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Although it has withdrawn from the Periphery of the Galaxy, the Empire still has keen advocates and military leaders true to its traditions, One such is charismatic and successful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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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
Books & Boots 