The Foundation of the Golden Age of Science Fiction
"It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
The new TV series released by Apple is portrayed as being based on the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov. The stories originally comprising the novels first appeared in the 1940s in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In the 1950s, they were released as three hardcover books. Asimov, presumably occupied by activities as a university professor and a popularizer of science, did not return to continuing the saga until the 1980s. He did not complete the entire epic in his lifetime; however, three other science fiction writers, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, wrote further sequels after Asimov's death. Aside from the books mentioned, other authors have written tales about the Foundation Universe directly or in some version, more or less parodying it.
The theme of the novels is that in the far future, a long-standing human empire would occupy the entire galaxy. The empire is controlled by an emperor from the planet Trantor near the center of the galaxy. A brilliant mathematician, Hari Seldon, living on Trantor, develops a new science, psychohistory, which, given the vast size of the human population, can predict the course of events. This idea works in the same way that statistical mechanics does in predicting the development of a physical system consisting of many particles. Using psychohistory, Seldon finds that the Galactic Empire will soon fall. To deal with the problem, Seldon suggests establishing a Foundation on the planet Terminus located in the far outer reaches of the galaxy. Seldon believes, from the use of psychohistory, that the Foundation will reestablish civilization in the galaxy as a Second Galactic Empire in 1,000 rather than 30,000 years.
For many readers, only the three novels based on the magazine versions are genuine "Foundational." Even Asimov's continuation of the series, written many years after their first appearance, has a feel that seems different from the originals. I confess that I share this view, though I do not claim that all the following works by Asimov and others are unworthy or uninteresting. On the contrary, they may even be better in many respects. My opinion includes the new streaming series on Apple TV, which has a very different audience than the original books, and is presented in a more visually based medium.
In what follows, I want to elaborate on why the original three books have their importance and an unique appeal. Asimov was in his twenties at the time of writing. He was also in close contact and under the influence of writers such as Robert Heinlein as well as being mentored by the editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell Jr. Also, a large class of readers and authors of science fiction were either professional scientists and engineers or students entering into those professions, or individuals with a strong interest in science and its influence on the future. In a nutshell, we might say that they wanted to answer the question "What if?" What if space travel became an everyday activity? What if we could construct machines that could act and work like humans? What if we could cure all physical ills and obtain long life spans? What if humans had telepathic abilities? The list is endless and was very motivating for the readers of the golden age, many of whom would help form our present-day world. Another question, more relevant to today's readers, is what it would be like for the individual living in a possible world? Put another way, what would be the influence on character development? In most of the golden age stories, the main emphasis was not on the character of the persons, human or alien, but on the ideas that formed the basis for the story. The ideas were, in fact, the real characters!
The personalities in the essential Foundation stories are there to develop and illustrate the ideas. Emotional involvement with them by the reader is nearly nonexistent. The very basis of the saga is that the individual does not matter; the laws of psychohistory determine the future. Events following these laws will supply the necessary individuals. This is in analogy to how statistical mechanics treats the properties of a gas made up of molecular components. The pressure produced in a container does not depend on the behavior of an individual molecule, only on the aggregate of vast numbers of molecules and their average behavior. Physics in the late 19th and early 20th century created the discipline of statistical mechanics to study such situations. The theory used the large numbers of particles involved in entities such as gases, solids, and liquids to predict behavior. So it is natural to ask if a similar theory could predict a society's activities, especially if composed of a huge number of actors, e.g., a galactic empire.
Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of evolutionary theory's developer, Charles Darwin, was a successful physicist that helped develop Statistical Mechanics. In the 1920's, he wrote a book that attempted to apply similar ideas to the study of human society and predict the human race's long-term future. He concluded that human society eventually would closely resemble the culture of 15th century China. Aside from Darwin's work, the development of a theory of history was also an active subject of study by individuals such as the historian Arnold Toynbee and, of course, Karl Marx. The philosopher Karl Popper expressed highly negative opinions of such work, which he called historicism. Asimov himself admitted to being influenced by the historian Gibbon's multi-tome work on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. As a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia, Asimov was certainly conversant with statistical mechanics, so it is no surprise that he came up with the idea of writing the Foundation stories. To this day the attempt to use methods developed for the physical sciences to the social sciences is controversial and tempting.
As psychohistory essentially plays the role of the main character of the initial Foundation stories, it is natural to ask how this would look from the viewpoint of an individual. How would circumstances force the predicted behavior to occur despite the individuals’ feeling that they controlled their own behavior? Another question is what would happen if the conditions on which the predictions were made were incorrect. For example, what would occur in the case of statistical mechanics if there was a hole in the container holding the gas? Molecules would escape, something perhaps not accounted for in the original calculations. The equivalent of an unaccounted for possibility in Asimov's story is a human who is significantly unlike all other human beings. I leave the details of this for those unfamiliar with the story to discover for themselves.
When returning to the Foundation series, Asimov decided to unite it with many of his other works to form a coherent future history. Among these were the robot stories, stories that asked another what-if question. Before Asimov's work, such stories usually involved the robots running amuck and attacking their creators. Asimov's mentor, Campbell, suggested that creative engineers build safety into their creations. Campbell pointed out that the machines should be designed to be “fail-safe." The idea led Asimov to develop his three laws of robotics. The concept was a natural source of stories by considering cases where things went wrong despite the three laws. Solving why things went wrong led to interesting tales. There are many reasons to criticize the practicality of the three laws now that we live in an age where AI is a real possibility. However, the laws hold considerable interest to those working on self-guiding machines such as autonomous vehicles. Asimov wished to use the robot stories to explain some of the events in his Foundation series. By the way, be aware that the film I Robot, seemingly related to Asimov's book of that name, has almost nothing to do with the book.
Given the above background, it appears that the Apple TV+ series does contain the ingredients of the original, but it has a different emphasis and was made for a very different audience. Characters and their development are primary in the TV series. In a way, this is interesting as it violates the basic premise of the original stories that individuals are not important. It may make for good viewing, but it seems all wrong in terms of the expectations of those of us who may have loved the originals. Oddly I also felt this about Asimov's own continuation of the stories. These seemed to be an attempt to be more character-focused, which I do not think Asimov was particularly adept at. If you have not read the books, you can better judge this new production on its own merits, but it is not the same story and does not have the same viewpoint! I wish they had used a different title, but marketing comes first when millions of dollars are involved. I am reasonably sure that if they did it the way I would have liked, they would lose most of their audience. I will watch it and try to see it in its own light, but I doubt if I can or will like it. However as of this writing, I have only seen the first two episodes and am not able to predict even my own future reaction.
As an aside, I would like to say something about the idea of developing a science of psychohistory. To my mind, Asimov's vision will not be fulfilled if today's understanding of complex systems is correct. For example, the weather, despite its complexity, is much simpler than human society. But while weather forecasting has improved with the help of technology such as satellite data collection, detailed prediction can only succeed for a limited time. This is shown from the results of dynamic systems theory and the phenomena of chaos. Think of the so-called butterfly effect where one small can influence a big change later. Like the weather, we may obtain limited predictions regarding human society, but the psychohistory of the Foundation series provides relatively exact results over thousands of years. Asimov does get around this problem somewhat in the series, but to tell of that would be a major spoiler! Other areas that have been studied using prediction models are economics, conflict, and even marriage. As I do not wish to turn this newsletter into an academic journal, I leave it to the interested reader to look further into the prediction problem and the theory of dynamic systems. One readable source is the award winning book Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. Naturally, I would be happy to respond to any inquiries regarding these matters.
This article has been somewhat different and more prolonged than those previously posted. Let me know if you would like occasional similar newsletters or not. As always, I would be interested and grateful for comments and different viewpoints.