All posts tagged Olaf Stapledon

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham were my favourite sci-fi authors as a boy, as an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old at the start of the 1970s. Clarke was still happily writing, I remember excitedly swapping Rendezvous with Rama with friends soon after it came out.

Childhood’s End is his fifth novel and one of the best books I had ever read. The memory of the book’s artful pacing, and the cumulative revelations leading up to the nihilistic final scenes, made an impact on my young imagination which has lasted all my life.

Premise

The idea behind the plot can be relatively simply stated.

There are lots of inhabited planets in the universe. Most of the inhabitants proceed through a similar cycle, from agriculture to industrialisation and scientific literacy, then the start of space travel and so on. It’s at this point that they are ready to move on to ‘the next stage’. A race called the Overlords is dispatched to guide them. Under the tutelage of the Overlords – who abolish war and poverty – the pupil race becomes wise and peaceful, experiencing a Golden Age.

But this is all deceiving. The Overlords have not been sent to supervise this golden age and are not there for the good of the pupil race at all. Another power, a power deeper and older and more powerful than them, the ‘Overmind’, has detected that the supervised species is about to move on to the next stage of evolution, to abandon physical bodies and become pure minds, initially as individuals, then uniting together to form a group mind, and then abandoning the host planet altogether to take to the stars and join the Overmind.

This is the basic plot of Childhood’s End. It is an epic story about the near future transformation of the human race into a completely new species and the end of the world as we know it, so big, so awe-inspiring, it reminds you of the galactic prophecies of H.G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon.

What makes it so powerful is that Clarke turns this story into a thriller. We don’t see this narrative told as a whole through the eyes of some future historian. Instead we discover it piecemeal through the eyes of a succession of pretty normal human characters, each of whom experiences a particular phase of the development, each of whom is granted a waystation revelation, learns a part of the truth, each of which is as much of a shock and surprise to them as it is to the reader, as the narrative as a whole slowly peels off skins like an onion, giving the reader a succession of imaginative jolts and marvels, a sense of mounting horror and suspense, right up until the shocking end-of-the-world scenes of the last few pages.

Key episodes

1 Earth and the Overlords

Thus the book opens by describing the work of two German rocket scientists, one captured by the Soviets, one by the Americans at the end of the Second World War. They are both nearing completion of plans for man-carrying rockets for their respective Cold War masters, when one day they look up and see the vast silver ships of the Overlords in the sky above them. At a stroke the world’s population realises that ‘we are not alone’. At a stroke, the rocket scientists realise their work is futile.

Five years later a lengthy section lets us get to know Rikki Stormgren, the Finnish Secretary General of the United Nations. We learn that within days of their arrival the Overlords (an earth nickname, not the name they give themselves) gave one speech across the whole world’s radio sets explaining that they are here to help not harm, to prevent the nuclear wars which might lead to humanity’s extinction – and then had settled down into a routine of inviting Stormgren to a weekly conference to discuss the management of earth.

To attend, Stormgren enters a metal pod via a set of retractable steps, then the pod zooms up into the stratosphere, entering a brief opening in the spaceship which immediately closes. When the pod door opens he finds himself in a comfortable room with a grille and a big screen which is blank and opaque. He hears the voice of the being named Karellan, who speaks perfect English, is always calm and polite, knows all about earth politics, and always gives wise advice about international problems. Despite questioning from Stormgren, Karellan gives little or nothing away about the Overlords.

The Overlords only interfere in earth affairs twice: in South Africa apartheid has collapsed and been replaced with persecution of the white minority which the Overlords intervene to put an end to. And – in a scene I have remembered my whole life – in Spain, at a bullfight, when the first toreador sticks a spear into the bull, the entire audience of 10,000 experiences what the bull feels and shrieks in agony (p.37). The Overlords abolish cruelty to animals.

Unsurprisingly, a movement has grown up resenting the Overlords’ intrusion in human affairs, the ‘Freedom League’ led by a man named Alexander Wainwright. One night Stormgren is kidnapped and – in scenes more reminiscent of a thriller – smuggled out of his house, swapped from a car to a lorry in a deep tunnel (to escape the Overlords’ detection devices), driven south then flown to South America where he wakes up in the hands of some goons from the Freedom League. They are fairly civilised, just want to know more about Stormgren’s weekly meetings with Karellan. As you might expect he is soon rescued by the all-powerful Overlords. In a compelling scene, the interrogators suddenly freeze in mid-sentence and Stormgren hears a polite voice emanating from a small metal sphere hovering at head height, which guides him out of the old mine works where he’s being held hostage, into one of the Overlords’ little flying machines, and so back to freedom (p.38).

Fifteen pages are then devoted to another episode featuring Stormgren as he discusses with his number two, Pieter van Ryberg, and the senior scientist at the UN, a Frenchman named Duval, a plan to see beyond the opaque screen in the ‘meeting room’. It takes Duval a few weeks to work up a super-powerful torch which Stormgren can hide in the base of the briefcase he always takes with him to the meetings. When the time seems right he can swing it up to face the screen and see if the torch’s beam illuminates what they all guess must be the room on the other side – and the Overlord who occupies it.

At this next meeting, Stormgren repeats the complaints of much of the population that they want to know what their rulers and masters look like. Karellan promises to make a global announcement that the Overlords will reveal themselves in fifty years time. Only then, he argues, will humanity have become completely acculturated and used to their presence, and their appearance won’t have the same impact.

As the conversation comes to an end Stormgren leaps up and swings the flashlight towards the opaque screen. He is just in time to see a room like the one he’s sitting in and a huge figure exiting an enormous door. What he sees shocks and stuns him for the rest of his life. We, the readers, have to wait till the next section to find out why.

2 The Golden Age (pp.56-119)

The fifty years are up. An Overlord flyer touches down on earth. The world’s press is gathered expectantly for the first Overlord to show himself. A doorway opens and gangway descends. Two little earth children from the crowd are invited up it. And then an enormous figures steps down the gangway, holding the sweet children in his arms. It is the figure of an enormous devil, deep red in colour, complete with horns and cloven hooves, leathery wings and long pointed tail! The social impact is immense. Now we learn what Stormgren had glimpsed in the spaceship fifty years earlier. And the meaning of his speculation that the two races must have met, sometime back in the mists of time, and something gone very badly wrong between them to leave such a diabolical folk memory.

But fifty years was the right period. Most people alive now accept the Overlords’ rule completely. Also, organised religion has faded away under the Rule of reason instituted by the Overlords and so there isn’t a great population of fundamentalists to stir up trouble (pp.56-58).

Clarke then embarks on a long description of the Golden Age of peace and plenty which the human race experiences. Ignorance, disease, poverty and fear cease to exist. Everyone speaks English. New agriculture supplies all food needs. Robots man the factories which supply a world of new consumer goods. The end of the Cold War, and all war, frees up resources and skills to be devoted to entirely peaceful ends. New technology creates flying machines which can get to anywhere on earth in under a day. Most people have at least two houses, often in exotic locations such as the top of Mount Kilimanjaro or deep in the Pacific depths.

With so much time on their hands humanity, as so often in these kinds of utopian visions, turn out to be immensely bookish, takes to higher education till age 25, becomes philosophers and poets and artists. Nobody has to do any work they don’t want to.

Like a good liberal Clarke imagines that all religious faiths will wither away. The Overlords give historical institutes a kind of historical TV machine which can show scenes from the past. Human historians immediately go back to check out the real people behind the legends of Moses, Mohammed, Jesus and so on. Organised religion does not survive the immense disillusionment of what they find (p.63). So religion disappears and the human race turns into millions of bookish, thoughtful, jolly nice chaps rather like, well, Arthur C. Clarke.

All this is exemplified in the social set around Rupert Boyce and his mixed-race wife, Maia, who give a stylish party at Rupert’s mountain-top home. Guests include a famous film producer, a minor poet, a mathematician, two famous actors, an atomic power engineer, a game warden, the editor of a weekly news magazine, a statistician from the World Bank, a violin virtuoso, a professor of archaeology and an astrophysicist. The world has turned into Hampstead.

Among the guests are George Greggson and Jean Morrel who are going to turn out to be tremendously important to the story, and the future of the human race.

They are astonished to discover that one of the guests is an Overlord, Rashaverak, who is quietly reading through Rupert’s world-famous and priceless collection of antique and ancient books about astrology, parapsychology, clairvoyance and so on.

Half way through the party, a bit drunk, George finds himself on the roof with another guest, a black man named Jan Rodricks, who is half-brother to the host’s wife, Maia. Jan is an astrophysicist, quiet and self-contained so George soon returns to the noisy party below,but Jan also will be a key player in the last stages of the novel.

George is talked by Rupert into attending a drunken session of Ouija the host has organised. It uses an up-to-date design by consisting of a round table of ballbearings on which is placed a circular tray. All the members – Rupert, Maia, George, Jean and, latterly, Jan – place hands on the tray while Rupert asks questions. Then the tray moves around the table towards the words Yes or No printed on the edge, along with all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1 to 10.

They seem to get half sensible answers to some of Rupert’s questions but drunk George thinks it’s all nonsense until Jan, out of nowhere, asks the identity of the Overlords’ home star. To his surprise the board immediately spells out the number NGS 549672 and most people are too puzzled by this to notice George’s partner, Jean, faint.

Jan recognizes this as a star-catalog number and travels to the Royal Astronomical Society in London where he looks it up and confirms it is a star which really exists and has been logged. Earlier we had observed him watching from Rupert’s roof one of the Overlords’ supply ships taking off from the moon and leaving a long tracer line across the sky: along with their appearance the Overlords no longer conceal that a) there is not in fact a fleet of ships but only one, the one hovering over New York, all the others were holograms and b) that they receive supplies from their home planet via a transhipping base on Pluto.

We cut to a discussion between Rashaverak – who witnessed the Ouija board scene – and Karellan. The latter says ‘it has begun’ creating a tremendous sense of suspense and anticipation in the reader, and they both indicate that Jean must, somehow, have been the channel through which this inaccessible knowledge had reached the Ouija board.

Jan then goes to visit Professor Sullivan in his research lab miles and miles underwater in the South Pacific Basin. For some time the Overlords have been collecting examples of earth’s flora and fauna. Jan has discovered that Professor Sullivan has been asked to supply examples of the world’s two largest creatures, the giant squid and the blue whale, for them. In fact they are going to build and design them from scratch with metal skeletons, cover them with rubber and plastic and paint them. Real samples would be difficult to get hold of and would stink and rot.

Jan proposes a scheme: that they build a hidey-hole into the metal whale and Jan stows away and flies to the Overlords’ home planet. Sullivan enthusiastically agrees to help. This storyline takes up twenty pages and brings us to the end of part two. Jan successfully stows away, the artificial whale is lifted up to the Overlord spaceship and it departs for its home planet.

Before departing Jan thoughtfully writes his sister Maia a letter laying out some of the practical issues: since the Overlord ships travel at near light speed, and Jan has identified that star NGS 549672 is 40 light years from earth, he will be gone for 40 years there and, assuming they send him right back, 40 years coming back. However, due to the weirdness of relativity, because he’s flying at near light speed, Jan himself will only age a few months. (Clarke gives an additional explanation that the line of light which Jan saw behind the departing spaceship wasn’t caused by anything so banal as flames from rockets, but due to the bending of light or maybe of the fabric of space-time itself, by the near light speed passage of the ship: he is not seeing a line of fire but a line of the bending of space into which the light of multiple stars is strained in order to create the impression of a line of light.) Jan is taking a supply of food, oxygen and will inject a narcoleptic to create a state of drug-induced hibernation for the duration of the flight.

This second section ends with Karellan holding a press conference at which he announces to the world’s press that the Overlords have discovered the presence of a stowaway, Jan, on one of their ships: he will be sent right back. But the incident has raised the whole issue of humans and space travel. The Overlords have allowed humans to develop the technology to fly to the moon and set up bases there. But now Karellan demonstrates why humans will never go to the stars. He conjures up a three dimensional hologram of the whole galaxy and then the universe. He points out that when the Overlords arrived mankind was on the bring of sparking a nuclear war. They saved them from that fate but if they can’t even manage the affairs of one little planet how, he rhetorically asks, would they cope with this: and the gorgeous fabric of millions upon millions of stars in the Milky Way strikes the attending press and scientists dumb.

3 The Last Generation (pp.120-189)

This final third of the novel is extraordinarily powerful and has two main threads. In the first we follow Jan Rodericks as he arrives at the Overlords’s home planet and what he finds and sees there. In the second, we follow Jean and George Greggson, who we met at Rupert’s party and now the significance of that seance session finally becomes clear.

We had already met the kind of people Clarke thinks will flourish in the future – film directors, poets, philosophers and the like. Now a group of these bien-pensant liberals establishes an artists’ colony on an island in the Pacific, which they immodestly name New Athens.

Among them are George and Jean Greggson, who by now have a seven year old son, Jeffrey, and a baby daughter Jennifer Anne. One day Jeffrey is playing on the beach when he feels a distant rumble and then the tide goes out out out and continues going out. Having seen footage and movies of this phenomenon I know this indicates a tsunami is coming but Jeffrey, inevitably, wanders down the beach following the tide until… a voice speaks in his ear telling him to Run run, and he turns and sets off up the beach and then up apath into the surrounding cliff as fast as his feet can carry him. It is a sweet bit of thriller detail when he finds a big rock blocking his way, the voice tells him to close his eyes, there’s a loud fizzing sound and when he opens his eyes the rock has gone so he can continue running.

All this is made that much more dramatic and involving by being told by Jeffrey in his own boyish words to his parents, who initially think he is making it up… until George himself visits the path and finds a rock which has clearly been blasted to nothingness. Only the Overlords could have done this. But why?

Then odd things start happening with Jennifer the baby. Her mother has a fit when she hears the rattle rattling but goes into the baby’s room to find it being shaken a metre above the baby’s head, unheld by any human hand. Jennifer begins to exercise other telekinetic powers. Soon food finds its way from the fridge to her cot by itself. She feeds and looks after herself, while her mother retreats into shock and George desperately tries to figure out what’s going on.

Eventually Kerallan tells them, explaining the basic premise of the narrative which I described above: the Overlords serve the Overmind, a vast cosmic intelligence, born of amalgamated ancient civilizations and freed from the limitations of material existence. The Overlords themselves are unable to join the Overmind, but serve it as a bridge species, fostering other races’ eventual union with it.

Now, Karellen explains, the time of humanity as a race of single individuals each with a concrete identity is coming to an end. The Overlords have been present at four such metamorphoses and know that it always starts with one member of the species ‘breaking through’. Then like the first crystal in a solution that one example catalyses all the others. Which explains why George and Jean become aware that other people’s children on New Athens are developing the same skills. Jeffrey had gone a long way down the road to individuality, but now he is called back into the group mind, also becoming indifferent to his parents’ existence.

All the children on new Athens become infected. Their minds reach into each other and merge into a single vast group consciousness. If the Pacific were to be dried up, Karellan explains, the islands speckling it would lose their identity as islands and become part of one new continent. Their children are now ceasing to be the individuals which their parents knew and are becoming something else, completely alien to the ‘old type of human’.

Adult society takes the decision to move all the transforming children to one continent, for their own safety and because their parents can’t bear their proximity, and cannot do anything for them now. Cameras are placed around their settlements to observe their strange behaviour. Sometimes they wander with their eyes closed. Sometimes they join hands and dance. They become filthy and ragged, their bodies mattering less and less.

The members of New Athens – that ideal colony of Hampstead intellectuals – are plunged into such grief and despair they blow themselves up with an atomic bomb planted at the base of the island. All over the planet the adult humans have to come to grips with the realisation that – their culture, their race, their species is ceasing to exist. Many choose not to live on.

Meanwhile, 40 light years away, Jan Rodricks emerges from hibernation on the Overlord supply ship and arrives on their planet. Clarke is really good at depicting a place which has physical reality but almost every aspect of which is genuinely alien and incomprehensible to him, not least the vast volcano-shaped mountain in the far distance which emits vast rings of smoke which then fly over the Overlord city. None of the Overlords were expecting him so no-one speaks English, until one slowly learns the language enough to give him a broken insight into their ways and purposes.

But then he is politely told that he will be placed on the next freight ship heading to earth and off he goes. Months later, as the Overlord shuttle enters earth orbit, Jan realises there’s something wrong. It takes him a moment and then he realises that there are no lights on the dark side of the earth, facing away from the sun. Almost as if those hundreds of brightly illuminated cities have… gone.

And of course this is what he discovers when the Overlord pod deposits him back on the surface. Karellan meets him and explains everything that has happened. The entire adult human race has either died out or killed itself. Jan is now the last man alive.

Only hundreds of millions of children – no longer fitting Jan’s definition of ‘human’ – remain on the quarantined continent, having become a single intelligence readying themselves to join the Overmind.

Jan finds that some Overlords have remained on Earth to study the children from a safe distance. When the evolved children mentally alter the Moon’s rotation and make other planetary manipulations, it becomes too dangerous to remain. The departing Overlords offer to take Rodricks with them, but he chooses to stay to witness Earth’s end and transmit a report of what he sees.

Before they depart, Rodricks asks Rashaverak what encounter the Overlords had with humanity in the past, according to an assumption that the fear that humans had of their ‘demonic’ form was due to a traumatic encounter with them in the distant past. But, in a really imaginative touch, Rashaverak explains that the primal fear experienced by humans was not due to a racial memory, but a racial premonition of the Overlords’ role in their metamorphosis. Time, as the Overlords have repeatedly told their human proteges, is much stranger than we can imagine. It was fear and anger and hatred of this future which endowed the figure of the devil with such terror.

Right up to the end the Overlords want to study what happens. They candidly explain to Jan that they are sad at their barrenness. Why do other species transform into mind and join the Overmind? Why can’t they? Hence their intense interest at studying, for example, all the books in Rupert Boyce’s library, hence their remaining on to study the children long after the rest of the human race has gone extinct.

Now Jan remains behind to witness the end of planet earth and relay his impressions and thoughts via radio to the Overlords whose spaceship retires to a safe distance, namely ‘six thousand million kilometres beyond the orbit of Pluto’ (p.189).

Jan describes earthquakes and spots of fire in the sky, and then how different fires come together to form a vast burning column which ascends from the planet into space. As the column disappears he experiences a terrible sense of emptiness when the children have gone. The atmosphere is leaving the planet taking with it everything which isn’t secured. Then everything around him and the earth itself become transparent and he can see a great white light emanating from the core of the planet upwards towards him.

The Earth evaporates in a flash of light. The children have used every atom of it as fuel to drive their final metamorphosis and journey to join the Overmind. Karellen looks back at the receding Solar System, reflects on the fate of the Overlords to obey, and the incomprehensible fate of the human race.

Critique

The everyday

It is a fantastic book, convincing and thrilling. Some critics think the human settings of each episode – the minutiae of Rikki Stormgren’s living arrangements and his kidnapping, or the immense labour spent describing the ins and outs of George and Jean Greggson’s marriage detract from the story, but I agree with Clarke’s approach and it’s what I like about Wyndham’s novels, as well. That these awe-inspiring changes happen to perfectly ordinary – or in fictional terms, ordinary – people. For me the fantasy is far more effective for being rooted in the everyday.

Anglocentric

When I read the long central section, the Golden Age, I thought, Wow! This is what the future’s going to be like! Clarke predicts that:

Everyone will speak English
Technology will do all the dirty jobs, giving everyone masses of leisure time
Everyone will have advanced university educations, often to age 25
organised religion will have withered away
quick cheap travel will be available for all

You can see how these assumptions grow out of faith that the post-war American economic boom would prove endless, and spread around the world, providing a never-ending stream of gee whizz technology.

When Clark wrote the Yanks were perfecting and marketing a dazzling array of household white goods – fridges, freezers, fridge freezers, ice machines, toaster, barbecues, hoovers, washing machines, tumble dryers. Futurologists, politicians and advertising companies thought it would never stop.

In economic, technical, scientific and cultural terms America emerged as the leader of the world. Hence the Overlords’ space ship hovers – as so many alien spaceships before and since have done – over New York, the only city which really counts in these kinds of stories.

But the 65 years since the book was published have proved otherwise. There are other countries in the world besides America. Not everyone wants to be American or to speak English. A whole load of angry Muslims can testify to that, not to mention Indians, Indonesians, the whole of South America, and so on.

The poor have not been eradicated. There is not enough food for everyone. There is not so little work to be done that everyone devotes their lives to leisure, poetry and philosophy. It’s striking how sci fi prophets from Wells to Clarke have all made exactly the same set of mistaken predictions based on:

complete ignorance of economics
complete ignorance of human nature

Economics Capitalism works through companies achieving competitive advantage. No company is going to introduce a new labour-saving technology which gives them a competitive advantage – and then let the whole workforce have half the week off. More likely they’ll introduce the technology and make everyone work harder, attending training courses and keeping up with the machines’ new higher levels of demand.

All through my teens in the 1970s Tomorrow’s World and every other magazine and new programme, all the articles by Asimov and Clarke and blizzards of other futurologists told us that technology was just about to usher in a new world of leisure. The great struggle of life by the early 21st century would be deciding how to spend all this leisure time, which course to take at the free universities, whether to become a poet or a painter.

Human nature Educated white men, bookish writers like Asimov and Clarke, imagined that in the future everyone would become educated and bookish like, well like them. That the future would be full of swots who, freed from the need to do work, would dabble in philosophy or art.

Has it turned out that way? Or was that just a laughably self-centred and blinkered view of human nature.

From Dickens through Wells and Huxley and then the great waves of 1950s sci fi gurus, right through to the present day, liberals all pin their hopes on education to bring about social reform. For me, this is a doomed approach. Maybe because I grew up among a lot of working class people who didn’t just not want an education, and were itching to leave school at 16 so they could get a job, money, a car and a girlfriend – but who also actively despised, bullied, threw stones and spat at anyone they caught reading.

Most people are not bookish. Plenty of people never read a book from one Christmas to the next. Those who do read, tend to read very intensively and make the cardinal error of thinking that everyone else is like them. Like all liberals, Clarke assumes that people want to be educated, want to be jolly bookish chaps like himself.

But they don’t, they really don’t.

Religion A massive tell-tale symptom of this secular liberalism is Clarke’s confidence that all religions will fade away, wither and die, disappear.

The numbers of people who admit to religious belief in the post-industrial west may well continue to decline, but in the rest of the world? In the Muslim world? In Latin America? In south-east Asia? In Africa? In nationalist India? All around the world passionate and sometimes violent religious belief continues to flourish.

It seems to me that sci-fi fantasies like this are messages from a specific place and time and culture which made the great mistake of assuming its very narrow and specific values would spread out to conquer all humanity.

Asimov, Clarke, Blish, they write stories in which techy white male Americans end up running everything, everyone speaks English, everyone uses American tech, everyone adopts American values, everyone is behind America’s efforts to colonise space.

As that period of American triumphalism (roughly 1950 to 1975) recedes, these works become more dated, period pieces, insights into a worldview which is becoming as remote as the medieval Europe which thought that the great Day of Judgement was just around the corner.

Maybe you could almost make the generalisation that science fiction, as a genre, expects just such a great change is just around the corner, comparable to all those feverish end-of-the-world predictions which seized men’s minds from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.

In science fictions from Wells to Wyndham a great event is just about to take place which will change everything.

Maybe, not so deep down, science fiction as a genre feeds on that profound human wish that there should be an apocalyptic change or ending or transformation, now, within our lifetimes, something, anything, to relieve the boredom, oppression, grinding, numbing grind of the daily struggle for existence.

It’s true there have been real changes and great turning points over the past century – the beginning and end of the two world wars, the atom bombs on Japan, the Soviet detonation of a hydrogen bomb, Sputnik, men on the moon, the collapse of the communist bloc in 1990 – these have been big cultural, social, scientific and political changes.

But deep down they didn’t change anything. People everywhere have still had to scrape a living, worried about their children, got ill and died in the same old way. Only above a certain level of education and literacy, and from a particularly Western perspective, do better-educated professional people care much about these kind of historic events.

For most people most of the time there are no such transformations. Life carries on being as much of a struggle as it ever was.

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,

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 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 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
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
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling narrative involving 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 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
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

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 New York

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

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.

Asimov’s introduction to the Foundation stories

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

written as short stories
for a popular sci fi magazine
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:

The Psychohistorians – the introductory story to the series written at Gnome’s request (1951)
The Encyclopedists – originally published in the May, 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction under the title of Foundation
The Mayors – originally published in the June 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as Bridle and Saddle
The Traders – originally published in the October 1944 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction as The Wedge
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:

Search by the Mule was originally published in the January 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the title Now You See It…
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

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.

Chronological reading order for the Robot and Foundation stories

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

Other science fiction reviews

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

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (1930)

I invite you to travel in imagination through the aeons that lie between your age and mine. I ask you to watch such a history of change, grief, hope, and unforeseen catastrophe, as has nowhere else occurred, within the girdle of the Milky Way.

Last and First Men is a towering science fiction classic, a masterwork which influenced generations of later sci-fi writers.

No book before or since has ever had such an impact on my imagination. – Arthur C. Clarke

Stapledon’s literary imagination was almost boundless. – Jorge Luis Borges

There has been no writer remotely like Stapledon and there is no one like him now. – Doris Lessing

Stapledon was the future maker. – Stephen Baxter

The idea is that the current author (Stapledon)’s mind has been taken over by an inhabitant of the far, far, far distant future, who proceeds to tell us the epic ‘history’ of humanity from the present day to his present – two billion years hence!

The impact of the book doesn’t come from the psychological realism, from plot or character, because there is no plot as such, there are few if any named individuals, and these only make fleeting appearances.

No, the impact derives from the absolute vastness of the scale. The story doesn’t just move forward to one moment in the future and set a story in that time – as done by Wells or Zamyatin or Huxley or Orwell.

Instead it presents a continuous and comprehensive survey of all future history stretching from the present until 2 billion years in the future, tracking not only the rise and fall of different civilisations, but the rise and fall of different species of man himself, with all our evolutions and mutations so that, by the end of the book, humanity has evolved through eighteen species or iterations.

We’re not just talking about thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years – but aeons which cover millions of year.

During the first tenth of the first million years after the fall of the World State, during a hundred thousand years, man remained in complete eclipse…

In its final agony the planet was so seriously damaged that mind lay henceforth in deep slumber for ten more millions of years…

For millions of years the planet would be uninhabitable save for a fringe of Siberian coast. The human race was doomed for ages to a very restricted and uncongenial environment…

Not till after millions of years did the bulk of the planet become once more a possible home for life…

The human beings in Asia remained a mere handful throughout the ten million years of the Second Dark Age…

It was some ten million years after the Patagonian disaster that the first elements of a few human species appeared, in an epidemic of biological variations…

And so on, and so on. It’s as if you and I, used to running a household budget and fretting about £5 here and £2.50 there, were suddenly introduced into a circle of millionaires who casually talk about throwing a few hundred grand on a new car, buying a Mayfair apartment for two mill, maybe investing a couple of mill in a start-up company. The effect is dizzying, mind-blowing.

The creation of a World State, largely under American domination, in the first thirty pages or so of the story – the kind of thing which H.G. Wells devoted entire books to – is just a warming-up exercise, which covers a mere four thousand years. Pah! Chicken feed!

The end of the First Men

After four thousand happy years the civilisation of the First Men comes to an end when the coal which fuels it runs out. As shortages and power cuts come in, the culture is kept going by rumours of an alternative power source, but when these are finally revealed as fake, civilisation collapses.

Dismay and rage spread over the planet. Everywhere the people rose against the scientists, amid against the governing authority which they controlled. Massacres and measures of retaliation soon developed into civil wars. China and India declared themselves free national states, but could not achieve internal unity. In America, ever a stronghold of science and religion, the Government maintained its authority for a while; but as its seat became less secure, its methods became more ruthless. Finally it made the mistake of using not merely poison gas, but microbes; and such was the decayed state of medical science that no one could invent a means of restraining their ravages. The whole American continent succumbed to a plague of pulmonary and nervous diseases. The ancient ‘American Madness’, which long ago had been used against China, now devastated America. The great stations of waterpower and windpower were wrecked by lunatic mobs who sought vengeance upon anything associated with authority. Whole populations vanished in an orgy of cannibalism.

This is a good example of the incredibly sweeping, broad brush, generalised way in which this whole future history is told. The narrative features few if any individuals. Instead, Stapledon is concerned only with the highest-level account of the rise and fall of races and societies and cultures. Whole nations are crushed, entire continents sink under the seas, whole species are exterminated.

All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth.

The Dark Age

After America, China, Africa are laid waste, humans descend into a new dark age which lasts for thousands of years. As post-apocalyptic savages always do in this kind of story, the survivors live in superstitious fear of the relics of the Old Ones – in this instance, amid the wrecks of their huge three-mile high skyscrapers – and make up feverish myths and legends about their superhuman powers.

The rise of Patagonia

Slowly an organised civilisation arises in Patagonia, partly because of land mass changes which link it to Antarctica. But it is deprived of coal or oil or any of the easily smeltable metals like iron or copper, which the World State had used up.

Stapledon is always more interested in ‘religion’ of these future cultures than in their economics or technology, so he gives Patagonia a religion of ‘the Divine Boy’ who never grows up, an exception to the rule that the new Patagonians age quickly, are middle-aged by 20. Stapleton even gives us a couple of scenes from the life of the actual Divine Boy, who desecrates the temple of their existing god, makes a grand speech, then is led away by the howling mob and executed.

Apocalypse

Over hundreds of years Patagonians build themselves up to a renaissance-level of technology and science. But then they discover lost writings in a Chinese tomb which make it clear that all this and much more had been achieved by the World State civilisation long ago. Patagonian society splits in two, some not believing the revelations, some crushed and depressed by them.

The Patagonians achieve industrialisation. A proletariat is created. A hereditary managerial class arises. After four hundred years of this, atomic energy is discovered. But instead of using it to help the poor, it is used to drill deeper into the earth’s core to find the rare metals. This results in increased work and suffering for the proles who, as a result, rise up in protest. Some get hold of one of the new power machines, tamper with it, and it explodes.

It sets off a chain reaction which flashes along veins of the (unnamed) metallic element which is the basis of the technology, and so a vast chain of explosions travels up the Andes, up the Rockies, across the Bering Strait, down to the Himalayas, through the Caucasus to the Alps, turning entire continents into seas of volcanic magma, turning the sky thick with steam and ash, so that:

Of the two hundred million members of the human race, all were burnt or roasted or suffocated within three months – all but thirty-five, who happened to be in the neighbourhood of the North Pole.

Twenty-eight men and seven women – of whom six men and two women are lost when they sail south to discover Britain blasted and France an inferno of volcanoes spewing out molten lava. The entire planet has become uninhabitable. Almost all existing flora and fauna have been exterminated. All subsequent human species are descendants of this minuscule band of survivors.

The new Dark Age

lasts ten million years, during which the continents change and re-arrange – Europe sinks under the Atlantic, Africa is joined to South America, Australia and Southeast Asia become one – new plants and trees, new mammals and insects emerge. Early in the existence of the first colony it had divided, half remaining on the north coast of Siberia, hemmed in by volcanoes, but developing a strong, healthy culture. The other half set off to see if they could find human survivors elsewhere, never did, and were washed ashore in sultry Labrador, where they degenerated into a more beast-like species.

The Second Men

But all this is just the adventure of the First Men – there are to be seventeen further iterations of the human race – the Second Man who are giants who live to be 300, who develop genetic engineering and are about to begin perfecting the species when…. The Martians invade, the Martians turning out to be fogs of bacteria which can coalesce into ‘clouds’ which have intelligence and purpose.

For fifty thousand years (the time periods keep escalating, producing an increasingly dizzying, vertiginous sense in the reader) the Martians return to earth again and again, causing mayhem and each time are defeated by the Third Men who use electric weapons which create a kind of lightning bolt to disintegrate the Martian clouds. But the Martians’ dying bodies leave behind alien contaminants which spread fatal pulmonary diseases, decimating the Second Men.

It is very typical of Stapledon that he not only goes to great lengths to explain the Martians’s physical being – individual cells which can congregate into unified beings with a kind of group consciousness – but to be very interested in their religion. The Martians, being soft and small and amorphous themselves, have developed a cult or religion of hardness. Having identified diamonds as one of the hardest objects in the universe, on their rampages across earth, the Martians seek out and rescue diamonds wherever they find them, in order to place them in high places where they can be worshipped. And where the Second Men discover them, finally realising that the Martians are ‘intelligent’ life forms, not just purposeless clouds of germs.

Finally, the Martians settle and colonise Antarctica (much warmer than in our day and directly linked to South Africa) and the two species live uneasily side by side on the same planet. Until a Second Man discovers a virus so virulent that it will wipe the Martians out, but probably most humans too. The Second Men are so demoralised by failure to defeat the Martians, as well as by strange viruses which have infected them, that they accept the risk, unleash the virus, wipe out the Martians but also almost entirely exterminate humanity.

The Third Men

Once again there is a vast long dark age. Slowly arise a new species, the Third Men, short, brown-skinned with golden eyes and a cat-like presence, with six fingers. They are interested in music, create a musical religion, consider the universe a great dance to music and, once they have reached a level of technical civilisation, become interested in redesigning living organisms.

The Fourth Men

Hence the Fourth Men. After thousands of years of experimentation, the Third Men create giant brains, which occupy multiple rooms and floors. More and more of them till there are thousands, some deep in the oceans, some in the stratosphere, some at the poles, investigating the secrets of the universe. But the Fourth Men’s intellectual pursuits are stymied when they eventually realise (after the usual millions of years) that there is a limit to purely rational enquiry and that the mysteries of life also owe something to having a physical body, being able to move, having emotions and so on.

The Fifth Men

So now the big brains of the Fourth Men experiment on the humble Third Men – who had been reduced virtually to slaves – in order to create a new breed which will combine the big brains with perfected human attributes. They breed the Fifth Men, twice as tall as us, with additional fingers and thumbs. As you might expect this new super-fit,. super-clever race eventually (after millions of years) comes into conflict with their makers, a war erupts, and the Fifth Men overthrow the big brains.

They rise and thrive and then discover to their horror that the moon’s orbit is decaying. At some point the moon will fall into the earth and destroy it. There are all kinds of reactions, scientific and psychological, to this knowledge, but the wise among them begin making plans to move planet. To Venus.

Voyage to Venus

Venus is second closest to sun, stiflingly hot, torn between a stiflingly hot day and freezing night and, when probes first arrive they discover it is almost all covered in liquid. The Fifth Men devote all their ingenuity to ‘terraforming’ it, removing as much hydrogen as possible from the atmosphere, breeding plants which will survive these conditions and produce oxygen to try and produce a sort of earth-like existence.

But there’s another problem. There turns out to be intelligent life on Venus, dolphin-like creatures which swim in the depths of the endless oceans and don’t like their planet being remade. They retaliate by sending bombs up through the oceans to blow up terran ships, probes, colonies. After all attempts to communicate fail, the Fifth Men have no alternative but to embark on a war of extermination against the Venusians, which succeeds but, as so often in the story, leaves the ‘victorious’ humans with an abiding sense of guilt.

The Sixth Men

Eventually the entire population of Fifth Men, and all the plants and animals worth saving, are transferred from earth to Venus. But the newcomers do not thrive. The conditions are too harsh. Over millions of years a new race emerges, the Sixth Men, stunted dwellers on isolated islands, grubbing for roots among the jungles of flora which have managed to grow on Venus. An entire variation takes to the huge oceans and, over time, develops into a seal-like creature, with mermaid tails. But they eat flesh. And eventually the two species become enemies, both seeking to catch and eat samples of the other, whenever possible.

The Seventh Men

Millions of years pass. Land masses arise on Venus. Populations spread, breed, branch out. Eventually there emerges a new dominant species, the Seventh Men, who can fly. Soaring aloft they create myths and legends of their own, in which flight is the meaning of life, and alighting on land is sadness and woe.

However, over the years they lose touch with the old science, and are also faced with a blight caused by some chemical content of Venusian water.

Now, a certain percentage of their race had always been born without the ability to fly. Previously the Seventh Men had kindly killed these mutants. Now the Seventh Men take the (disastrous) decision to deliberately foster the cleverest of these ‘mutants’, these land dwellers, in order to create a cohort of scientists intelligent enough to combat the water blight. Except that… The mutants – the Eighth Men – do become cleverer than the flyers and grow to resent them.

The mutants breed and slowly take control of the less clever flyers, who they clip and pen up and limit their flying time such that the avian species slowly loses their will to live. Eventually the entire flying population, of its own volition, flies west and immolates itself in a live volcano.

The Ninth Men and beyond…

And we’re not even half way through the eighteen avatars yet! I haven’t got to the part where the threat of a destructive cloud forces the Eighth Men to move planet once more, by ‘ether-vessel’, this time to Neptune, where conditions are so utterly unlike Venus – mainly the crushing gravity – that the Eighth Men have to design and engineer an entirely new type of creature – the Ninth Men, who will make the migration. And then the hundreds of millions of years of man’s further evolution on Neptune.

Or, as Stapledon puts it, with his typical sober, serious, mind-boggling manner:

We have watched the fortunes of eight successive human species for a thousand million years, the first half of that flicker which is the duration of man. Ten more species now succeed one another, or are contemporary, on the plains of Neptune. We, the Last Men, are the Eighteenth Men. Of the eight pre-Neptunian species, some, as we have seen, remained always primitive; many achieved at least a confused and fleeting civilization, and one, the brilliant Fifth, was already wakening into true humanity when misfortune crushed it. The ten Neptunian species show an even greater diversity. They range from the instinctive animal to modes of consciousness never before attained. The definitely sub-human degenerate types are confined mostly to the first six hundred million years of man’s sojourn on Neptune. During the earlier half of this long phase of preparation, man, at first almost crushed out of existence by a hostile environment, gradually peopled the huge north; but with beasts, not men. For man, as man, no longer existed. During the latter half of the preparatory six hundred million years, the human spirit gradually awoke again, to undergo the fluctuating advance and decline characteristic of the pre-Neptunian ages. But subsequently, in the last four hundred million years of his career on Neptune, man has made an almost steady progress toward full spiritual maturity.

Multiple scenarios

It is not only the almost inconceivable scale of the narrative. It is also that the scale allows Stapledon to explore or experiment or play with whole civilisation-level storylines. Flying humans, aquatic humans, nuclear apocalypse, alien invasion, terraforming other plants, the moon falling into the earth, a flying gas cloud which destroys planets, the creation of artificially massive brains, telepathy, transporting minds back into the deep past – the book is a compendium, a treasure trove of plots and ideas which other writers could mine and explore.

Teleology

Underpinning the huge story is a scientific or biological flaw. Stapledon believes that, time after time, human nature will out. No matter how massacred, no matter how degraded or polluted or redesigned or mutated or evolved, Stapledon believes there is a fundamental unchangeable ‘human spirit’ and that this will always resurface, no matter what.

He criticises the Eighth Men for not having had faith enough in this unstoppable reappearance of ‘human nature’ to have designed the Ninth Men to be primitive, dwarvish thugs – as the conditions on Neptune required – and having the confidence that “man” would sooner or later rise again.

They should have trusted that if once this crude seed could take root, natural forces themselves would in time conjure from it something more human.

‘Natural forces’? Beneath the entire vast narrative is the assumption that there is a fundamental human nature, a triumph of the mind and of the human spirit, which always results in the same kind of civilisation, of self-awareness, technology, reason, the spirit of scientific enquiry. Thus humans may evolve into mermen or flying wombats or rabbit-shaped beings (on Neptune) but underpinning the whole vast fireworks display is the assumption that, given enough millions of years, all these shapes will revert to a roughly human shape (two arms, two legs), walking upright, and with a human type brain which always, in the end, comes round to creating a similar-sounding civilisation, with peaceful communities, great architecture, poetry and philosophy and so on.

This is to suppose that the whole universe is somehow geared to producing ‘mind’, mentation, intellect, soul, spirit and all the rest of it.

Why? There’s no evidence it is. All the evidence is stacked against it. The universe is overwhelmingly full of non-mind, in fact packed out with non-life. There is no God. There is no plan. Nothing is fore-ordained. If humanity is wiped out then billions of other species will truck along quite happily without us, as will planet earth, all the other planets and the rest of the universe.

The book is underpinned by this tremendously optimistic belief in the triumph of human nature, against all odds, perils and mutation, which is very much of its times. The structure of DNA was only discovered 23 years later, in 1953, and the full implications of the evolutionary genetics are, in a sense, still percolating through our culture.

In Stapledon’s time, of course evolution was known about and central to any intelligent person’s thinking; but because the precise mechanism of mutation and variation wasn’t understood it was still possible to think in vague terms of some spirit or mind or some other numinous driving force which shaped and directed evolution. That it had a goal or purpose or aim.

80 years later we are much more realistic and disillusioned. We know that random mutations occur all the time in everyone’s DNA, most are harmless, a lot can be corrected by the body’s defence mechanisms, some persist and result in the numerous cancers we are prone to. The existing genepool is shuffled when sperm meets egg. Every new individual is a genetic experiment.

The advent of ‘mind’, or at least the kind of mind Stapledon is thinking of, has occurred only on one remote twig of the vast bush of life forms and not at all, or not in any form we can recognise, in any of the trillions of other life forms which have or currently do exist.

Which is why Last and First Men is not only a science fiction classic in its own terms, but also a testament to an era of cultural optimism, a period of confidence and anticipation. Lost forever after the Nazis, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the countless other blows which humans have administered to our amour-propre.

Last and First Men: structure

Chapter 1 Balkan Europe
1 The European war and after
2 The Anglo-French war
3 Europe after the Anglo-French war
4 the Russo-German war

Chapter 2 Europe’s downfall
1 Europe and America
2 The origins of a mystery
3 Europe murdered

Chapter 3 America and China
1 The rivals
2 The conflict
3 On an island in the Pacific

Chapter 4 An Americanised planet
1 The foundation of the first World State
2 The dominance of science
3 Material achievement
4 The culture of the first World State
5 Downfall

Chapter 5 The fall of the First Men
1 The first Dark Age
2 The rise of Patagonia
3 The cult of youth
4 The catastrophe

Chapter 6 Transition
1 the First Men at bay
2 The second Dark Age

Chapter 7 The rise of the Second Men
1 The appearance of a new species
2 The intercourse of three species
3 The zenith of the Second Man

Chapter 8 The Martians
1 The first Martian invasion
2 Life on Mars
3 The Martian mind
4 Delusions of the Martians

Chapter 9 Earth and Mars
1 The Second Men at bay
2 The ruin of two worlds

Chapter 10 The Third Men in the wilderness
1 The Third human species
2 Digressions of the Third Men
3 The vital art
4 Conflicting policies

Chapter 11 Man remakes himself
1 The first of the great brains
2 The tragedy of the Fourth Men
3 The Fifth Men
4 The culture of the Fifth Men

Chapter 12 The last terrestrials
1 The cult of evanescence
2 Exploration of time
3 Voyaging in space
4 Preparing a new world

Chapter 13 Humanity on Venus
1 Taking root again
2 The flying men
3 A minor astronomical event

Chapter 14 Neptune
1 Bird’s-eye view
2 Da capo
3 Slow conquest

Chapter 15 The Last Men
1 Introduction to the last human species
2 Childhood and maturity
3 A racial awakening
4 Cosmology

Chapter 16 The last of man
1 Sentence of death
2 Behaviour of the condemned
3 Epilogue

Science fiction reviews

More science fiction reviews

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Olaf Stapledon

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

Premise

Key episodes

1 Earth and the Overlords

2 The Golden Age (pp.56-119)

3 The Last Generation (pp.120-189)

Critique

The everyday

Anglocentric

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

Share this:

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)

Asimov

The story behind Foundation

The afterlife of the Foundation stories

Posthumous Foundations

Foundation and Robot

The premise of the Foundation stories

Hari Seldon’s role in the Foundation stories

1. The Psychohistorians

2. The Encyclopedists

3. The Mayors

4. The Traders

5. The Merchant Princes

Comments

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

Share this:

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (1930)

The end of the First Men

The Dark Age

The rise of Patagonia

Apocalypse

The new Dark Age

The Second Men

The Third Men

The Fourth Men

The Fifth Men

Voyage to Venus

The Sixth Men

The Seventh Men

The Ninth Men and beyond…

Multiple scenarios

Teleology

Last and First Men: structure

Related links

Science fiction reviews

Share this:

Follow

Topics

Categories