The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (107 page)

If Asimov never noticed, it was partly because he had a rare ability to be oblivious to anything that didn’t concern him, and partly because he had turned his attention back to science fiction writing. Something like fourteen months after he finished “Bridle and Saddle,” it dawned on him that in fact money wasn’t his primary motive in writing. If he wrote SF, it was because he felt a compulsive urge to write SF—and the urge was on him again.

So, while others, like Heinlein, forgot about science fiction writing for the duration, donning as many as three different hats in an earnest attempt to see the war brought to a conclusion as quickly and decisively as possible, Isaac Asimov was content to do his job at the Navy Yard during the day, and then go home at night to work on his latest SF story.

The first piece he wrote, a novelet entitled “Author! Author!” was a fantasy aimed at
Unknown,
a market he had never been able to crack. It took Asimov the better part of three months to finish, writing in his none-too-copious spare time, but when he was done, Campbell not only bought it, but threw in a bonus. Unfortunately, the story was still in inventory when
Unknown Worlds
was killed off in the fall of 1943, and it wouldn’t see publication until more than twenty years later when it was included in an anthology of stories drawn from
Unknown.

If Asimov had known that such a thing was going to happen, he might have been discouraged from writing further stories. As it was, however, he was so elated by his sale to his favorite magazine that he sat right down and started another story, and never looked back.

It took him awhile to regain his stride. The first two science fiction stories he wrote were relatively trivial exercises that depended on snappy punchlines for their impact.

But Asimov’s fourth new story, a long novelet entitled “The Big and the Little” (
Astounding,
Aug. 1944), was more serious and substantial. It was another Foundation story, set seventy-five years after “Bridle and Saddle.”

The central character of “The Big and the Little” is an interstellar trader named Hober Mallow, who was born in Smyrno—which we will remember as one of the old Four Kingdoms—but who was bright enough to have received a lay education at the Foundation. Such is Mallow’s strength of character and his ability to recognize what the moment requires that before the end of the story he would even be elected Mayor of Terminus and successfully deal with yet another of the crises foreseen by the great psychohistorian Hari Seldon.

The big and the little of the title are the Galactic Empire and the Foundation. Though the two aren’t in direct contact, they are locked in contention over the direction that is to be taken by a stellar state which lies between them, the hereditary dictatorship of Korell, ruled by a man named Commdor Asper Argo.

But “the big and the little” also refers to the respective technologies of the Empire and the Foundation. The Empire depends on machines of tremendous size, built to last for generations and run by a caste of technicians who are no longer capable of performing repairs when the machines break down. By contrast, the gadgets and machines produced by the Foundation and sold by traders like Hober Mallow are small things like refrigeration units and dust-precipitators and items of personal adornment. As Mallow puts it:

“The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They’ve calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.

“But we,—
we,
our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources,—have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods—techniques and methods the Empire can’t follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any really vital scientific advance.”
⁸⁸⁸

One of the particular strengths of this story was that it presented in dramatic form, a full year before the publication of van Vogt’s
The World of Null-A,
some of the key ideas associated with Alfred Korzybski.

Among these was the Korzybskian dictum that the map is not the territory. In the course of “The Big and the Little,” Hober Mallow, following a star map 150 years old, makes a foray into territory closer to the galactic center to check on current conditions within the Empire. He lands on what he takes to be the capital planet of an Imperial Sector, only to discover that his map is no longer accurate. When he asks a scholarly informant if this is Siwenna, the man replies:

“ ‘Siwenna, yes. But Siwenna is no longer capital of the Normannic Sector. Your old map has misled you. . . . The stars may not change even in centuries, but political boundaries are all too fluid.’ ”
⁸⁸⁹

Things do change through time—even the location of the stars. And one moment in time is not the same as another.

This Korzybskian insight—which Asimov may, in part, have picked up from his reading of Heinlein’s Future History stories—is further illustrated by a crucial conversation between Hober Mallow and a political rival who is wedded to the notion that the Foundation, having successfully dealt with the Four Kingdoms through its religion of the Galactic Spirit, ought to continue to promote it forever.

The rival politician says: “ ‘You see, of course, that your attempt at trade for its own sake . . . can only end with the overthrow and complete negation of the policy that has worked successfully for a century.’ ”
⁸⁹⁰

To this, Mallow replies:

“And time enough, too . . . for a policy outdated, dangerous and impossible. However well your religion has succeeded in the Four Kingdoms, scarcely another world in the Periphery has accepted it. . . . There isn’t a ruler in the Periphery now that wouldn’t sooner cut his own throat than let a priest of the Foundation enter the territory.”
⁸⁹¹

Mallow perceives that in new times marked by different conditions, the way forward isn’t to insist upon old solutions to old problems. Indeed, to do this must inevitably prove counterproductive.

Commdor Asper Argo of Korell may be politically oriented toward the Galactic Empire, and be ready to accept its gifts of atomic-powered warships. He may even declare war against Terminus, so that the Foundation must duck and run and stall for time. Over the long haul, however, what will prove decisive in the conflict is the economic ties that have been established by interstellar traders like Hober Mallow. Mallow explains:

“The whole war is a battle between those two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits.

“A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects’ welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest. But it’s still the little things in life that count—and Asper Argo won’t stand up against the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years.
⁸⁹²

In the relative balance of forces presented in “The Big and the Little,” it is possible for us to see a reflection of ideas then current about big, slow, stupid dinosaurs lumbering around while under their noses swift, bright little mammals were breaking their eggs, eating their young, and condemning them to extinction.

We might also think of Chester Geier’s story “Environment,” in which the men from Earth who make their way through the rooms of the deserted school-city are at first introduced to machines that grow ever larger and more complicated but then, at a certain point, begin to become smaller and more subtle. The trend toward machines that accomplish more and more with less and less would be one of the major differences between the Atomic Age and the Techno Age. And, to the extent that Asimov’s story was a harbinger of transistors and printed circuits to come, it would be fresh and new and insightful.

In other respects, however, “The Big and the Little” would not be representative of the ongoing changes that were taking place in
Astounding
during the last years of World War II. In fact, it was to an extent retrogressive inasmuch as this novelet, far more than the two Foundation stories which had preceded it, was concerned with matters of physical science.

One reason for this old-fashionedness was that the period during which Lewis Padgett and others were establishing the new type of SF frankly based in transcendent consciousness was exactly the same period in which Asimov lapsed in his reading
of Astounding.
He hadn’t caught on to the change as yet.

But there was another limitation to the stories that Asimov produced when he took up writing SF again. Perhaps because of doubts engendered by the uncertainty of the war, perhaps because of the Techno Age thinking that Asimov was exposing himself to in the history books he was reading so assiduously, there was a strong undercurrent of fatalism in the stories he wrote at first. We can see this expressed in the titles of his new stories: “Death Sentence” (
Astounding,
Nov. 1943), “Blind Alley” (
Astounding,
Mar. 1945), and “Dead Hand” (
Astounding,
Apr. 1945).

This last story, another long Foundation novelet set forty years after “The Big and the Little,” was explicitly deterministic. It was heavily influenced by Arnold Toynbee’s
A Study of History
(1934-54), of which six volumes out of an eventual ten had then been published. Asimov began to borrow them one at a time from L. Sprague de Camp in the spring of 1944, just prior to writing “Dead Hand.”

The historical model upon which this story was based was the life and deeds of the Sixth Century general Belisarius. This able man recovered the lost territory of North Africa from the Vandals for the Eastern Roman Empire, and fought in Italy against the Ostrogoths who were then ruling Rome. Belisarius might have accomplished even more than he did had it not been for the envy of his ruler, the Emperor Justinian, who gave him insufficient troops and support, recalled him more than once to Constantinople at inopportune moments, and eventually confiscated his property and had him thrown into prison.

In “Dead Hand,” for the first time, the Empire and the Foundation face each other in direct conflict. Asimov’s parallel to Belisarius, a young general named Bel Riose, denies the inevitable power of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory and launches a war against the Foundation. He has considerable success, too, retaking for the Empire a number of planets that the Foundation had brought under its political and economic sway.

The Foundation not only fights desperately, but tries one trick after another to stave off the general and drive a wedge between him and his Emperor, Cleon II. But nothing that it tries accomplishes more than a temporary postponement of what appears to be inevitable defeat. Then, however, just when all seems lost, Bel Riose is recalled by Cleon for his own reasons, is placed under arrest, tried and executed.

The son of the Siwennian scholar whom Hober Mallow met in “The Big and the Little” explains to men of the Foundation why they were right to think that the key lay in disunion between the Emperor and his general, but wrong in thinking that it was they who could bring this about:

“You tried bribery and lies. You appealed to ambition and to fear. But you got nothing for all your pains. In fact, appearances were worse after each attempt.

“And through all this wild threshing up of tiny ripples, the Seldon tidal wave continued onward, quietly—but quite irresistibly. . . . There was a dead hand pushing all of us; the mighty general and the great Emperor; my world and your world—the dead hand of Hari Seldon. He knew that a man like Riose would have to fail, since it was his success that brought failure; and the greater the success, the surer the failure.”
⁸⁹³

And he adds:

“What keeps the Emperor strong? What kept Cleon strong? It’s obvious. He is strong, because he permits no strong subjects. A courtier who becomes too rich, or a general who becomes too popular is dangerous. All the recent history of the Empire proves that to any Emperor intelligent enough to be strong.

“Riose won victories, so the Emperor grew suspicious. So he was recalled, and accused, condemned, murdered. The Foundation wins again.

“Why, look, there is not a conceivable combination of events that does not result in the Foundation winning. It was inevitable; whatever Riose did, whatever we did.”
⁸⁹⁴

The extreme degree of the historical parallelism and the overwhelming determinism in “Dead Hand” would trouble Asimov himself after he had had some time to consider the matter. And he would trace this to the influence of Toynbee. Asimov would say:

As I continued to read Toynbee, my admiration waned. More and more, it was obvious to me that he was essentially a classical and Christian scholar and that the order he found in history was an imposed one produced by his seeing reflections of classical history wherever he looked. The final stories of the Foundation series were once more relatively free of his influence, therefore.
⁸⁹⁵

One person who was explicitly troubled by the determinism of “Dead Hand” was John W. Campbell, even though he not only bought and published the story but paid Asimov a bonus for it. Cyclical history—originally based upon the model of the fall of the Roman Empire—was precisely what all his efforts with modern science fiction had been designed to confute, and it could hardly serve his purpose of making man master of the universe if Hari Seldon and his psychohistorical predictions ultimately proved to be as great a dead weight upon the being and becoming of humanity as cyclical history ever was. And that was clearly the direction in which Asimov’s Foundation series was tending.

Consequently, when Asimov paid a rare wartime visit to the editor’s office in New York on January 8, 1945, two months before the publication of “Dead Hand,” and the two men discussed the next Foundation story, Campbell informed Asimov that he wanted to see Seldon’s Plan overturned.