Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  The chance of encountering a civilization, then, that is at some level near our own would have to be very small.

  And yet (and this is Clement’s Paradox), science fiction writers consistently show alien civilizations to be fairly close in technological level to Earth’s. They might be a little more primitive or a little more advanced, but considering the rate at which technology advances on Earth these days, it would seem that the aliens are not more than a few thousand years behind us at most, or a few hundred years ahead of us at best.

  How enormous the odds are against that!

  As far as I know, however, science fiction writers didn’t worry about this. Certainly, I didn’t. Since I began publishing in 1939, when Edward E. Smith was at the very height of his success (though John Campbell had just retired to the job of editing Astounding), I naturally tried my hand at the “many-intelligence” galaxy myself.

  For instance, there was my eighth published story, “Homo Sol,” which appeared in the September, 1940 Astounding. It dealt with a galactic empire consisting of the civilized beings from many, many planetary systems-each planetary system containing a different type of intelligent being. Each bore the name of the native star in the species name, so that there would be “Homo Arcturus,” “Homo Canopus “ and so on. The plot dealt with Earth’s coming of technological age and the possible entry of Earthmen (“Homo Sol,” you see) into the empire.

  And now there came a struggle between John Campbell and myself. John could not help but feel that people of northwest European descent (like himself) were in the forefront of human civilization and that all other people lagged behind. Expanding this view to a galactic scale, he viewed Earthmen as the “northwest Europeans” of the galaxy. He did not like to see Earthmen lose out to aliens, or to have

  Earthmen pictured as in any way inferior. Even if Earthmen were behind technologically, they should win anyway because they invariably were smarter, or braver, or had a superior sense of humor, or something.

  I, however, was not of northwest European stock, and, as a matter of fact (this was 1940, remember, and the Nazis were in the process of wiping out the European Jews), I was no great admirer of them. I felt that Earthmen, if they symbolized these northwest Europeans according to the Campbellian outlook, might well prove inferior in many vital ways to other civilized races; that Earthmen might lose out to the aliens; that they might even deserve to lose out.

  However, John Campbell won out. He was a charismatic and overwhelming person, and I was barely twenty years old, very much in awe of him, and very anxious to sell stories to him. So I gave in, adjusted the story to suit his prejudices and have been ashamed of that ever since.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t plan to have that happen again, ever. I wrote a sequel to “Homo Sol,” which I called “The Imaginary,” in which I evaded the issue by having Earthmen not appear (and Campbell rejected it). I wrote another story in which Earthmen fought villainous extraterrestrial overlords, and felt that would be all right, for the overlords were transparent symbols of the Nazis (and, as it happened, Campbell rejected that, too).

  I continued to want to write “superscience stories” my way, however, and continued to probe for strategies that would allow me to do so without encountering Campbellian resistance.

  I arrived at the answer when I first thought of my story “Foundation.” For it, I needed a galactic empire, as in “Homo Sol,” and I wanted a free hand to have it develop as I wished. The answer, when it came to me, was so simple, I can only wonder why it took me so long to reach it. Instead of having an empire with no human beings as in “The Imaginary,” I would have an empire with nothing but human beings. I would not even have robots in it. Thus was born the “all-human galaxy.”

  It worked remarkably well for me. Campbell never raised any objections; never suggested that I ought to insert a few alien races; never asked why they were missing. He threw himself into the spirit of the stories and accepted my galactic empire on my terms, and I never had to take up the problem of racial superiority/inferiority.

  Nor did I spend time worrying about the rationale behind the all-human galaxy myself. I had what

  I wanted, and I was satisfied.

  I did not ask myself, for instance, why it was that human beings were the only intelligent species in the galaxy. As it happens, it is possible that though planets are extremely numerous, relatively few are habitable; or that though many planets may be habitable, few may develop life; or that though many planets may be lifebearing, few indeed may develop intelligent life or civilizations. Nevertheless, I made no effort whatsoever to state any of this explicitly as explanation for what I was describing. It is only with my new novel Foundation’s Edge, written forty years after the series had begun, that I have started to explore the rationale behind it.

  Nor did I ask myself, at the start, if the idea were a novel one. Years later, I began to think that no one before myself had ever postulated an all-human galaxy. It seems to have been my invention (though I stand ready to be corrected in this by some SF-historian more knowledgeable than myself).

  If I did indeed invent the concept, it is a useful one, quite apart from the role it played in the duel between Campbell and myself (a duel which Campbell never knew existed). By removing the alien element, the play and interplay of human beings can be followed on an enormous canvas. Writers can deal with human interactions (only) on different worlds and within different societies and it gives rise to interesting opportunities of all sorts.

  And, what is more, the all-human galaxy offers a way of getting around Clement’s Paradox- perhaps the only way of doing so.

  Psychohistory

  “Psychohistory” is one of three words (that I know of) that I get early-use credit for in The Oxford English Dictionary. The other two, for the record, are “positronic” and “robotics.”

  This is not at all unusual. Every science fiction writer makes up words and sometimes they actually penetrate the language (but then English is notoriously hospitable to neologisms-which is one of its strengths, in my opinion).

  The more unimaginative and inevitable a word is, the more likely it is to be adopted, and I am not prone to making up words wildly. Thus, once the positron was discovered and named in 1935, and once “robot” became accepted as a term for a humaniform automaton in the 1920s, it was simply a matter of time before the words “positronic” and “robotics” appeared in print. That I seem to have been the first in each case is purely accidental.

  In fact, when I first used the word “positronic” in print (in my story “Reason,” which appeared in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction) as a natural analogue of “electronic,” I thought the word already existed. The same was true when I first used the word “robotics,” in my story “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

  In the case of “psychohistory,” however, I suspected that the word was not in common use, and might even never have been used before. (Actually, the O.E.D. cites one example of its use as early as 1934.) I first used it in my story, “Foundation,” which appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

  I came up with the word because John Campbell and I were discussing the course I was to take in the Foundation series once I came to him with my initial idea on the subject. I was quite frank in my intention of using Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as my model and as a basic guide for plot ideas, but I needed something that would make science fiction out of it. I couldn’t simply call it the Galactic Empire and then just treat it as a hypertrophied Roman Empire.

  So I suggested we add the fact that a mathematical treatment existed whereby the future could be predicted in a statistical fashion, and I called it “psychohistory.” Actually, it was a poor word and did not represent what I truly meant. I should have called it “psychosociology” (a word which the O.E.D. lists as having first been used in 1928). However, I was so intent on history, thanks to Gibbon, that I could
think of nothing but psychohistory. In any case, Campbell was enthusiastic about the idea and we were off and running. I modeled my concept of psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases, which I had been beat over the head with in my physical chemistry classes. The molecules making up gases moved in an absolutely random fashion in any direction in three dimensions and in a wide range of speeds. Nevertheless, one could fairly describe what those motions would be on the average and work out the gas laws from those average motions with an enormous degree of precision. In other words, although one couldn’t possibly predict what a single molecule would do, one could accurately predict what umptillions of them would do. So I applied that notion to human beings. Each individual human being might have “free will,” but a huge mob of them should behave with some sort of predictability, and the analysis of “mob behavior” was my psychohistory. There were two conditions that I had to set up in order to make it work, and they were not chosen carelessly. I picked them in order to make psychohistory more like kinetic theory. First, I had to deal with a large number of human beings, as kinetic theory worked with a large number of molecules. Neither would work for small numbers. It is for that reason that I had the Galactic Empire consist of twenty-five million worlds, each with an average population of four billion. That meant a total human population of one hundred quadrillion. (In my heart, I didn’t think that was enough, but I didn’t want to place any greater strain on the suspension of disbelief than I absolutely had to.) Second, I had to retain the “randomness” factor. I couldn’t expect human beings to behave as randomly as molecules, but they might approach such behavior if they had no idea as to what was expected of them. So it was necessary to suppose that human beings in general did not know what the predictions of psychohistory were and therefore would not tailor their activities to suit. Much later in the game, I thought of a third condition that I didn’t think of earlier simply because I had taken it so completely for granted. The kinetic theory assumes that gases are made up of nothing but molecules, and psychohistory will only work if the hosts of intelligence are made up of nothing but human beings. In other words, the presence of aliens with non-human intelligence might well bollix the works.

  This situation may actually develop in future books of the Foundation series, but so far I have stayed clear of non-human intelligences in my Galactic Empire (partly because Campbell and I disagreed fundamentally on what their role would be if they existed and since neither of us would give in).

  Eventually, I thought that my psycho history would fade out of human consciousness because the term came to be used by psychiatrists for the study of the psychiatric background of individuals (such as Woodrow Wilson, Sigmund Freud, or Adolf Hitler) who had some pronounced effect on history. Naturally, since I felt a proprietary interest in the term psychohistory as a predictive study of large faceless masses of human beings, I resented the new use of the word.

  But then as time went on, I grew more philosophical. After all, it might well be that there could be no analogy drawn between molecules and human beings and that there could be no way of predicting human behavior. As mathematicians began to be interested in the details of what is now called “chaos,” it seemed to me that human history might prove to be essentially “chaotic” so that there could be no psychohistory. Indeed, the question of whether psychohistory can be worked out or not lies at the center of the novel I have recently completed, Prelu de to Foundation, in which Hari Seldon (the founder of psychohistory) is portrayed as a young man who is in the process of trying to devise the science.

  Imagine, then, how exciting it is for me to see that scientists are increasingly interested in my psychohistory, even though they may not be aware that that’s what the study is called and may never have read any of my Foundation novels, and thus may not know of my involvement. (Who cares? The concept is more important than I am.)

  Some months ago, a reader, Tom Wilsdon of Arden, North Carolina, sent me a clipping from the April 23, 1987, issue of Machine Design. It reads as follows, in full:

  “A computer model originally intended to simulate liquid turbulence has been used to model group behavior. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratories have found that there is a similarity between group behavior and certain physical phenomena. To do the analysis, they assigned certain physical characteristics such as level of excitement, fear, and size of the crowd to model parameters. The interaction of the crowd closely paralleled the turbulent flow equations. Although the analysis cannot predict exactly what a group will do, it reportedly does help determine the most probable consequence of a given event.”

  Then, too, Roger N. Shepard, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has published an article in the September 11, 1987 issue of Science entitled “Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science.”

  Unfortunately, although I made a valiant effort to read it, the mathematics was too tough for me and even the nonmathematical portions produced only a rather dim and hazy understanding within me. However, here is the summary of the article as given at the beginning:

  “A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along with the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms.”

  As I said, I don’t really understand this but I have the feeling that Hari Seldon would understand it without trouble. I am also concerned, suddenly, that psychohistory may be developed within the next century. I placed its development 20,000 years in the future. Is this going to be another case of my science- fictional imagination falling ludicrously short?

  Science Fiction Series

  I have received a letter from Nancy Bykowski of Bolingbrook, Illinois, which says, in part, “I have noticed the trend in recent years towards trilogies and serial volumes. I enjoy reading a series of books set in the same background, but it can be frustrating when the books do not stand alone…But there are some authors out there that seem to be writing serials so that we will be forced to buy their next book. I believe I read somewhere that the publishers tend to encourage that kind of thinking. So my question to you is, did you write your Foundation trilogy in response to a request from a publisher, or was it simply the result of an idea that was too big for one volume?”

  As it happens, I, too, have noticed the tendency for novels to come in clumps these days. (It’s true of movies, also. Someday, we will have a motion picture called Rocky XVII Meets Superman XI.)

  But why is that? Why are so many writers turning out a series of connected novels?

  One very obvious reason is that it makes life simpler for them. Instead of having to invent a new social background for each story, they can make use of one that they have already devised. The writer can thus begin a new novel with a ready-made background and sometimes with ready-made characters. If you're not a writer yourself, you have no idea how much mental agony and psychic wear-and-tear that saves.

  Then, too, readers who have enjoyed a book often welcome a return of the same characters and background. As a result, the pressure for a sequel and even for a continuing series is likely to come, at least to begin with, from those readers rather than from the author or publisher.

  Publishers naturally welcome any book in which the chance of success and profitability is high. They are always more eager to receive a manuscript from an established writer than from a newcomer because they can usually be sure that the former will be profitable, while the latter always represents a risk.

  By s
imilar reasoning publishers would prefer to have an established writer do another book of a popular series than venture in a new direction altogether. The series book is more nearly a sure thing, and publishers are almost as fond of a sure thing as you and I are…

  However, are these series of novels written simply to force readers to buy the next book against his will? Of course not. If readers don't like a particular book, they are not likely to buy a sequel. If they like the first three books of a series and find the fourth disappointing, they are less likely to buy the fifth.

  In short, a maintained popularity and profitability will tend to keep a series going indefinitely. Non-popularity or declining popularity will bring an end to the series quickly.

  As a matter of fact, far from a series of books continuing just to lure reluctant readers into purchasing volumes that they don't really want to read, it is the reverse that is likely to be true. It is the writer, not the reader, who is likely to be victimized. After all, writing a long series of related books can grow awfully tiresome for a writer. He may have sucked the juice out of his characters and background and may long to go in other directions, thus stretching and resting his cramped and aching mind.

  The writer therefore quits and goes about his business-and then a storm arises. Readers express loud disappointment and make demands for another book in the series. Publishers, becoming aware of this, and seeing no reason to allow profitability to go glimmering, then proceed to put pressure on the writer, who is often far less enthusiastic about his series than anyone else is-and, in the end, he must write. In that case, anyone who says to him, “You're turning out endless reams of this junk just to con the reader into buying your books,” is likely to get a punch in the mouth if the writer is of the violent persuasion, or a sad look if the writer is as gentle and lovable as I am.