Adventure classics -- The rise and fall of civilizations

Foundation

by Isaac Asimov

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Would you bet your future on someone who claims to see 30,000 years into the future of the entire galaxy? Too far-fetched? How about if this seer only promises to predict the future for the next 1,000 years?

This is the premise of Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction classic, Foundation, not to mention its sequels, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. And could even legendary psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who set up the whole thing, have predicted that nearly thirty years after the first volume appeared, a new wave of sequels and prequels would propel Asimov to science fiction demigodhood?

“I love historical novels,” Asimov wrote. But when the idea first came to him early in World War II while he was in graduate school, “to write a historical novel was, however, impractical for me. It would require an enormous amount of reading and research and I just couldn’t spend all that time at it. It occurred to me that I could write a historical novel if I made up my own history . . . A science-fiction story that read like a historical novel.”

He explains the genesis of the Foundation series in Isaac Asimov: It’s Been a Good Life, the condensation his widow Janet Jeppson Asimov edited from the three massive volumes of her husband’s autobiography.

“Why shouldn’t I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire?. . . I was bubbling over by the time I got to Campbell’s (John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction), and my enthusiasm was catching. It was perhaps too catching, for Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do. ‘That’s too large a theme for a short story,’ he said.”

Campbell insisted on having an outline for an open-ended series of stories. Stymied by the idea of writing to an outline, Asimov eventually wrote eight short stories, published in Astounding Science Fiction beginning in 1942. Four of these and a previous unpublished story were gathered in a single volume, Foundation, in 1951, beginning the tale of how Hari Seldon, born in the 11,988^th year of the Galactic Era, established the science of psychohistory. And established a foundation to carry on the knowledge and culture of the dying empire in the hope of shortening the length of the dark ages he foresaw following its fall. Shortening them from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000.

The first Foundation novel, however, covered less than two hundred years of the 1,000-year long dark age Seldon had foreseen. Flinging himself in the breach, in intervals between receiving his doctorate (in chemistry), serving in the Army, getting married, and becoming a father, Asimov continued the story with Foundation and Empire (which would throw a Hitleresque monkey wrench into Seldon’s calculations) and Second Foundation. At their close, he was still only halfway through the 1,000 years between the rise and fall of empires. And there things rested, for decades.

Then, starting in 1981, Asimov wrote two additional sequels and two prequels to bring the Foundation story to a close. His own life was closing as well. In 1983, he had become infected with the AIDS virus as a result of a blood transfusion in connection with heart bypass surgery. He continued writing, switching from typing his own manuscripts to dictating to his wife his poignant “Farewell¾ Farewell” to readers in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

He died in 1992, the year before publication of the final volume, Forward the Foundation.

“. . . In killing Hari Seldon he was also killing himself,” Janet Asimov writes in It’s Been a Good Life, “yet he transcended the anguish. . . Isaac said, ‘like Hari Seldon, I can look at my work all around me and I’m comforted. I know that I’ve studied about, imagined, and written down many possible futures¾ it’s as if I’ve been there.’”

Asimov’s work is widely available at bookstores and online. For more about Asimov on this site, see “The mind of a machine,” July 8, 2011.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor.)

Adventure classics -- When a space suit is your best friend

Have Space Suit -- Will Travel

by Robert A. Heinlein

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“She asked me to suggest an artist,” Robert A. Heinlein wrote of an book editor, “then wrote me back that (my suggestion) was ‘too closely associated with a rather cheap magazine’ -- meaning John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction. To prove her point she sent me tear sheets from the magazine. It so happened that the story she picked to send me was one of my stories. . . I wondered if she knew that my reputation had been gained in that same ‘cheap’ magazine. . . .”

It was 1949, and Heinlein had become the first writer of science fiction to break out of the ghetto of pulp magazines -- first in the pages of prestigious Saturday Evening Post, then with what his wife Virginia called “books for boys” -- a series of science fiction aimed at teen audiences that soon became the darling of librarians.

Heinlein wrote to his agent that he chuckled over the snobbishness of the editor, whose name Virginia diplomatically excised from the posthumous volume of her husband’s letters, Grumbles From the Grave.

The dichotomy -- pulp writer versus literary writer -- was among those that would dog Heinlein’s life, a series of plot twists and reversals worthy of one of his own novels.

Heinlein’s leap to Saturday Evening Post from the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, whose legendary editor John Campbell had nurtured his early career, would cost him Campbell’s friendship. A bout with tuberculosis would end his promising career as a naval officer -- but open one in writing. And his political views -- exactly how did he get from an Upton Sinclair brand of socialism to the far right of the spectrum?

His 1958 classic, Have Space Suit -- Will Travel, was the last (or by some counts next to last) entry in his “books for boys” series. It’s also the most fun, although his readers (or their parents) may have detected looming paranoia in Heinlein’s satire of the high school education of his hero, Clifford “Kip” Russell, whose classes include “applied English (the class had picked ‘slogan writing’ which was fun)” Kip tells his father.

(Heinlein’s paranoia had become the nation’s by that time. You had to have lived through the late 1950’s to appreciate the horror over the gap in scientific achievement Americans felt when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, the October before Have Space Suit -- Will Travel was published.)

Heinlein’s own technical skills (he earned a degree in engineering as a naval cadet) propel the story as Kip renovates the used but authentic space suit he wins in a -- wait for it -- slogan writing contest, is kidnapped by bad guy extraterrestrial “wormfaces”, and after multiple escapes and recaptures assists in the legal defense of Earth against an inter-galactic legal panel. (Are Earthlings too savage to live? The panel postpones a decision, although possibly it reconvened to render the “mostly harmless” verdict of last week’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

I’ve got to admit, as a twenty-first century reader I felt squeamish about Heinlein’s sexism. Despite Kip’s little girl prodigy sidekick Peewee and a maternal (but not exactly female) extraterrestrial he calls “The Mother Thing,” most 1950’s era sex roles were firmly in place.

And although, like any teenager with an immature frontal cortex, Kip thinks his biggest triumph is trumping the local soda shop bully back on Earth, the sequences of his hallucinatory, near-death discussions with the renovated space suit he dubbed “Oscar,” are among the most heroic sequences in fiction, either for young people or adults. May all of us have a friend as wise.

For more about Heinlein's legacy, see www.heinleinsociety.org/.

(And about the movie version of Have Space Suite -- Will Travel. Rumors abound. I hate to say it, but this year’s Ender’s Game precludes any other big screen science fiction releases until next summer, if ever. I could be wrong, but not in this galaxy.)

(Next Wednesday -- Enough fun, games, and end of the planet! Margaret Atwood scares us to death with her perhaps not so distant dystopian vision, The Handmaid’s Tale.)