TI04 Asimov 2: Foundation

In 1941, World War II was raging in Europe, and 21-year-old Isaac Asimov was on his way to pitch his editor, John W. Campbell, a new story idea. Except he didn't have one. But he did have with him a well-thumbed copy of his favorite book, which contained the librettos of Gilbert and Sullivan's light operettas. Yes, Asimov was a massive fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. Opening it at random, he hit the page depicting the fairy queen from Iolanthe kneeling before a soldier. Instantly inspired, Asimov began to think about soldiers, empires, the Roman Empire. Why not a galactic empire? Bursting with enthusiasm, he sold the idea to Campbell, and Foundation was born.

Welcome to the Tech Imaginarium. Join us as we explore how science fiction made the modern world.

Hi there, my name's John Helmer.

I'm here as ever with my good friend and SF expert, Isri Karlabach.

Hello.

This is the second of our episodes about Isaac Asimov. Last time we discussed his robot stories and the laws he devised for robots that he then worried away at in a series of related works. This time we're looking at his other major franchise, if I can use that slightly anachronistic 21st century framing, the Foundation series. The original Foundation trilogy was published from 1951 to '53, so not long after I, Robot. And by 1958, the Foundation books and the robot books had made him famous. He was able to walk away from his Boston University biochemistry post to write full-time, the dream of every writer. And this begins the second phase of his life. Hack facts.

By the 1970s, Isaac Asimov was the public face of American science writing—courted by NASA, quoted by presidents. After a lull of nearly 15 years, he came back to major fiction in 1972 with "The Gods Themselves," which won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel. 4 years later, "The Bicentennial Man" did the same in the novelette category. In 1977, he lent his name to Isaac Asimov's science fiction magazine, which is still publishing today. The American Humanist Association made him Humanist of the Year in 1984 and elected him president a year later.

A bit ironic, really, as he wrote all that stuff about robots. He died in 1992 of heart and kidney failure. A decade on, his widow, Janet, revealed that the cause had actually been AIDS, which he contracted from a blood transfusion during 1983 bypass surgery. And it'd been kept secret on doctor's advice, apparently. So it goes. Let's start with the Foundation trilogy. This kicks off with the original premise he sold to his publisher at lunch, as Ezri mentioned on the front, and grows over time with a host of subsequently added sequels and prequels, in the process of which it gets retrofitted into the Robot series in a way that delighted some and infuriated others. So I'm interested to find out which of those camps you're in, Ezri. So here's the initial setup for Foundation. On the franchise. In a galactic empire of 25 million inhabited worlds, the mathematician Hari Seldon has developed a new science, psychohistory, which you'll see on Esri's shirt here, capable of predicting the future behaviour of very large populations using the same statistical certainties that govern gas molecules. Interestingly enough, Seldon foresees the inevitable fall of the empire and a subsequent dark age of 30,000 years. He can't stop that happening, but his calculations show that can shorten the period of barbarism by establishing two foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy to preserve and accelerate civilization. There's a spoiler in that. Unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of spoilers, um, in this episode, I'm afraid. We'll look at Asimov's view of history as dramatized in the books, uh, the things that influenced him and how he has influenced people down to the present day. But before we get into all that, Esri, I read Foundation when I was in my teens, which was a lot closer to its publication date than I'd really like to admit. But how did you first come across the series, and how would you introduce it to somebody who was completely new to it?

Yeah, I also read the Foundation trilogy in my teens. It sort of sounds like a confession. I was a teenage psychohistorian. Um, and incidentally, John, before we go into this, the Foundation trilogy, Asimov's groundbreaking science fiction epic, shares its origins with another groundbreaking technological innovation: Fairy lights. In 1882, Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, Iolanthe, which, as we've heard, gave Asimov the idea for Foundation, opened in London. And in the production, the principal fairies in the play's really beautifully absurd story wore electric lights in their hair. And the phrase fairy lights entered the English language. So now you know.

I read this about the same time as I went to see a Gilbert and Sullivan production of Iolanthe. Um, with the school. I never in a million years would have put those two things together. No.

Anyway, by 1974, I'd already devoured many stories by Asimov, like the I, Robot collection, Nightfall, Pebble in the Sky, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun. And I think I read all of his juvenile novels— we call them young adult novels now— about the space explorer David Lucky Starr. Of course, I knew of the Foundation trilogy, but I remember being reluctant to tackle it because I'd been told by some older science fiction fans, university students— what an unreliable lot they are— that it would be too hard for me. Eventually, maybe late '74 and '75, I took the plunge, saved up my pocket money, and bought all three books at once. I've still got them here. The COVID price on each was 35p, so I'd stumped up a grand total of £1.05 and hurried home with the three books clutched in my nervous adolescent hands. Um, but before I started reading, I spent a long time— I remember it now as hours, but probably only 10 minutes or something, just staring at the 3 covers and looking at the illustrations by the legendary SF artist Chris Foss. That was enough to send me into a dream world of interstellar travel and unutterably cool tech from which endless adventures were possible. Funnily enough, despite studying the covers so hard, I failed to notice the crucial thing about them. And it was only when a school friend came around to my house and placed the 3 books next to each other, carefully aligned, that I realized the 3 covers formed one one continuous painting. I was completely blown away by that, and it made my approach to the books even more reverential. Of course, at that age, I didn't recognize what Asimov himself later called the pulpy elements in the story, and I don't think it occurred to me at all to wonder why there were no aliens, no computers, and no robots in this far-future tale of galactic empire. I was just gripped by the ideas and by the imaginative work I had to do as a reader, which, as we know, makes it all the more real. As they say, radio is just like television, but with better pictures. Looking at the trilogy again now, I can see its shortcomings and also some of its unintentional comedy moments, such as when Salvor Hardin lights up a long cigar of vegan tobacco. Obviously, it is tobacco from a planet called Vega, and it's probably pronounced Vega, but anyway. There's the superbly comic character of Lord Dorwin, and I'm pretty sure Asimov meant him to be a comic character, an 18th-century fop transported into a far-future psychohistorical drama. He takes snuff, has elaborately permed hair, makes elegant hand gestures while speaking, and cannot pronounce the letter R. So the text faithfully replaces every R with a W in Dorwin's dialogue, and we get things like elementary and polyphony. However, when he says the word rank, the W mysteriously disappears. Good job too. We have to bear in mind that Asimov was in his 20s when he wrote this stuff, um, and was not what we would call a man of the world. He was a man of many worlds, if you like, and, and that's what I was so drawn to. Um, but despite his undeniable position, I think, as I said last time, as at the head of the SF pantheon. Today, I would really only recommend the Foundation trilogy to new readers with some serious caveats.

Okay, so let's focus on the original trilogy before we look at how Asimov built it out and retrofitted it over the years. First novel, Foundation, follows Terminus through its early centuries as the Empire crumbles. It survives a sequence of pre-calculated Seldon crises, first by playing rival warlords off against each other using a religion of science, then by using trade. Each crisis is resolved not by individual heroism, but by the historical mathematical inevitability Seldon foresaw. So on to the second volume, Foundation and Empire. The plan suddenly breaks. A mutant warlord known only as the Mule, a single individual with the power to manipulate emotions not through social media, but with the power of his mind, appears from nowhere and conquers the Foundation. Seldon's equations had no way of pricing him in. Two survivors, Beta Darrell and Toran Darrell, escape and uncover the Mule's identity in the ruins of Trantor itself. See what I mean about spoilers? On to the third volume, Second Foundation. The third, confusingly, reveals that Seldon hedged his bets. A hidden Second Foundation, composed not of physical scientists but of mentalics, or mentalists, maybe, psychologists who have developed psychohistory into a science of the individual mind, and they can kind of read minds and other psychic powers. It's been quietly steering events all along. The Mule hunts them and fails. After his death, the First Foundation hunts them too, fearing manipulation. The trilogy ends with the Second Foundation's location apparently revealed, the plan apparently back on course, and a strong hint that almost nothing the reader has just been told can be trusted at face value. So, Esri, where do you place the trilogy within Asimov's wider œuvre? How successful do you think it is as a work of science fiction, and to what extent does it deserve its prominence in the canon?

Well, as ever, there are different ways to assess both its place in Asimov's vast output and its success. I mean, one indicator is that in 1966 it won a special Hugo Award for best all-time series, beating The Lord The Rings, among other heavyweight competitors. Like I, Robot, the original Foundation trilogy has never gone out of print, so there's definitely a commercial indicator. It's sold around 20 million copies worldwide to date, and that's just the original trilogy, not including any of the prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. And it still gets endlessly discussed and debated within SF fan circles and the burgeoning academic field of science fiction studies. Despite being basically 3 fix-up novels, as we heard in relation to I, Robot, a novel made up of previously published short stories with some bits thrown in, the overall coherence of the narrative is actually pretty impressive. And again, despite the well-documented limits to Asimov's ability at that age to draw convincing character portraits or delve into his characters' inner lives in a meaningful way, he still manages to create characters and scenes that stay with you long after you've read about them. Just to give one example, the famous quote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," is spoken by Salvor Hardin. It gets quoted in all kinds of different contexts now, including, I should say, in the Apple TV adaptation. But outside of that, often by people who don't even know it's from a science fiction novel. In the novel, we're told that Hardin has that saying framed on the wall behind his desk. And this, I think, is because it represents such a core part of Asimov's own philosophy. He was a rationalist and a humanist, profoundly opposed to war and racism and the degradation of human dignity in any form. The entire Foundation trilogy contains just 3 scenes of a violent nature. And while there are wars and battles constantly going on amongst all these inhabited planets, Asimov wisely, in my opinion, treats them the way a Greek chorus does in the plays of antiquity. They happen offstage, so to speak, and we're told about them afterwards. Frankly, I find that refreshing in our era of graphic everything, when storytellers across all media tend to rely too much on prurience and shock. I think there are a couple of specific attributes to Foundation that also contribute to its enduring appeal and influence. First, Asimov sets out a series of problems facing a human-only but far-flung galactic civilization, and has his characters set about solving them rationally. That's evident in a lot of his work, as you mentioned, John, in, in I, Robot as well, and in the non-SF mystery stories he wrote. Because as a scientist, he was both fascinated and motivated by rational problem-solving processes. That's not something unique to Asimov, of course, but the way he presents it has, I think, influenced many other science fiction writers. The second thing is the device he uses of having extracts from Encyclopedia Galactica to explain key elements in the story provides a kind of fictional third-party reference source. And this gets cited by Jack Dann in his book, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History, as the original use of an authoritative yet invented source to provide background, set the scene, or act as a means of bridging long gaps in a narrative's timeline.. And that's been copied, adapted, and reused many times in science fiction, notably by the New Wave, including Michael Moorcock, who added his own twist by frequently using found sources from actual newspapers and magazines, headlines, billboard ads, and so on. I see it as a link here with the great Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem, who wrote many wonderful stories in the form of reports by scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and academics living in various future periods. And actually, give Lem the last word on the question of whether Foundation deserves its place in the SF canon. He summed up a lot of people's views, I think, when he said, 'Asimov's Foundation trilogy is a remarkable achievement, a science fiction series of books by a man who knows his science. Unfortunately, Asimov is not a great writer.' Nevertheless, Lem recognized the profound influence Foundation had on science fiction and particularly praised the way it tackles the question of society's relationship with technology.. He called it above all a novel of ideas with science and the dialectic of history as its principal protagonists.

That saying of, I can't remember who actually says it, but within the Foundation trilogy, violence is the last resort of the incompetent. I can remember chess nerds saying it at school as they were being beaten up by bullies. Yes. It was sort of in the water in that sense. Yeah. I should also say I found much more trouble talking about Asimov as a writer. And, you know, I can't help the fact that I'm a literature grad and it grates. I find a lot of his kind of narrative techniques very repetitive. I think he's best as a short story writer. And I really enjoyed the robot stories more because they kind of work as variations on a theme. But here you again and again get a setup where kind of two men usually are facing off against each other and having a kind of interchange where they're clashing. And one of them, usually the representative of the Foundation or one of our heroes, turns out to have these cards up his sleeve that he then plays. And so it's kind of like, you know, Salva Hardin, all my ships are at the limit of the galaxy about to come and destroy your planet, And then there's a kind of aha moment where he says, "Ah yes, but my ships are behind the Mahan. I've now in fact wiped them all out and I'm deposing you, blub." You know, I'm kind of extrapolating the style of it, but it happens again and again. And I found that really slightly difficult. I read the first book when I was very young. My father brought it for me and I wanted to be a writer. And of course, the first thing I did is sat down and wrote my own science fiction story. And when I look back at it, it, I realized it was two blokes in a room discussing things that are happening on a planet somewhere else. And I kind of looked at it, I thought, this stuff's a bit lame, it's a bit stilted. And what I'd written was an Asimov parody. I think the first thing a lot of writers do is to write parodies of the stuff that they read. So I'm just kind of logging that. Actually, on the level of ideas that he introduces, I think it's fascinating. And I think Asimov is worth reading and you have to kind of put away your, your English goggles to really enjoy it. And we're going to get into the ideas behind it, which is so interesting in a bit more detail later. But first of all, I want to talk now about the extension of the Foundation franchise as beyond the first 3 books, the prequels, sequels. Tell us about them, please, because I've got to admit, full disclosure, I haven't read them.

Okay, shock reveal time. I haven't read them either, um, because by the time Foundation's Edge appeared in 1982, I'd moved on to other things. I was more interested in people like Sladek, Brunner, Ballard, Harlan Ellison, and so on. They made us fiction, particularly Foundation, look old hat, precisely for the reasons that you've just been describing. And even when I seriously reread Asimov about 10 years ago, I just stuck to the things that I knew and loved, and I continued to ignore the franchise element.

So these later additions to the franchise represent increase or dilution from your point of view? I mean, you can take two views of his motives in doing it. One is that he was so fired up with what he'd created in the trilogy, that it inspired him to extend the world he had made in those titles. Actually, it's much more than a world. It's a whole cosmos. You can see that expansion as having grown from a good seed and flowered wonderfully. On the other hand, if you're cynical like me, you can take the view that, say, people bought it in large numbers. So Asimov reckoned he could flog a few more books with the same ideas and characters. And the changes and additions aren't necessarily a flowering. He might express dissatisfaction with what he'd written in the '40s and '50s. You know, you change, don't you, as a person over time? Then again, maybe with one eye on his legacy as he prospered and became a public man, he wanted to give a more imposing and architectural character to his overall body of work. He was starting to think about the legacy. So what, if any, of those options would you say is behind his subsequent output under the Foundation banner? I mean, I know you haven't read it, but I know, you know, you're a serious academic and you will know what's in them.

Well, I know the story of how they came about because I've read Asimov's memoir, the final volume, It's Been a Good Life. He didn't complete it before he died, but it was subsequently completed and edited by his wife, Janet Jeppson Asimov. And this is what he says. He describes a meeting with Betty Prashker, a senior editor at his publisher, Doubleday, in 1981. Now, it's important to note that by this time, Asimov had more or less completely abandoned writing science fiction novels. And actually, John, in more than one place, he agrees with your assessment that he was a better short story writer than novel writer. He was mostly writing nonfiction at this point, and very successfully. He tells us that up to the end of the 1970s, he generated 20 times as much income from his nonfiction as he had from his fiction. Nevertheless, the publisher wanted more, and Betty Prasker just instructed him to go home and start thinking up a novel. Now, Asimov was really unsure about this. He initially did not want to do it at all. But later the same day, he had a phone call from the head of Doubleday's science fiction list, someone called Pat LaBrutto. And here I'll quote directly from Asimov's memoir. Listen, Isaac, Pat said, let me make it clear. When Betty said a novel, she meant a science fiction novel. And when we say a science fiction novel, we mean a Foundation novel. That's what we want. I heard him, Asimov continues, but I couldn't make myself take it seriously. I'd written only one science fiction novel in the previous 22 years, and I had not written a word of any Foundation story in 32 years. I didn't even remember the content of the Foundation stories in any detail. Now, just to be clear, you know, Asimov never said a bad word about Doubleday, at least not that I've seen. And once he'd sat down and reread his own trilogy from start to finish, he felt sufficiently fired up to produce the novel Lightning Rod. Yes, that was his title, but Doubleday said it's a Foundation novel, so it must have Foundation in the title, and it became Foundation's Edge. Doubleday also told him that the original books, around 70,000 words each, simply weren't long enough for what had become the publishing market's expectation of SF epics, and therefore he had to make Foundation's Edge much longer. So it came in at exactly double that length, typical of Asimov, 140,000 words. A case of never mind the quality, fill the width, maybe. As I've said, I've never read it, so I'm not the best judge. But apparently when Doubleday showed Asimov the proposed cover for Foundation's Edge, he actually burst out laughing because it had a sticker on it that said, "The fourth book of the Foundation trilogy." He had to point out the illogical nature of that statement, and they changed it to "Fourth Book of the Foundation Saga." Again, to be fair to Doubleday, it was a huge success and even hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication. Asimov was astounded by this. As he puts it, "I had been a writer for 43 years, and Foundation's Edge was my 262nd book. Having escaped every publisher any hint of bestsellerdom for all that time. I scarcely knew what to do with one. Well, you can bet Betty Prashker knew what to do, because Asimov was then pushed on to write a further sequel and two prequels. And then, if you'll pardon the expression, Doubleday doubled down and encouraged him to write even more. So he wrote a new robot novel, The Robots of Dawn, and once again it was a big hit. And that's when he came up with the idea of explaining the absence of robots from the Foundation universe by writing a book that would connect the two series, the Robot series and the Foundation series, and that book was Robots and Empire. And no, I haven't read that one either. Um, ultimately, although he was pushed into doing all those later novels by Doubleday, I don't think he regretted it. I think his experience of writing the books, and I guess their commercial success, overcame that objection to tampering with the legacy of the original Foundation stories. And that had been raised by many of his friends and peers.

That's a fascinating story. And loads of stuff I didn't know there. I'm sure a lot of people won't know that, and they'll perhaps forgive us for not having read any of the later stuff. But it also kind of explains a lot about what happens in the adaptations that people have made of Foundation. So now it's time to discuss a couple of adaptations in other media, one very faithful to the original trilogy and one not so much so. First of all, the faithful one. I'm really grateful to you, Ez, for sending me the 1973 BBC Radio adaptation of the trilogy, which is available on Spotify. That's the original trilogy available on Spotify as well as corners of the internet. So So tell us about it, and then I'll tell you my reactions.

Yeah, this is the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in its pomp, along with a cast of thousands. Okay, not quite, but a pretty big cast, including actually many stars of Doctor Who, which got its iconic theme tune from the Radiophonic Workshop. So this show was first broadcast in 1973, was repeated in '77, and then in 2002. And as you say, it kind of pops up in various dusty interweb corners, um, and it's classic BBC Radio drama, all clipped British accents, dialogue delivered with more precision than emotion, um, along with all those frequent bouts of retro-futuristic bleeping and blooping courtesy of the toys in the Radiophonic Workshop's cupboard. As you said, it's pretty faithful to the original stories. They make a few slight cuts here and there, they added a bit of comedy as well, um, and altogether runs to about 8 hours in 2 batches of 4 1-hour episodes. And I did enjoy listening to it, um, but it's not something I would listen to very often.

The accents I found quite startling. I didn't realize how much the English accent on BBC had changed since the '70s until I listened to that. And they are all very rahda accents. And you add that to the fact that there are so many kind of, so many scenes, dialogue scenes between two entitled middle-aged males with these kind of professional classes, English accents. And it does, it's really dated. You know, which is really interesting. I also found there was a bit of it with a grandfather who goes on a rocket voyage with his granddaughter. And it just felt like we were in C.S. Lewis territory. It was odd, you know, odd how dated it all felt. So it's interesting now to bring this up to date with a more more recent adaptation. And this is a bit of a Marmite subject, I think. And I feel both Marmite reactions myself. I really quite enjoy it. It's the Apple TV+ series, the creation of showrunner David Goyer. Has to be said, the Ellisons are behind this as well in the production, which has had 3 seasons so far. I think Goyer has now left the franchise, although they've got another one coming. Another one's commissioned and in production at time of recording. Expected to be screened in 2027. I kind of don't mind it. I had another look at the earlier episodes just yesterday, and there's a lot about it I've really enjoyed, as well as other things I don't particularly like. Eszri, I'm pretty sure you hate it. Yeah.

It was hate at first sight, I must admit. But after watching a few episodes, it did occur to me that one small change would have resolved my issues with it. Last time out, we talked about the 2003 version for Alex Proyas' movie of I, Robot starring Will Smith. And that has a closing credit that reads, "Suggested by the book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov." Well, I think the Apple TV production should have done the same thing. To me, it is not Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's a network TV show suggested by Isaac Asimov's Foundation. And if we look at it on that basis, we can then go on to discuss whether we think the script is good or garbage, whether the acting is virtuoso or hammy, and whether the special effects are an integral part of the story or just to sort of splash it all over Cologne, and so on. And you can guess where I stand on those things. I have absolutely no problem with Salva Hardin and Gal— or should I say, Gayle Dornick— being young women of color. The approach to creating any TV show is inevitably going to be overlaid with contemporary concerns in exactly the same way that Asimov's original stories are overlaid with the concerns of his time. I want to get serious for a moment, read another brief extract from It's Been a Good Life. You'll remember from last time that Asimov worked in a US Navy yard in Philadelphia during World War II. And it was in this period that he actually began writing the stories which eventually became the Foundation trilogy. So, you know, the— the— what's going on in the world is crucial to this. In his memoir, he recalls how by 1942, the Jews at the Navy Yard did not feel themselves to be in an enviable position. It seemed to some of us that there were strong feelings among some of the Gentiles that the war was being fought to, quote, save the Jews, and that Pearl Harbor was a put-up job somehow arranged by Roosevelt and his Jewish friends. It seemed reasonable for us Jews to fear that continued reverses in the war would cause a vast increase of antisemitism in the United States. In fact, some of my fellow Jews spoke to me about my effervescence in the lab. Asimov was famous for singing while working in the lab. Gilbert and Sullivan, no doubt. Very likely, yes. They hinted that I ought to keep a low profile, since if I made myself annoying and unpopular, that would reflect on the Jews generally. I get a really strong sense of déjà vu reading that today. Confronted with the rise of Nazism, it's completely understandable that as a Jew and a believer in democracy and freedom, Asimov must have felt tremendous fear at the prospect of a world plunged into the barbarity of Nazi rule. That's just one of the more obvious layers of Asimov's contemporary concerns that are, if you like, overlaid on his Foundation stories. And while I don't want to over-egg this, I do find it striking how Asimov's Jewishness just simply gets erased today.

How do you relate that to your reaction to the Apple TV series? Because for me, ideologically, it's a real hodgepodge. You know, there is a degree of wokeness in the casting, to use that unpleasant word, and in some of the ideas from the— You know, the whole Foundation thing is really quite They're a bunch of libs in a way. And then on the other hand, the Empire, which is, there's much more of in the TV series than there is in the book. You've got this day emperor character who strides around with his shirt off decimating worlds with gay abandon with a very kind of Pete Hegseth, dare I say it, approach to intergalactic warfare. And you can't help but note the Ellisons are in there or something. So they're kind of nods to the whole contemporary MAGA tendency and that vies with the sort of wokeness where you've got this sort of bearded Trotsky-esque kind of character in Harry Seldon, the creator of Psychohistory. So how do you relate that to what is incoherent in ideological terms as a piece of Well, it's—

one way of looking at it is to say that it's incoherent. The other way is to say that it's demonstrating, you know, historical dialectic, that you have these empires and their institutions, but you have these young people pushing for freedom of the individual. But the main point is that the way that we look at it now, and certainly the way that the Apple TV show presents the story, is based on the concerns of today. In the way that Asimov's presentation of the stories is based on his concerns. So, he was informed by the fact that World War II was going on. You had the, you know, these terrifying empires, if you like, of Hitler. And although Stalin was on the same side, in theory, as the Americans, they were still already seen as a threat at that point. And then you had the sort of everyday, conspiratorial responses that are so familiar now that, you know, the whole war, it was the fault of the Jews. So, Asimov was really trying to process that and live with his experience whilst telling his science fiction story. So, I think that's the same thing that goes on whether it's Larry Ellison or David Goyer or anybody else. You've seen this process with Star Trek, perhaps even more starkly, where I personally have dropped out of the, um, the Star Trek universe at the point of the, um, series, uh, Starfleet Academy, because it's— it suffers from the same problems but without really a coherent, um, explanation. So, uh, it is problematic. I think we're at a point now where the tension between these differing worldviews— and it gets repeated over and over again in any analysis of Foundation, It's determinism versus the freedom to make choices of the individual, the state versus the citizen. Then there's all the background stuff, the conspiracies that go on that people aren't aware of. It's about transparency, knowledge, power, all the things that we are concerned about now, but it's flavored by the specific issues of any given era.

Yeah, we could talk a bit more about the ideas. In the saga, I suppose we should call it rather than franchise. But I want to first point out an inherent difficulty that Asimov has created for anybody making adaptations of it. And so this is more a kind of structural point, I suppose, a kind of craft or creator perspective. Anyone who wants to make a compelling drama out of the story, which will carry people along through its great length, is going to have inherent problems, I think. And that explains some of the changes. Because of the huge span of time over which the epic unfolds, main characters keep dying and disappearing. You just got comfortable with the characters driving the narrative forward, a Gael or Gal Dornick, for instance, or a Salvatore Hardin, when the story suddenly moves on a couple hundred years and it's a completely new cast. They're all dead. The main hero of the story, Harry Seldon, doesn't last longer than a couple of chapters, and then he's dead. Screenwriters brought up on Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey, and Robert McKee, his screenwriting kind of tones, can't hack it at all because they're constantly losing their hero. Where's the hero's journey when it's constantly being someone else who's kind of driving the narrative? So what do you do with that? Because, you know, the viewers need characters to fasten onto who are gonna keep their emotional sympathy going from episode to episode, but then from season to season, which is a kind of kind of the way things work nowadays. So the Apple TV series addresses this in a couple of ways, and I think it explains some of the changes. Characters go into suspended animation for the odd century so they can come back and carry on the mission given them by Harry Seldon. That gives a bit more continuity. Harry Seldon seems to have uploaded himself to the cloud as a sort of AI avatar who lives in his vault, which is quite a capacious kind of retirement home, is there as a sort of— it's a bit unsure whether he's actually still alive in any sense or not. But it's so that he can be around whenever the plot needs him century after century. You get these periodic Selden crises where he emerges and talks to the people and tells them, "Aha, this was all planned for." And then again, why would you not want to Jared Harris to stick around to portray him because he's a great actor. There's some terrible hammy acting in this. There's also some really quite good performances and Jared Harris, I think, gives the thing a bit of credibility. And then there's the biggest area of fresh paint in the whole structure, of course, which I sort of mentioned, the tripartite clone emperor thing. It's really quite complicated. I'm not gonna spend the time to explain exactly how it works, but there's 3 of them at any given time. It was invented for the series, not in Asimov at all. 3 people are Emperor at once called Dawn, Day, and Dusk, a span of young to old actors, a little trio who sit around and have dinner together and discuss how they're gonna rule the empire. Because they're clones, they look pretty much the same from generation to generation. So I mean, this kind of helps with the continuity, but actually it's really quite confusing because the same actor crops up again, but he's got a different kind of narrative arc. Dark. So I think all that is a bit contingent and slightly baffling. They're guided and advised by an eternal robot, Eto Demerzel, played by Finnish actress Laura Byrne, who is very lovely, who is actually a character of Asimov's. She can't die, poor thing, being a robot, but the consolation prize is that she gets to be running the whole empire on the quiet. And as the the series wears on into its third season, she becomes more and more important. And of course, in the Asimov story, she's kind of the hinge where the robot world joins the Foundation world. So before we close, we're going to get into some of the deeper themes of the story now and Asimov's big idea that drives the whole thing, psychohistory, which you have emblazoned on your t-shirt, Ezra. The idea that the twists and turns of galactic geopolitics at the macro level among big populations over large swathes of time obey hidden laws that super clever scientists like Asimov can map and understand and even predict? So let's get on to psychohistory and the power of prediction! Okay Es, you start for 10— Psychohistory... Qu'est-ce que c'est? Fa fa fa fa fah Faire.! Join in if you know the words.

Um, yeah, it's, it's, um, a long story and we won't have time to cover very much of it at all. So to keep this brief for the sake of our listeners' patience, but also to avoid straying too far off subject, um, the immediately obvious influence is Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Asimov knew and loved. In fact, he says in his memoir he'd read all 6 volumes of it twice, every word, before he'd even come up with the basic idea for Foundation. And it's easy to trace the storyline of Foundation over Gibbon's famous work and see the similarities. It begins with the empire in a position of great strength, expanding territorially and strengthening its institutions. But the seeds of decline are already present— the arrogance, complacency of the rulers, etc. Cracks begin to show internally as religious schisms and corruption lead to an increasingly decadent attitude to public life. And then you get an external threat that pushes the empire to the point of no and it collapses. Asimov read a great deal of history. It was, it was one of his most passionate interests. And so he also knew, for example, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, originally published in German, of course, translated into English in the 1920s, as well as Arnold Toynbee's monumental 12-volume work, A Study of History, the first 6 volumes of which were published between '34 and '40. So he definitely read at least some of those, probably all of them. Both these historians had a lot to say about the growth and decline of civilizations. Spengler had a view of civilizational structure being cyclical, and you can see that in Foundation. But I think his cultural determinism and open call for an authoritarian leadership to defeat liberal democracy would definitely not be to Asimov's taste. After all, Spengler voted for Hitler in 1932. 2. And while he fell out of favor with the Nazi regime, his enthusiasm for its ideological roots in Germany's so-called conservative revolution movement, you know, all that's completely antithetical to Asimov's and the Foundation's positions. Toynbee was himself influenced by Spengler, but took a much broader view of civilizational structures, emphasizing the complexity of cultural influence and practice. In contrast to Spengler's deterministic view, Toynbee believed the nature of human responses to new challenges was inherently creative and therefore unpredictable. Uh, there's a lot more to those influences that we could go into, but for anyone who wants to pursue the ideas further, there's actually a great article by Mark Cole called Foundation and Reality, um, which appeared in Clarkesworld, the science fiction magazine, in November 2012. But there's also a debate amongst critics, fans, and theorists about the extent of any influence on Asimov coming from from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their idea of dialectical materialism. And in a very tiny nutshell, um, and because if I say the wrong thing, the purists will be onto me even more than the science fiction purists, um, in a very tiny nutshell, this posits a philosophical view that says the material world exists independently of human thought, combined with the belief that continuous change occurs through the Hegelian dialectical process of struggle between inherent contradictions within human concerns. Okay, that's as much Hegel as you're going to get from me today, unless you want more, but you don't really.

I think it's enough for now.

But there are diverging views how much Marx is actually in Foundation. Um, writing in Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, Keith Booker It is almost impossible not to see echoes of Marx in Asimov's Seldon, the genius whose psychohistory is a new form of historiography that allows him not only to understand the past but even to predict the broad outlines of the future. Now, Asimov himself cast doubt on any Marxist influence, but he would have had good reason to in 1950s America, when any hint of communist sympathies could be dangerous for a public figure. Um, James Gunn, who's an academic and science fiction author who's written a great deal about Asimov, rejects the notion that there's any Marxist influence in Foundation completely. However, we should point out Asimov was a member of the Futurians, a pioneering group of science fiction writers who met in New York between 1938 and 1945. The group included Frederick Pohl, Donald Wollheim, Judith Merrill, Damon Knight, among many others, and all they— all of them were significant figures in science fiction., and at that time they all favored various flavors of left-wing politics. Wallheim went on to write in his critically acclaimed essay The Universe Makers that psychohistory is the science that Marxism never became. Um, and this is because Marxism, Wallheim says, although it predates the modern science of psychology, failed to take psychology into account as it developed in the 20th century. True. So obviously, you know, I, I barely scratched the surface of these ideas, but it's a testament to the enduring value of Foundation, I think, as a work of science fiction with all its much-discussed flaws, that it continues to generate these kinds of debates.

It's worth pointing out that McCarthyism in the US as a phenomenon really came to a head. It starts in 1950. McCarthy becomes very prominent in 1950, and it's raging away over the next few years until I think '54 it the wheels start to come off a bit. But it was an enduring legacy because before the war, a lot of people had been influenced by left-wing ideas and Marx and so on. And then once that McCarthy moment happened, the whole thing flipped and the attitude completely changed and people had to hide a lot of their fellow traveler-like tendencies. Right down to the present day, that kind of hangs around to a degree and we see resurgence of it. But McCarthy is another thing in the historical background that's worth bearing in mind when you look at Foundation. And I absolutely agree with you. I initially wanted to do Foundation because I thought, oh, well, this is all Hegel. But actually he's as much about the decay of empires and the downfall So you're right, it's much more to do with Gibbon than it is to do with Hegel or Marx. So now looking in the other direction, what influence is he having subsequently to the publication of the beginnings of the saga and down to the present day?

Yeah, as we've been suggesting, Asimov has immense influence way beyond almost any other science fiction writer, certainly in the context of the Three Laws of Robotics. But I think if we're looking at Foundation in particular, there's a very obvious path from Foundation to Frank Herbert's Dune novels. Yep. And I would say, as an aside, some interesting parallels in the respective TV and movie adaptations. And actually thinking about it, Asimov's influence is why Apple TV's Foundation was the big deal that it was when it got announced. Foundation means so much to the science fiction community and to the tens of millions of people who've read the trilogy trilogy, not to mention all the prequels, sequels, and so on. And there are now probably one too many future history SF epics to list, and they all owe a debt to Foundation, I think, without a doubt. And there are direct literary inheritors too, primarily in the second Foundation trilogy. It's a bit confusing here. Not second Foundation, but a second trilogy of Foundation books, which was commissioned in the '90s with the approval of the Asimov estate. Um, written by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, who are all pretty well-known SF authors in their own right. And there is a continuation of the Foundation themes— unauthorized, I should add— in Donald Kingsbury's 2001 novel Psychohistorical Crisis. Um, Kingsbury goes deeply into the maths of psychohistory, which makes for a fascinating but also pretty demanding read. And psychohistory itself has acquired a new life, or has had an ongoing life, in fact. It exists in a form that is linked to Asimov's idea, but which takes a psychoanalytical rather than mathematical focus. There's even an International Psychohistorical Association based in New York, and I know of at least one person who's been awarded a PhD for a thesis on psychohistory, and extremely interesting it is too. Paul Ziolo, the author of that thesis, distinguishes psychoanalytic psychohistory from Asimov's mythic version, and in his thesis, which is called Psychohistory: Emergence Theory Applications. He defines contemporary psychohistory as an attempt to probe the sources of human motivation in history through the application of psychoanalytic insights to the analysis and interpretation of surface events. Um, I can't resist responding to that by quoting the brilliant early 20th century satirist Karl Kraus, who said, psychoanalysis is that disease for which it believes itself to be secure. And I think I'd probably better stop there.

Great. Thanks for that, Ez. There is a lot to talk about in the influences and how the repercussions of those ideas are continuing to the present day. I'm just going to mention a couple of things rather quickly because I don't want to extend this too much. Prediction is a big theme of Foundation. In a way, it's the plot motor. It's what drives it, the idea that psychohistory can predict history. There's a lot of interest nowadays in the idea of prediction, that science can help to predict the future. And as AI grows, we see more of it. Recently there was a TED Talk by Carissa Vailis, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. She traces a line from Roman emperors who banned astrologers and prophets through the the Oedipus story, which as we know is a kind of— there's a prediction about Oedipus and his father tries to stop this happening by killing his son, but the shepherd lets the son survive. And it turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. He does in fact famously marry his mother and kill his father. Also nowadays we have prediction markets. So Carissa Vailies talks about beware the power of prediction. Predictions don't just describe the future, they create it. They're instruments of power, not of knowledge. And I think that's quite an interesting idea. And we might look at what's happening in politics nowadays with the kind of rhetorical flourishes of populist leaders and how they attempt to create a future that wouldn't exist otherwise in language. So she develops it in her book Prophecy and so on. Prediction markets, people are putting a lot of credence by prediction markets now, although actually they're not too scientific and they really don't seem to work that well, but they seem to work better than polls in some cases. And then there is this thing, accelerationism, which could be traced back to Warwick University University. So much to answer for. And it was co-founded there by Sadie Plant and Nick Land, who is a really interesting figure, now be really quite something on the far right along with people like Curtis Yarvin. And he said that capitalism itself was an autonomous accelerating alien intelligence, and that what we should do is accelerate the tendency for technology to replace humans, that we're seeing worries about in AI. And actually we should help to speed it up. And the whole thing starts to get a really weird religious immanentizing the eschaton, if anyone recognizes that phrase from Illuminatus, thing where really it's kind of part of that whole burn it all down, rather nihilistic strain of thinking that seems to be there in the far right at the moment and shared by a lot of kind of, should we say, Silicon Valley founders. I'm not going to get too far into that. It's really the kind of bailiwick of another whole subcategory of podcasts. So instead, just before we move on to looking ahead ourselves and predicting what's going to happen in the next episode, Just wanted to add one thing I don't think we should really forget about or gloss over. Asimov was a great man in many ways, but we shouldn't attempt to paper over his faults. And we ought to acknowledge one of those. He was a groper. He would grope women at public events. In the polite euphemism often used by upper-class British women, and also we found out in kind of the aides who have to put on events at Number 10 and other government facilities, he was a bit hand panzee and even took some pride in being a dirty old man. He wrote stories about, um, being a dirty old man. But let's call it what it was— it was sexual harassment. For all that, he gave the genre a seriousness, a scope, and a scale in its concerns that we should be grateful for. And it's been a real revelation for me reading this stuff and how interesting the ideas are, as well as some great stories, of course. He truly deserves place up there on that Mount Rushmore of 20th century science fiction greats. So as we leave Asimov behind, what do we look forward to? Ezri, what's coming up next time?

Next time we're going to delve into science fiction's source code, the book that gave us the mother of all monsters. I mean Frankenstein, of course, the gothic vision of 18-year-old Mary Shelley as she holidayed on the shores of Lake Como with husband Percy Shelley and his slightly dodgy mate Lord Byron. Along with the good Dr. Polidori, they spent an evening together swapping ghost stories, and Mary then stitched together a terrifying tale that has embedded itself really into popular culture. More than 200 years later, Frankenstein continues to stalk our imagination like no other monster before or since. Mary Shelley's novel has become, in the words of Sir Christopher Frayling, nothing less than the modern creation myth.

You've been listening to Tech Imaginarium, how science fiction made the modern world. If you'd enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe on your platform of choice. And it really helps other people to find us if you leave a positive review there. Tell your friends, tell your enemies too. Tech Imaginarium is a learning hack podcast produced and hosted by Jon Helmer, written by Jon Helmer and Esri Karlabach. Music is by Nick Dwyer. And Flintett.