1952 classic SF, collection of shorter works. The Foundation, the
organisation from which the second Galactic Empire will be born,
continues to stumble along the road of Seldon's Plan. Spoilers for a
73-year-old book.
Well, it's still Asimov in smug mode, but the cracks are showing
a bit. And some of them he might even have put in deliberately. Almost
everyone here is still a self-important man who knows that he is
always right, but this time most of them aren't, even the ones who are
working for the Foundation
In the first part, "The General", the Empire makes its last try at
conquering the Foundation; I think the essential point here is that
while an individual general may be brilliant, the organisation behind
him is failing, so that (a) he must, if competent, inevitably plan to
take it over and (b) its existing leaders must, if paranoid enough to
stay alive, inevitably suspect anyone competent or popular of plotting
just that, and therefore will strike first. Fair enough.
The bulk of the book is "The Mule",and here things get rather more
interesting, even if Asimov cheats his own premise. Another barbarian
warlord has arisen, but this one seems to be actually successful; and
when one of Seldon's periodic patronising posthumous messages makes no
mention of him, merely talking about a conflict that's been forgotten
in the rising worry, panic breaks out.
Unfortunately, with this story being longer than most of them, we
stick with a particular set of characters for longer than has happened
before in this series. And in this book, Asimov attempts to write a
woman who is also a human being. This is a major departure from the
female characters (I think there were two of them, neither named) in
the earlier collection. Bayta… yeah. Yeah, even her name is pronounced
the same way an American would pronounce the Greek letter β. I'm sure
that the naming of the one significant woman in the series so far as
something associated with being secondary and less important wasn't
deliberate on Asimov's part, but I'd bet money it was in his
subconscious. Anyway, he tries to write her as best he can, i,e, as a
man who occasionally shows the weakness of having emotions. (When he
tried to write a woman as a woman, the result would be The Gods
Themselves.)
But anyway, Seldon's Plan, while it can predict everything else, can't
predict… mutants! (A "mutant" is, it seems, intrinsically not
regarded as human.) And the great unexamined question is: well, he's
conquering the galaxy. Isn't that basically what the Foundation is
going to have to do in order to establish a second empire? How do you
think empires happen, everyone gets together and says "yay central
rule"? So why is this a bad thing for the galaxy overall? The Mule, or
a few hundred years later whatever the leader of the Foundation is
called, surely it's all the same in the big picture?
But nobody thinks of this, panic panic, and Bayta, her husband, and
the clown who escaped from the Mule's court, flee from place to place
just before those places fall… and never wonder, until the great
revelation at the end, just why it seems to be that they reach each of
those places just as things start to come apart. (I think I see an
echo here of the Second World War and hearing the news of countries
falling to Hitler one after the other, the same state of mind that I
suspect gave rise to the domino theory when it came to communism.)
In what I can't help but see as a brief moment of authorial
self-awareness, it turns out that the Mule never bothered to
mind-whammy Bayta because she was the only person who'd ever liked him
without having to be forced into it. And so she is his downfall, at
least for now.
Also the Second Foundation starts to be mentioned, and is defined as
having had the psychologists (and therefore potentially
psychohistorians) who were deliberately left out of The Foundation
because psychohistory wouldn't work if the people involved understood
it. But the Second Foundation has survived in spite of this. Somehow.
And I'm sure that's not at all the author changing his mind.
Still, I actually enjoyed this more than Foundation, because there's
some plot to it beyond "smug dead man is right again".