The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (89 page)

And when he got home, Asimov dutifully spent the next ten days attempting to produce the outline Campbell had asked for. But he just couldn’t get it to work. He says that it “got longer and longer and stupider and stupider until I finally tore it up.”
⁷³⁰

Three months earlier, when Robert Heinlein’s Future History chart had been published in
Astounding,
Asimov had been as impressed by it as everybody else. Perhaps more impressed, since he was both an appreciator of history and Heinlein’s earliest fan. But banging his head against this outline was enough to convince him that if Campbell wanted him to be another Heinlein and base all his stories on detailed charts and 70,000 word background manuscripts, it wasn’t going to happen.

It was Asimov’s conviction that he was incapable of planning a story out on paper, all in advance, and then following that plan exactly—let alone doing this for an entire series of stories. It was just the opposite of how he actually worked.

Asimov didn’t build up a whole out of an accumulation of details. He started with a sense of something—a glimmering—and eventually found the specific form and words that would express it.

First would come the inkling. Then, after he had moved factors and insights and potentialities around and around in his mind, a story pattern would fall into place. This might happen almost instantaneously, or it might take considerable thought, but the process couldn’t be talked about, let alone pinned down on paper in any meaningful way.

At last, when Asimov had enough of a design in his head to begin writing, he would sit down at the typewriter and throw himself into a state of intense concentration. His inner eye would remain fixed on the shape and direction of the whole, while his typing fingers took on a life of their own. Words would then pour onto the page almost as though they were being dictated to him—until at last he looked up and found himself with another completed story.

In this process of creation, Asimov was sure there was no place for written outlines. His conclusion was that if the editor’s head had been turned by Heinlein’s example, so that he desired Asimov to do exactly what Heinlein had done, then Campbell had to be mistaken.

We might go even further than this, however, and say that if Asimov was correct in thinking that this was what Campbell wanted of him, then the editor was doubly wrong, since we know that this wasn’t what Heinlein had done, either. When Robert Heinlein wrote science fiction, including his Future History, he made things up as he went along—just like Asimov.

But another possibility does exist, and this is that John Campbell never seriously intended for Asimov to produce an exact outline of what he would write. The editor, after all, was asking Asimov for “an open-ended series,” and a story series that constantly surprises itself by going off in unexpected new directions has to be an unlikely candidate for complete outline in advance.

What Campbell may actually have wanted was for a little time to pass for an overwhelmed Asimov to catch his breath and regain his balance. And setting him to work on an outline, however useless it might prove, at least ensured that he must do some thinking about a series of stories and the way to seek Second Empire.

In either case, after ten days there came a moment when Asimov was ready to shrug off the command to produce an outline, and just go ahead and write. In this mood of readiness and determination, he was prepared to forget about what might happen in later stories, and simply try to deal with a single story in his usual way.

He tells us: “I started the story I had originally intended to write (with modifications that resulted from my discussions with Campbell) and the heck with possible future stories. I’d worry about them when the time came—and
if
the time came.”
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In “Foundation,” the story that Asimov wrote, it is fifty thousand years after the discovery of atomic power. Humanity has expanded into a galaxy devoid of other intelligent beings, and there it has settled on millions of different planets. An Empire centered on the planet Trantor has ruled the galaxy for thousands of years, but now the Empire is in decline and soon it must fall.

The demise of the Empire has been predicted by Hari Seldon, the greatest psychologist of the age, who is able to mathematically anticipate the thought patterns of whole populations, and thereby to affect them. Seldon says:

“And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism, a period which, our psychohistory tells us, should, under ordinary circumstances, last from thirty to fifty thousand years. We cannot stop the Fall. We do not wish to; for Empire culture has lost whatever virility and worth it once had. But we can shorten the period of Barbarism that must follow—down to a single thousand of years.”
⁷³²

As the story opens, Seldon is addressing the final meeting of fifty of the best philosophers, psychologists, historians and physical scientists in the Galactic Empire. After twenty years of effort, the work of this team of wise men is now complete.

Seldon declares:

“We have done; and our work is over. The Galactic Empire is failing, but its culture shall not die, and provision has been made for a new and greater culture to develop therefrom. The two Scientific Refuges we planned have been established: one at each end of the Galaxy, at Terminus and at Star’s End. They are in operation and already moving along the inevitable lines we have drawn for them. . . .

“We began in secret; we have worked throughout in secret; and now end in secret—to wait for our reward a thousand years hence with the establishment of the Second Galactic Empire.”
⁷³³

Thus it was that in the opening paragraphs of “Foundation” the ultimate goal was explicitly set forth—the re-establishment within a thousand years of a new, improved Galactic Empire.

But we can also see much else of importance either stated or implied by Hari Seldon: a human-ruled Galaxy that may be falling of its own weight, but is not threatened by alien equals or superiors; a new science of “psychohistory”; and the existence of two different Scientific Refuges, one at each end of the Galaxy.

When he imagined a human empire occupying a galaxy that was lacking in all alien competitors, Asimov was following the precedent set by Jack Williamson in “After World’s End.” Looking back in more recent time, Asimov has frankly acknowledged that “the multi-intelligence Galaxy is, to my way of thinking, more probable than the all-human one.”
⁷³⁴
But when it came to the making of his science fiction stories, it was never the calculation of probabilities that guided Asimov.

Modern science fiction, as Asimov had been learning to write it from Campbell, consisted of thought experiments—the imagining of possible problems—and their solutions. And just as it was legitimate in a scientific experiment to arrange all sorts of improbable conditions in order to tease an event into being and then observe what occurred, so did Asimov regard it as perfectly legitimate in science fiction thought experiments like “Reason” or “Nightfall” to present unlikely yet possible circumstances for the sake of working through what might result from them.

Even though it was cut from a larger bolt of cloth, “Foundation” was not different from “Reason” or “Nightfall.” It was a thought experiment, too. And in this particular case, Asimov had at least three good reasons for not including able, contentious aliens in the galaxy of his imagination.

One of these reasons—it seems quite likely—was shared with Jack Williamson in “After World’s End.” And this is that if you wish to write a story about a human Galactic Empire, it is altogether simpler and easier to allow men to set up shop in a universe that is wide-open and ready for the taking than to require them to contend with other beings for the privilege of establishing and maintaining their Empire.

A second reason was that Asimov didn’t crave any unnecessary struggles with John Campbell. He says, “It was my fixed intention not to allow Campbell to foist upon me his notions of the superiority and inferiority of races, and the surest way of doing this was to have an all-human Galaxy.”
⁷³⁵

Asimov’s third reason for omitting aliens was that they had no role to play in the story he was aiming to tell. It was human social, political and historical forces that Asimov desired to set upon the galactic stage and observe in action. Alien beings would only be a distraction.

Ultimately, however, all three of Asimov’s reasons for choosing an all-human galaxy were one and the same: He didn’t wish to write about mankind contending for evolutionary dominance in the old familiar Techno Age manner. He wanted instead to pose problems and then work his way through to solutions in the emerging style of the Atomic Age.

So, in choosing the conditions of his particular thought experiment, Asimov simply elected to leave out all aliens. In fact, so ruthless was he in setting his parameters that he even excluded the robots he had brought under human control in his other series of connected thought experiments.

Campbell would have no complaints to make about Asimov’s radical simplification. The editor might still be enough of an unregenerate Techno-Ager to never want to concede that any alien being could be permanently or absolutely superior to man, but he suffered no compulsive need to hunt up strange beings and pick fights with them. His real interest, too, was in human problem-solving. If Asimov’s streamlined galaxy allowed men to get on with their proper business of solving problems without distraction or dismay, that could only be a recommendation in Campbell’s eyes.

Other writers would find Asimov’s expedient a convenience, too. In years to come, so many of the stories printed in
Astounding
would follow Williamson and Asimov into the humans-only galaxy that it could even be taken by some to be the mainline human future.

Asimov’s new science of psychohistory would also be congenial to Campbell. With the prompting and encouragement of the editor, Asimov had been trying out the idea of a mathematically exact science of psychology in one form and then another. In “Homo Sol,” it was galactic masters of mathematical psychology who take the measure of mankind and then declare us awesome. In the series of stories about robots-under-control that Asimov was evolving, it was mathematically founded robot psychology, epitomized in the Three Laws of Robotics, that guaranteed the grip of man over his mechanical offspring. And now, here in “Foundation,” it was a statistically based psychology of human populations that was to furnish the basis for shortening the hiatus between Galactic Empires to a mere thousand years.

At different moments in “Foundation” and its sequels, “psycho-history” would be spelled in different ways—sometimes with a capital, sometimes without, sometimes with a hyphen and sometimes not. But in all its variants, this would be a most powerful and penetrating science. Asimov would summarize its nature this way:

Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.
⁷³⁶

From this we can see that in form psychohistory would bear a resemblance to kinetics. That is, it would not be able to measure and predict the psyche of an individual human being any more than kinetics was able to account for the behavior of a single molecule in a volume of gas. But when it came to the behavior of the whole—the psychological reactions of the entire human population of the galaxy—psychohistory would be remarkably exact. Its accuracy would approach the ability of classical mechanics to predict the ricochet of a billiard ball.

Most provocative of all, however, would be the suggestion that after these comparisons to physics had been made, such was the true power and significance of psychohistory that next to it, physics must be reckoned a lesser science!

The last point of importance introduced by master psychohistorian Hari Seldon—the existence of two Scientific Refuges from the fall of Galactic Empire, and not merely the one that Asimov had originally envisioned—was the result of a suggestion from John Campbell. According to Asimov:

I’m sure that it was Campbell who first said, “Let’s have
two
Foundations, one at each end of the Galaxy.”

Naturally, I said, “Why?” and he said, “You may need the second one later on.”
⁷³⁷

What a highly useful provision to have tucked away for the hour when it might be needed! And, indeed, Asimov would eventually discover that he did have good use to make of this second Foundation.

Now, however, after its establishment in the initial scene of Asimov’s story, the second Scientific Refuge at Star’s End would be set aside. The remainder of “Foundation”—after Hari Seldon has finished making his valedictory speech to his team of sages—would take place fifty years later at Encyclopedia Foundation Number One on the planet Terminus.

Once again here, as in “Reason” and “Nightfall,” Asimov would be dealing in terms of states of relative knowledge and ignorance. That is, there are fundamental things that Hari Seldon and his associates know—and which have been revealed to the reader—that the scholars of this Foundation do not know.

They haven’t been informed that the Galactic Empire is falling, for instance. Nor are they aware of the plans that Hari Seldon has for them to serve as the seed from which a new Empire will grow. There has even been a deliberate exclusion of psychologists and psychohistorians from the Foundation to prevent them from knowing too much too soon and interfering with the course that has been charted for them.

At this moment, the political balance of power at the edge of the Galaxy is starting to shift rapidly. The territories of the Periphery are breaking away from the Empire. The Royal Governor of Anacreon—the area lying between Terminus and the heart of the Empire—has just declared himself a King.