Social laws acted and people were maimed, damaged, robbed, and strangled by forces they could not even glimpse. People were driven to sickness, to desperation, to loneliness and fear and remorse. Shaken by tears and longing, in a world they fundamentally failed to fathom, they nonetheless carried on.
There was nobility in that. They were fragments adrift in time, motes in an Empire rich and strong and full of pride, an order failing and battered and hollow with its own emptiness.
With leaden certainty, Hari at last saw that he probably would not be able to rescue the great ramshackle Empire, a beast of fine nuance and multiplying self-delusions.
No savior, he. But perhaps he could help.
They both stood in silence for a long, aching time. The Galaxy turned in its slow majesty. A nearby fountain spewed glorious arcs into the air. The waters seemed momentarily free, but in fact were trapped forever within the steel skies of Trantor. As was he.
Hari felt a deep emotion he could not define. It tightened his throat and made him press Dors to him. She was machine and woman and…something more. Another element he could not fully know, and he cherished her all the more for that.
“You care so much,” Dors whispered.
“I have to.”
“Perhaps we should try to simply live more, worry less.”
He kissed her fervently and then laughed.
“Quite right. For who knows what the future may bring?”
Very slowly, he winked at her.
Afterword
The Foundation series began in World War II, as America arced toward its zenith as a world power. The series played out over decades as the United States dominated the world’s matters in a fashion no other nation ever had. Yet the Foundation is about imperium and decline. Did this betray an anxiety, born even in the moment of approaching glory?
I had always wondered if this was so. Part of me itched to explore the issues which lace the series.
The idea of writing further novels in the Foundation universe came from Janet Asimov and the Asimov estate’s representative, Ralph Vicinanza. Approached by them, I at first declined, being busy with physics and my own novels. But my subconscious, once aroused, refused to let go the notion. After half a year of struggling with ideas plainly made for the Foundation, persistently demanding expression, I finally called up Ralph Vicinanza and began putting together a plan to construct a fittingly complex curve of action and meaning, to be revealed in several novels. Though we spoke to several authors about this project, the best suited seemed two hard SF writers broadly influenced by Asimov and of unchallenged technical ability: Greg Bear and David Brin.
Bear, Brin, and I have kept in close touch while I wrote this first volume, for we intend to create three stand-alone novels which nonetheless carry forward an overarching mystery to its end. Elements of this make their first appearance here, to amplify further through Greg Bear’s Foundation and Chaos, finding completion in Brill’s Third Foundation. (These are preliminary titles.) I have planted in the narrative prefiguring details and key elements which shall bear later fruit.
Genres are constrained conversations. Constraint is essential, defining the rules and assumptions open to an author. If hard SF occupies the center of science fiction, that is probably because hardness gives the firmest boundary. Science itself yields crisp confines.
Genres are also like immense discussions, with ideas developed, traded, mutated, their variations spun down through time. Players ring changes on each other-more like a steppin’-out jazz band than a solo concert in a plush auditorium. Contrast “serious” fiction (more accurately described, in my eyes, as merely self-consciously solemn). It has canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, looming great and intact by themselves.
Much of the pleasure of mysteries, of espionage novels or SF, lies in the interaction of writers with each other and, particularly in SF’s invention of fandom, with the readers as well. This isn’t a defect; it’s the essential nature of popular culture, which the United States has dominated in our age, with the invention of jazz, rock, the musical, and written genres such as the Western, the hardboiled detective, modern fantasy, and other rich areas. Many kinds of SF (hard, utopian, military, satirical) share assumptions, code words, lines of argument, narrative voices. Fond remembrance of golden age Astounding and its letter column, of the New Wave, of Horace Gold’s Galaxy- theseare echoes of distant conversations earnestly carried out.
Genre pleasures are many, but this quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. In contrast to the Grand Canon view of great works standing like monoliths in a deserted landscape, genre reading satisfactions are a striking facet of modern democratic (pop) culture, a shared movement.
There are questions about how writers deal with what some call the “anxiety of influence,” but which I’d prefer to term more mildly: the digestion of tradition.
I’m reminded of John Berger’s definition of hack work, describing oil painting in Ways of Seeing, as “…not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art.” Fair enough; but this can happen in any context. Working in a known region of concept-space does not necessarily imply that the territory has been mined out. Nor is fresh ground always fertile.
Surely we should notice that a novel Hemingway thought the best in American literature is a sequel-indeed, following on a boy’s book, Tom Sawyer.
Sharing common ground isn’t only a literary tradition. Are we thrown into moral confusion when we hear Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini? Do we indignantly march from the concert hall when assaulted by Variations on a Theme by Haydn? Sharecropping by the Greats? Shocking!
Reinspecting the assumptions and methods of classical works can yield new fruit. Fresh narrative can both strike out into new territory while reflecting on the landscape of the past. Recall that Hamlet drew from several earlier plays about the same plot.
Isaac himself revisited the Foundation, taking different angles of attack each time. In the beginning, psychohistory equated the movements of people as a whole with the motions of molecules. The Second Foundation looked at perturbations to such deterministic laws (the Mule) and implied that only a superhuman elite could manage instabilities. Later, robots emerged as the elite, better than humans at dispassionate government. Beyond robots came Gaia…and so on.
In this three-book series we shall reinspect the role of robots, and what psychohistory might look like as a theory. More riffs upon the basic tune.
I had always wondered about crucial aspects of Asimov’s Empire:
Why were there no aliens in the galaxy? What role did computers play? Particularly, vs. robots?
What did the theory of psychohistory actually look like?
Finally, who was Hari Seldon-as a character, a man?
This novel attempts some answers. It is my contribution to a discussion about power and determinism which has now spanned over half a century.
Of course, we know some incidental answers. The term “psychohistory” was commonly used in the thirties and appears in the 1934 Webster’s Dictionary; Isaac greatly extended its meaning, though. He didn’t want to deal with John w. Campbell’s notorious dislike of aliens who might be as clever as we, so his Foundation had none. But it seemed to me there might be more to the matter.
As well, Asimov’s uniting of his robot novels and the Foundation series became intricate and puzzling. The British critic Brian Stableford found this “comforting in its claustrophobic enclosure.” There are no robots in the early Foundation novels, but they are behind-the-scenes manipulators in both Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation.