the prime movers of British New Wave. All three moved away from ‘hard’ science fiction stories about space ships and robots and aliens, and showed more interest in literary effects and psychology, often in a very garish late-60s, tricksy sort of way.

Interplanetary travel destroyed much SF fantasy

Another factor which made the SF of the 1960s different from what went before, was that a lot of science fiction came true. In the 1960s men actually started rocketing into space and in 1969 walked on the moon, thus killing off the vivid flights of fancy which had fuelled the genre up to that point with their dull discovery that space was empty and bathed in fatal radiation, while the moon is just a dusty rock. No fantastic civilisations and weird Selenites after all.

In the story Sister Planet in this collection, Poul Anderson imagines Venus to consist of one huge, planet-wide ocean teeming with intelligent life, where men can stride around requiring only respirators to breathe. But when information started to come back from the Mariner series of probes, the first of which flew by Venus in 1962, and the Venera 7 probe which actually landed on the surface in 1970, Venus turned out to be a waterless rock where the atmospheric pressure on the surface is 92 times that of earth, and the temperature is 462 C.

So the advent of actual probes and rockets and space research in the 1960s did a lot to kill off a lot of the fantasies of the 1940s and 50s.

1960s technology also undermined SF fantasies

Similarly, the 1960s saw the arrival of loads of gadgets and inventions, for example the advent of jet planes and intercontinental travel and, you know what, after the initial glamour wore off it turned out to be a bit boring. Civilisation certainly wasn’t turned upside down as everyone started travelling everywhere, as sci-fi prophets from H.G. Wells onwards had predicted.

It was a massive cultural revolution when everyone got coloured televisions, but these turned out not to be used for announcements by the World State or amazing educational programmes as SF writers had predicted; they were used to sell soap powder and bubble gum.

Satellites were launched and people were amazed by the first live global broadcasts, but none of this led mankind onto some higher level of culture and civilisation, as so many thousands of sci-fi stories had predicted. Now we have digital communication with anyone on the planet, but the biggest content area on the internet is pornography, closely followed by cats who look like Hitler. Turns out that a lot of this revolutionary comms capacity is devoted to mind-numbing trivia.

To sum up: a lot of what had seemed like exciting technical predictions in the 1940s had turned into commonplaces by the 1960s, and turned out to be very disappointing. As Amis pithily puts it, ‘Terra incognita was turning into real estate.’

So you can see why the New Wave wanted to take a new approach and look for the weird and alien here on earth, particularly Ballard. By the mid-70s the New Wave was itself declared to be over, about the same time that post-war Serialism in classical music breathed its last gasp, at the same time that a lot of the political and cultural impedimenta of the post-war years ran out of steam.

As I view it from 2018, this led to a decade of doldrums (the 1970s), and then the appearance, during the 1980s, of bright new commercial styles, Post-modernism in art and literature and architecture, the importation of Magical Realism into fiction, and a new era of sci-fi blockbusters in cinema, the rise of computer-aided animation which has transformed the look and feel of films, and to an explosion of all kinds of genres and cross-fertilisations in writing.

Specific examples

But back to Amis in his 1980 introduction. Amis claims says science fiction suffers from ‘gross commercialism’, and uses the Terra incognita argument to explain why many even of the New Wave writers had dried up or gone into alternative forms – Arthur C. Clarke ceasing to write novels, Aldiss writing histories of the genre, and Ballard turning out never to have really been a sci-fi writer, more a writer about modern psychosis who started out by using sci-fi tropes, before moving on.

So that’s Amis’s position and explains why the stories Amis selected for this collection are all from the 1950s (1948 to 1962, to be exact) – from the decade when sci-fi writers had racked up a tradition of sorts to build on, had achieved a mature treatment of recognised tropes – but before those tropes were burned out from over-use and the 1960s ruined everything with its silly experimentalism.

You can strongly disagree with this view, but at least it’s a clear defined view, put forward with evidence and arguments.

The short stories

He Walked Around the Horses by H. Beam Piper (1948) (American)

It is 1809. A series of letters from officials in Imperial Austria tell the tale of Benjamin Bathurst, who claims to be a British government envoy who, we slowly realise, has somehow got transported from out 1809 to a parallel history in which the Americans lost the war of independence, there was no French Revolution, no Napoleon, no wars raging across Europe, and so Herr Bathurst is regarded as a lunatic.

The Xi Effect by Philip Latham (1950) (Pseudonym used for his sf by American astronomer Robert Shirley Richardson)

Physicists Stoddard and Arnold discover that radiation above a certain frequency is no longer being detected. Radio stations are becoming unavailable. They measure the eclipse of one of Jupiter’s moons as happening absurdly nearby. Suddenly they think of Friedmann and his theory of the Xi Effect, namely that space isn’t continuous but made up of ‘clots’, clots which can be disrupted by bigger-scale events. Stoddard and Arnold and then everyone else learns that the world and the solar system are shrinking. Since everything is staying in proportion relative to everything else you’d have thought that wouldn’t be a problem except that the one thing which can’t shrink is electro-magnetic radiation. In other words, the world is getting too small for light to travel in it. One by one all the colours disappear, and then everyone is left in universal blackness.

The Quest for Saint Aquin by Anthony Boucher (1951) (American)

After a nuclear apocalypse a ‘monk’ is sent by ‘the pope’ to find the body of a supposed saint in the hills outside San Francisco.

It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby (1953) (American)

Genuinely upsetting story in which a child with telepathy and unlimited powers is born and, while still young, either destroys the world or transports his small town into some void wherein the remaining inhabitants must think nothing but positive thoughts – repeating to themselves ‘it is a good world’ for fear that the little monster – Anthony – will detect negative thoughts and turn them into something unspeakable.

The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (1953) (English)

A computer company supplies its latest model to a Tibetan lamasery whose abbot tells the chief exec that they will use it to work through every permutation of names for God. They have a belief that, once all the names of God have been expressed, the need for a planet and humanity will cease and the universe will move on to the next stage.

Months later, the two bored technicians tasked with overseeing the installation and running of the machine are relieved to be making their way to the little Tibetan airport to return Stateside when the computer reaches the end of its run and… the world comes to an end.

Specialist by Robert Sheckley (1953) (American)

Interesting description of a galactic spaceship made up of living parts which all perform specialist functions e.g. Walls, Eye, Tracker, Feeder. When their ‘Pusher’ dies in an accident they trawl nearby planetary systems for a new one and, of course, come to earth, where they kidnap a guy who is out camping under the stars, and induct him into the galactic code of co-operation.

Student Body by F. L. Wallace (1953) (American)

Colonists arrive on a new planet where the Chief Exec is keen to get biologist Dano Marin to manage infestations of mice and rats which attack the crops and stores. Slowly Marin realises they are dealing with a species which can mutate at need, almost instantly, in order to survive and which will always manage to evolve into shapes which can elude them. Worse, he realises it will have stowed away on the earlier reconnaisance ships and have made its way back to earth.

The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith (1954) (pen-name of American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger)

Deep space travel reveals vicious entities which attack man’s ships, which get nicknamed ‘dragons’. The only way to kill them is with light bombs which disintegrate their bodies, but it all happens so fast that only the handful of humans who have telepathic powers can manage to be plugged into the ‘pin sets’ which detect the dragons; and the whole effort went up a notch when it was discovered that some cats can be in telepathic unison with the humans, and have even faster reflexes.

The Tunnel under the World by Frederik Pohl (1955) (American)

Maybe the best story, relatively long and persuasive i.e. you get totally drawn into it.

Guy Burckhardt wakes up on June 15 from a nightmare of an explosion, then goes about his humdrum life in the small town American town of Tylerton, dominated by its state-of-the-art chemical works which is run mostly by the recorded brainwaves of technicians. A new guy in the office shops tries to hustle him a new brand of cigarettes. Later a lorry stops in the street and blares out ads for Feckles Fridges. A flustered man named Swanson accosts him on the street then runs away.

Then he wakes up on June 15 from a nightmare, and goes about his day. New cigarettes, lorry ads, flustered Swanson. That night the fuse blows and, rooting around in the cellar, he discovers that behind the brick walls is metal. And under the floor. The reader begins to wonder if he is in some kind of alien prison. He is down there when overcome by sleep.

Next morning he wakes up remembering everything from the day before except that… his wife thinks it is June 15, the radio says it is June 15, the newspaper says it is June 15. On the street Swanson finds him and, discovering that Burckhardt is confused, takes him through shops and into a cinema, all the time telling him that ‘they’ will be after him. they exit the auditorium, Swanson takes him through corridors, into the manager’s office, then opens a closet door into… a vast steel tunnel stretching in both directions.

Swanson thinks it must be Martians? Is it aliens? Or the Chinese who everyone in the 1950s were so terrified of? Read it yourself.

A Work of Art by James Blish (1956) (American)

Richard Strauss is brought back to life 200 years in the future. He immediately wants to carry on composing and Blish gives a very good analysis of the composer’s music, its characteristics, what he looks for in a libretto and so on and the whole process of composing a new opera.

But at its premiere, the applause is not for the composer, but for Dr Kris, the mind sculptor who has, in fact, used all the traits of the composer to create him and impose him on the mind of a perfectly ordinary unmusical man, Jerom Bosch. At a click of Kris’s fingers, Bosch will revert to his normal workaday self.

The Country of the Kind by Damon Knight (1956) (American)

A rare thing, a first person narrator. In a perfect society of the future (after ‘the Interregnum’) he has been born a brute and a sadist, capable of killing and injuring and defacing while all around him are placid and calm and sensitive. We see, from his point of view, how intolerable and anguished his existence is, forced to live among ‘the dulls’.

Sister Planet by Poul Anderson (1959) (American)

This is a long, involving and bitingly pessimistic story. A small colony of scientists is established on a platform floating on Venus’s endless stormy ocean. They have made contact with ‘cetoids’, dolphin-like creatures and some kind of exchange goes on i.e. the humans leave paintings, sound recordings and so on which the cetoids take off in their mouths, and the cetoids return with various objects, including rare and precious ‘firestones’. These are so precious that ferrying them back to earth and selling them has so far funded the scientific research.

In among their practical duties, the half dozen or so scientists on the outstation chat about how overcrowded and polluted and violent earth is becoming. The main figure among them, Nat Hawthorne is particularly sensitive and close to the cetoids. One day he is astonished when the most friendly of them, who he’s named Oscar, nudges at his feet (on the pontoon which stretches out from the base, where they distribute goodies to the cetoids and receive the jewels in return, level with the ocean and often slopped over by waves) indicating he wants to give him a ride.

Hawthorne puts on breathing apparatus and Oscar takes him deep under the sea to show him a vast coral cathedral which appears to have been shaped, or grown, by the cetoids. there is no doubt that they are ‘intelligent’.

Back in the crew quarters of the colony, he is about to tell everyone about his encounter, when the quiet, intense Dutch scientist Wim Dykstra bursts in to make a major announcement. He has been analysing Venus’s core and has realised that it is on the unstable edge of making a quantum leap upwards in size. If it did that, it would project magma up through the sea creating continents and the presence of rocks would absorb carbon dioxide from the (currently toxic) atmosphere. In other words it could be ‘terraformed’, made fit for human inhabitation – an overflow for what has become a poisoned earth.

it is then that Hawthorne tells the roomful of colonists about his discovery, that the cetoids are undeniably intelligent and creative. At which point there is an earnest discussion about man’s right to colonise new planets, even at the expense of the natives – all of which made me think of contemporary, 2018, discussions about colonialism and racial oppression etc. Reluctantly Dykstra agrees to suppress his work in order to let the cetoids live.

But Hawthorne is gripped by a kind of panic fear. Sooner or later more scientists will come to Venus. They will repeat his experiments. Sooner or later humans will realise they can transform Venus for their own use. Tortured by this knowledge, Hawthorne blows up and sinks the research station, flees in a mini submarine and, when the cetoids come to investigate, slaughters them with a laser machine gun. Then submerges to go and blow up their beautiful coral cathedrals. Before calling the ferry ship which is in orbit down to pick him up. He will claim the cetoids blew up the centre despite his attempts to stop them.

His aim is to demonstrate to earth that Venus is a violent environment which cannot be colonised. And to show the cetoids that humans are murdering barbarians who cannot be trusted.

To save the cetoids – he has to destroy them and their cultural achievements.

The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard (1960) (English)

A classic expression of Ballard’s interest in entropy and decline. Among the empty swimming pools of some desert American town, scientists go about their work in alienated isolation from each other. A plague of narcolepsy has attacked humanity. More and more people are falling asleep never to waken, the central figure, Powers, keeps a diary of the way he, too, is falling asleep earlier and earlier, his days are getting shorter and shorter. In what time he has left he conducts obscure experiments on plants and animals which seem to mutate at an accelerated rate if exposed to near fatal doses of radiation. He has a typically distant, autistic ‘relationship’ with a patient whose brain he operated on and who now is collecting the last works of art, books and so on by famous artists, writers and such. And has discovered that astronomical research centres have come across series of numbers being sent from apparently different locations around the universe, all of which are running down, like countdowns.

The Machine that Won the War by Isaac Asimov (1961) (American)

A short and characteristically tricksy Asimov story. It is the end of the war against the Denebians. Everyone credits victory to the vast supercomputer, the Multivac, which processed all the information and provided pinpoint accurate decisions about the war.

Executive Director of the Solar Federation, Lamar Swift, has gathered the key men in the team who ran Multivac to celebrate, namely Henderson and Jablonksy. But as both hold their champagne glasses, one by one they reveal that the data they received was never good enough, the sources around the solar system and beyond were too scattered, information came in too slowly… and that the head of the team processing it never trusted them, and so falsified many of the figures.

But instead of being shocked, Swift smile and says, he thought as much. He made all the key decisions which won the war by using a much older technology. And he takes out a coin, flips it with his thumb, covers it as it lands in his palms, and asks: ‘Gentlemen – heads or tails?’

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut (1961) (American)

A short glib story set in 2018 when everyone is equal because everyone is handicapped by the Handicapper General. Fast athletic people are weighed down by weights. Tall people forced to stoop. Beautiful people wear face masks. Clever people have earpieces fitted which emit piercing noises every 30 seconds. Thus everyone is reduced to the same level, and is equal. Anyone tampering with any of this equality equipment is arrested and imprisoned.

George and Hazel Bergeron’s son, Harrison, was born unusually tall and handsome. He was immediately locked up. The trigger for this short story is George and Hazel settling down to watch TV (George’s thought processes continually interrupted by the screeches in his ear, to prevent him being too clever) and hearing on the news that their son has escaped from prison.

Then he bursts into the TV studio and throws off his restraints, the handicap harness which weighs him down, the rubber mask which makes him ugly – to reveal that he is a tall god. He declares to the watching audience that he is the Emperor, who must be obeyed.

He had interrupted a live broadcast of a ballet and now he asks who among the ballerinas wants to be his wife. One comes forward, throws off her face mask and feet cripplers to reveal that she is beautiful and elegant. Together they start dancing a beautiful ballet of freedom.

At which point the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, bursts into the studio and machine guns both of them dead. The TV goes black. Loud sounds burst in George’s ear. He goes to get a beer from the fridge. Loud sounds interrupt him on the way back. By the time he’s back on the sofa he has a sense that something sad happened on the TV but neither he nor his wife can remember what.

The Streets of Ashkelon by Harry Harrison (1962) (American)

Trader John Garth is happy living alone on Wesker’s World, dealing with the slow but logical alien inhabitants, the Wesker amphibians, who have learned to speak English.

One day a fellow trader stops by (his spaceship causing hundreds of square metres of devastation) to drop off a priest. Garth tries to prevent him landing, then is very rude to him. To his horror, the slow logical Wesker creatures are awestruck by the priest and the stories he has to tell about God their father and how they are saved. Garth is a typical trader, rough and ready, a hard drinker, but he has been honest with the Wesker creatures and told them as much about the universe and earth as he thought wise.

One day Garth is called along to a meeting the Weskers are having with the priest. In their slow logical way they have come to the conclusion that the priest needs to prove his religion. The Bible – which he has given them to study – brims over with examples of miracles which God was happy to perform to prove his existence. Surely he will perform at least one miracle to convert an entire new planet and save an entire species.

Suddenly Garth sees where this is heading and leaps up to try and bundle the priest out of the meeting hall but he is himself overwhelmed by the Wesker creatures and tied up, from which powerless state he has to watch the creatures overcome the priest and very methodically nail him up to a cross, just like the pictures in the Bible he had given them, the Weskers expecting him to be resurrected.

But of course he isn’t. Days later, still tied up and in a pitch black lumber room, Garth finds the most sympathetic of the Weskers undoing his ropes and telling him to flee in his space ship. Having failed with the priest the Weskers have decided to experiment with him next.

The Wesker asks: ‘He will rise again won’t he?’ ‘No,’ replies Wesker. ‘Then we will not be saved and not be made pure?’ asks the Wesker. ‘You were pure’, Garth sadly replies. ‘You were pure, but now…’ ‘We are murderers,’ replies the Wesker.

Old Hundredth by Brian Aldiss (1963) (English)

This is the most poetic of the stories, Aldiss deliberately using onomatopeia and rhyme in his prose, as well as rich verbal pictures, to convey a dreamlike scenario.

In the far distant future the Moon has left the earth, and the earth and Venus orbit each other. Humans have long ago left the planet which is now populated by a mix of of animals and ”Impures’, intelligent creatures created by human experimenters on Venus.

Dandi Lashadusa is a giant sloth who traipses round the desert world seeking out musicolumns, insubstantial pillars into which the last people converted themselves, and which become audible music when life forms come close enough to them.

She is guided and advised by a mentor who she is telepathically in touch with, who is slowly revealed to be a dolphin living in a coral cell.

Almost all the stories – 14 out of 17 – are by Americans, the other three by Brits i.e. all very anglophone. Wasn’t there any Russian, French, German etc sci-fi during the period? Even in translation? Maybe that’s something which came in to rejuvenate the genre after Amis’s day, particularly stories from Russia and the Eastern bloc.

The pros and cons of science fiction

Is Amis right when he says: ‘Science fiction is a pessimistic medium… Most of it is about things going wrong’? Well, on the evidence here, Yes. The Xi Effect, Sister Planet, The Streets of Ashkelon, Student Body and, especially It’s a Good Life, which I found very disturbing – they are extremely negative and pessimistic. But then gloomy Amis chose them. Is the genre as a whole pessimistic? Well… I’d make a case that most of literature is pessimistic. I’m looking at F. Scott Fitzgerald books next to Flaubert’s on my shelves as I write this. Not many happy endings there.

Maybe you could argue that there is a kind of ‘global conceit’ about science fiction. In ‘ordinary’ novels one or two people may die; in a science fiction story it is likely to be a whole world, as the world comes to an end in the Clarke story, or man corrupts an entire species as in the Harry Harrison.

Science fiction may be more apocalyptically pessimistic than other types of fiction. This is one of its appeals to the adolescent mind – the sheer sense of scale and the world-ending nihilism. But at the same time it’s one of the reasons SF used to be looked down on by ‘serious’ critics and writers, as a flight from the trickier complexities of real human relations in the here and now, the kind of thing supposedly tackled by ‘proper’ fiction.

But I think Amis is wrong. I think this slant completely overlooks the positive, uplifting and inspiring aspect of science fiction, the teenage sense of exuberance and escape and release conveyed by some of the stories. The sense of the genuinely fantastical and imaginative, that life is stranger and richer and weirder than non-sci-fi readers can ever realise. Surely that was and still is a key element for fans, some of these stories are vividly, viscerally exciting!

A feeling conveniently expressed in one of the stories here:

As a boy he had loved to read tales of time travel and flights to other planets, and the feeling that something transcendent was lurking around the corner had never entirely left him. (The Xi Effect, p.65)

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth and they rebel
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, an engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the vastest vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with vanished Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – Describes, in the style of a government report, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1985 The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke – a collection of ten short stories, some from as far back as the 1950s
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap; but Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop with a heart of gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson –

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by Simon on December 3, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 3, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/golden-age-of-science-fiction-kingsley-amis/

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