1951 classic SF, collection of short stories. The Galactic Empire is
bound to collapse, and millennia of barbarism will follow. But one man
has a plan to shorten that time.
It's not that these stories show their age; they show their
Asimov. There are two female characters in the whole thing, one piece
of scenery and one harridan wife of a tyrant, and even she doesn't get
a name. (But I've read The Gods Themselves and this is probably
better than Asimov actually trying to write female characters.) The
only possible states of affairs are a single Empire ruling over all
humanity or barbarism. Nobody ever questions that.
Meanwhile: Hari Seldon, Hari Seldon, Seldon Seldon, Hari Hari. Not
only was he the one person who could invent a way of shortening the
dark age, it wouldn't work if anyone else knew what was going on, so
everyone just has to do what the great man says and not ask questions.
Especially once he's dead.
He's commissioned the writing of the great Encyclopædia Galactica as
a cover for gathering all the most knowledgeable people in the Empire
for his Foundation. This cross-section of all human knowledge does not
include any psychologists, who might spot what he's up to. Nobody
seems to notice that the Encyclopædia Galactica is strangely silent
about this particular science. Nobody grows, nobody changes, they just
bash against each other and the side which the author favours wins.
But Roger, you say, this isn't supposed to be about the people; this
is supposed to be fiction covering a vast span of time, and the people
in it are just examples of the sort of thing that is happening. Yeah,
I say, but I have read Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men from
twenty years earlier, and that was honest in its lack of character.
Clarke can't write characters in Rendezvous with Rama twenty years
after this, but he has the good sense not to try: all they really need
to express is competence at their jobs and awe in the face of the
unknown.
All right, the ideas are interesting. But the basic idea of a
predictive science of historical trends is quickly devalued since
after the first segment (added for this publication in 1951 to the
stories that had been published in 1941-1944) Seldon is dead and
nobody is there to do the predictions. (Seldon himself appears in some
time-delayed recordings, but mostly to say "congratulations, I saw
this crisis coming and since you are watching this you have survived
it".)
Meanwhile a recurrent theme is an explicitly false religion used to
insert a fifth column into barbarous worlds: locals are trained up as
priests who can rote-operate high-tech gadgets (obvious influence on
Warhammer 40,000) but this is explicitly a snare: to get people who
are more loyal to the Foundation than to their homeworlds, and to get
other powers dependent on gadgets that can be turned off in an
instant, and none of the top men in the religion is a believer. This
is a good thing. This is all that religion is good for.
Basically it's thoroughly paternalistic: we are the only smart guys,
we are the only guys who are anything more than comic-opera tyrants,
we can corrupt you and you'll thank us for it because it's all for
your own good.
We're told explicitly that some of the barbarian kingdoms have lost
the ability to use atomic power and are burning coal and oil to
generate power for their cities; we're told that their warships cannot
stand up to older atom-powered warships. Can this imply anything other
than oil-fired spaceships? How do you make those work, then?
At least this is relatively short; it doesn't suffer from Asimov's
later tendency to loquacity (I have read The Robots of Dawn). It has
its moments; I'm not sorry to have read it, if only to see where some
well-known SF ideas were first used. But my word, it really isn't
good.