Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  As in Part I, the characters seem like real people. Denison is not a hero (no doubt he functions as the author's representative: Denison's age is forty-eight; Asimov's, when he wrote the novel, was fifty-one), and Selene is not a heroine. Selene's attachment to the sullen Neville seems perverse, though her later rejection of him seems correspondingly more satisfying. Neville, on the other hand, is a more classic villain (although Asimov can probably understand his attachment to his lunar tunnels and sympathize with his desire to take the solid Moon along with him on his space travels). Gottstein seems a character of convenience. The reader longs a bit for Lamont's intensity or even Bronowski's wit.

  Denison, however, who downplays everything, has what was always for Asimov (and for those readers who like Asimov's fiction) the saving grace of rationality. He behaves rationally, understanding the stupidity of others (the stupidity against which the gods themselves, but not Denison in his later years, contend in vain), realizing that one must make people want what is good for them rather than waste effort and time on trying to make them stop doing what they want to do. He accepts the weaknesses of others as readily as he admits his own. He has learned (rather like the moment when Asimov learned to give up the smart-aleck quip and become lovable). At the age of twenty-five, he says, he was still such a child that he had to amuse himself by insulting a fool for no reason other than that he was a fool. Since Hallam's folly was not his fault, Denison admits he was the greater fool to insult him. Since then, he has learned not to insult others and has learned to accept help where it is offered without false pride and without illusions as to why it is offered. He refrains from hurting others. He wants Neville's name added to the scientific paper as co-author in order to save Neville's and Lunarite pride. When he first kisses Selene, he puts his hands behind his back; when he moves toward her at the end, he moves hesitantly.

  The final strength of Part III, the solution to the scientific problem, justifies or almost justifies its weaknesses. The concept of the cosmeg-Universe seems so neatly implied by the para-Universe, as the opposite end of the nuclear force spectrum, that it falls naturally into place as the last piece of the puzzle. And its existence is reinforced by the cosmological explanation it implies for the explosion of this Universe's original cosmic egg.

  The entire novel plays itself out on Asimov's traditional bare stage. Few surroundings were described; even the lunar environment was only referred to by the texture of its food, the lessened influence of gravity, and the presence of Earth in the lunar sky. Asimov fiction always had this characteristic, perhaps reinforced by his first book-editor's criticism of his attempts at colorful writing in the early drafts of his second novel, The Stars, Like Dust. More likely, writing went faster and more easily for Asimov with limited description, and Asimov always wrote swiftly. Moreover, ideas play themselves out most effectively and most clearly in isolation, and Asimov, in The Gods Themselves as the present example, was more concerned about the "idea" of lunar life than about its reality.

  The important aspect of The Gods Themselves may be not so much what it is but what it represented. Though better written, better conceived, and even more greatly honored than earlier Asimov work, The Gods Themselves was not as important as half a dozen of those earlier books. The novel came at a time when science fiction was maturing into individual statements by individual authors; each new novel was considered mostly on its own merits rather than on its context and its contribution to that context. Each, therefore, might be individually superior but less important in terms of the genre of which it was a part. So it was with The Gods Themselves. It was important as a statement by Asimov that science still could be the distinguishing characteristic of science fiction, that the older traditions of science fiction (not always honored in their own time, even by Asimov) could be built upon rather than discarded, that science-important fiction could be recognized as contemporary. And, as a personal statement, the novel demonstrated that Asimov still could write serious science fiction.

  The Gods Themselves came as a capstone for a career in which Asimov was recognized as an important writer of our time, a recognized master of the science popularization, a polymath profligate with books in many fields and pursued by opinion-seekers of all kinds on a variety of subjects, a witty, expensive, much-sought-after speaker, a commercial spokesman upon occasion, and only last a science-fiction writer, insofar as his general reputation went. The occasions of his one hundredth, two hundredth, three hundredth, and four hundredth book publications brought him considerable attention from the book world and perhaps even from the book-reading world. He was reviewed and interviewed and profiled in and on a variety of national media. He was an institution. The delightful part of the man was that, in spite of his fame and wealth and general reputation, he never forgot his roots. He still considered himself a science-fiction writer. He was shaped by science fiction and by John Campbell, just as he was shaped by an upbringing in Brooklyn and his servitude in the series of candy stores from which he was liberated only late in his teens, by his precociousness, and by his father's stern ethical principles. Out of all these influences came the Asimov stories in the Golden Age of the magazines and the books published when science fiction first was breaking into the book market. As a consequence, the stories influenced the genre because they led the way in critical times. They retain that importance, but it may exceed their basic value as literature.

  At the end of the first volume of his autobiography, Asimov wrote that in science fiction "I had gone as far as I could. I might do things that were better than `Nightfall,' The Foundation Trilogy, I, Robot, or The Caves of Steel, but surely not much better." That judgment was sound: he may have done better but not much better. What he did in his chosen field, however, was no small thing. Those works, and other Asimov stories and books, helped to shape science fiction just as Asimov himself was shaped by it. Asimov's presence in the field of science fiction had importance as a reminder not only of the past but of the way in which the past is a foundation for the present, and of the way in which the past can renew itself. Rationality still could be relevant.

  8 The Best-Selling Author

  On January 15, 1981, Asimov started on a path that would take him where he had never expected to arrive, what 261 earlier books had taught him not to expect, to a place on the nation's best-seller lists. On that date Hugh O'Neill, Asimov's new editor at Doubleday, asked him to see Betty Prashker, an editor higher in the editorial chain of command. Prashker told Asimov that Doubleday wanted him to write a novel. In his memoir Asimov recorded his typical objections, which Prashker brushed aside by saying that Doubleday was going to send him a contract with a large advance, which four days later turned out to be the biggest Asimov had ever received, $50,000, ten times as much as he usually got from Doubleday.

  The evening of his conversation with Prashker, Asimov got a telephone call from Pat LoBrutto, the editor in charge of science fiction at Doubleday, who said, "When Betty said `a novel,' she meant `a science-fiction novel'; and when we say `a science-fiction novel' we mean `a Foundation novel.'"

  Asimov protested that he didn't know if he could write novels any more (The Gods Themselves was almost a decade in the past, and, aside from the novelization of Fantastic Voyage, it had come 15 years after his previous novel, The Naked Sun). Moreover, he said that Doubleday would lose its shirt with that kind of advance.

  But Doubleday brushed aside his objections and after four months of finishing up other projects, Asimov sat down to come up with an idea by re-reading The Foundation Trilogy. He found it a page-turner, having forgotten much of how it was going to turn out. But he also recognized its flaws, particularly its lack of action and over-dependence on dialogue. Although he does not say so in his memoir, in an article for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which later was reprinted as an introduction for the 1982 edition of The Foundation Trilogy, he wrote:

  I read it [the Trilogy] with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothin
g ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense.

  What was all the fuss about, then? Why did everyone want more of that stuff? To be sure, I couldn't help but notice that I was turning the pages eagerly, and that I was upset when I finished the book, and that I wanted more, but I was the author for goodness' sake. You couldn't go by me.

  I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting on giving back the money when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some sentences by science-fiction writer and critic James Gunn, who, in connection with the Foundation series said, "Action and romance have little to do with the success of the Trilogy virtually all the action takes place offstage, and the romance is invisible but the stories provide a detective-story fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas."

  Oh well, if what was needed were "permutations and reversals of ideas," then that I could supply. Panic receded, and on June 10, 1981, I dug out the fourteen pages I had written more than eight years before. . . .

  Asimov finished the novel on March 25, 1982, after a difficult nine months for himself and his wife, as his lack of confidence in what he was doing (and his inability to take on large non-fiction projects) left him moody and depressed. His title for the novel was Lightning Rod, but Doubleday insisted that it have "Foundation" in the title, and Foundation's Edge was published in September. Immediately it appeared in twelfth place on The New York Times' best-seller list, rose to third, and spent twenty-five weeks on the list.

  Its success, however, set off a small alarm in Asimov's mind: now Doubleday would never let him stop writing novels. And it never did. Foundation's Edge was followed by The Robots of Dawn in 1983, Robots and Empire in 1985, Foundation and Earth in 1986, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain in 1987, Prelude to Foundation in 1988, Nemesis in 1989, and Forward the Foundation, published posthumously in 1993. Meanwhile, his Norby collaborations with his wife Janet were also appearing, as well as the expansions of his favorite short stories by Robert Silverberg, Nightfall in 1990, The Ugly Little Boy in 1992, and The Positronic Man ("The Bicentennial Man") in 1993.

  The Robots of Dawn made the best-seller lists, but for fewer weeks than Foundation's Edge. Robots and Empire made Publisher's Weekly's best-seller list but not that of The New York Times. Foundation and Earth, however, returned Asimov to both lists. Nemesis also was, in Asimov's words, "quite successful."

  He still found time for other books. After 1979, he published 21 collections of SF, fantasy, and mystery stories; 105 anthologies, almost all in collaboration with Martin H. Greenberg (and a combination of other editors); two collections of SF essays (from his magazine editorials); 86 books on science; two on history, one on the Bible, three on literature, three humor and satire collections, three volumes of autobiography; and eleven miscellaneous books.

  How can the autumnal success of Asimov's SF novels be explained? Many theories have been advanced, among them the possibility that Asimov's readership (from his more than 200 non-SF books as well as his still-in-print SF titles) had built itself to the point where the pent-up desire for his novels coincided with a mature audience that could afford to purchase hard-cover editions and was too impatient to wait for the paperback. The same thing happened to Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the other two of what Asimov liked to call ''the Big Three." Indeed, in 1982 Heinlein produced Friday and Clarke produced 2010: Odyssey Two and both appeared on the best-seller lists at the same time as Foundation's Edge. For a time more than half the top ten titles were science-fiction or fantasy titles.

  Doubleday's sense of the marketplace was better than Asimov's. Asimov never concerned himself about the marketplace. He preferred low advances so that publishers would allow him to write whatever he wanted. Doubleday, which had been one of the pioneers of SF in hardcovers, also had helped for some 20 years to put a ceiling on sales of SF hardcovers; now, through Asimov, it was reinforcing the concept of the SF bestseller.

  When SF novels began to be published following World War II, publishers' expectations placed a cap on their sales. Publishers expected novels to have a top sale of about 5,000 copies, and printed no more. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But sales of SF began picking up in the 1970s. All through the 1970s and early 1980s the number of titles had escalated from a few hundred a year to more than a thousand by 1982 (six years later they would reach almost two thousand a year), Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) had sold with remarkable persistence in paperback as well as the phenomenal The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and some hard-cover titles, particularly The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in 1974 and Herbert's Children of Dune in 1976, had demonstrated that SF novels could actually become best sellers. Authors such as Heinlein, Clarke, and Herbert were commanding advances (of a half-million dollars to a million and a half) that made Asimov's advance seem minuscule by comparison.

  All this had shifted the evolutionary development of science fiction from the magazine to the book. Approximately the same number of magazines (half a dozen) were being published, and with the same average circulation (50,000-100,000 or so) but books had proliferated. More books were being published than magazine stories and for far greater financial return, and experienced authors were spending their time writing novels rather than stories. Magazine editors like John Campbell and H.L. Gold and Tony Boucher no longer shaped stories and careers, and in the process, science fiction itself; now power was in the hands of book editors such as Donald Wollheim, Pat LoBrutto, David Hartwell, and particularly the marketing genius Judy-Lynn Benjamin del Rey, and they were interested not in realizing a consistent generic vision for a group of identifiable subscribers but in selling diverse books to a difficult-to-define general audience.

  Foundation's Edge, then, was published in the expectation that it would become a best seller (and that expectation was reflected in the financial incentives of the contract); that, too, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Copies were printed by the tens of thousands; press releases flowed; advertisements appeared in general as well as specialized media; and, most of all, salesmen persuaded booksellers to stock the book in large quantities, and therefore to display the book prominently where casual shoppers as well as knowledgeable SF readers would notice and perhaps even buy it.

  What was the excitement about? In Foundation's Edge, 48 F.E., the First Foundation has consolidated its position in the Galaxy: through the Foundation Federation it controls approximately one-third of the inhabited planets and influences what it doesn't control. A young Councilman, Golan Trevise, is stirring up controversy with statements that the Second Foundation hasn't been destroyed. His reason, he says privately, is that Seldon's Plan is too closely on course, and some external agency must be controlling events. Trevise is betrayed by fellow Councilman Munn Li Compor, a seeming friend, to Mayor Harlo Branno. Branno arrests Trevise and later exiles him into space in a powerful new computerized pocket-cruiser in the company of Janov Pelorat, an aging historian who wants to locate Earth, the legendary birthplace of humanity. Branno then sends Compor to follow them.

  After various intrigues and doublethinks (Asimov's "reversals of ideas"), Trevise and Pelorat arrive at a planet called Gaia, which might be but isn't Earth, whose parts, organic and inorganic, form a telepathic gestalt. Also gathering in spaceships near Gaia are Branno, who has hoped to trap the Second Foundation into revealing itself, and then to destroy it through the development of a mental shield, and Stor Gendibal, an ambitious young Speaker of the Second Foundation, who also has maintained that Seldon's Plan has been impossibly consistent and that a mysterious third party must be responsible.

  A three-way mental battle ensues in which Trevise, who has been selected by Gaia to make the crucial choice for the future of the Galaxy, opts for Gaia's proposal. Branno and Gendibal are sent back to their respective Foundations with their memories adjusted to eliminate
recollections of Gaia and the experiences that led to the confrontation but otherwise to believe that each had won. Pelorat stays on Gaia with a young woman he loves (and whom Trevise accuses of being a robot). And Trevise leaves to search for the elusive Earth. Asimov concluded with a veiled promise ("The End [for now]") of a sequel.

  This brief summary gives little suggestion of the flavor of the novel. In style it belongs to the 1940s not simply to science fiction's 1940s but to Asimov's 1940s. It is no novel of character not even a Caves of Steel or a Gods Themselves but a discursive novel of ideas, much like the other Foundation stories. As the first extended treatment (140,000 words compared to the 50,000 words of "The Mule" or "Search by the Foundation") in fact the longest novel Asimov had written it hangs together well.

  Like the stories that make up The Foundation Trilogy, Foundation's Edge is largely dialogue, like them it contains little action, and like them it is readable, involving, and intellectually complicated. As Jorane Sutt tells Hober Mallow in "The Merchant Princes," "There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings," so it is with Foundation's Edge. The suspense of the novel is sustained by repeated examples of motivation within motivation, wheels within wheels. Harlo Branna, for instance, has Trevise arrested on an accusation of treason. But in a personal conference, she reveals that she really wants him to search for the Second Foundation. But as she tells her Director of Security, Liono Kodell, what she really intends him to do is to serve as a lightning rod (Asimov's working title for the novel), leading the Second Foundation to reveal itself.