1953 classic SF, collection of shorter works. The Mule is still
building his empire. Obviously that has to be stopped. Spoilers for a
73-year-old book.
Though nobody seems to consider any way in which the Mule's
present empire is better than the Foundation's future empire, except
that the smug men of the Foundation aren't in charge of it. But
apparently that's enough. So (in "Search By the Mule") the Mule's men,
searching for the semi-mythical Second Foundation since he's already
conquered the First (I'll just call them F1 and F2 hereafter), make
discoveries, and… turn out to have been led down the garden path by
operatives of F2, who it turns out also have mind-whammy powers like
the Mule's, and indeed are the destined future rulers of the Second
Empire (according to them; nobody told F1 who were going to be doing
all the work of building it).
The recurrent theme is is: aha, I have trapped you! No, I predicted
that move, I have trapped you first! Go to previous sentence.
This continues in "Search By Foundation" when the F1 notices the
mental manipulation of the F2 in their own society, and sets out to
find the F2, because there's only room for one set of smug men in this
Galaxy! There are shenanigans, and another female character with some
agency (though this one's much more in the Asimov stereotype than
Bayta from Foundation and Empire). There's adventure and
shenanigans, and someone is clearly an F2 agent, and there's a war,
and in the climax F2 is obviously located on… no it isn't, it's
obviously there…
I thought I saw a little self-awareness in Foundation and Empire,
but the story here comes down to the smug men of F1 versus the smugger
men of F2, with a bit part from a stereotype of a Borscht-belt farm
produce salesman (also smug). Because it turns out that if the people
of F1 know that F2 is out there and might save them, they won't be
smug (and self-reliant) enough and so will fail; so the entire
proceedings of the story (including everyone's illusions of agency,
not just the female character's) turn out to have been set up by F2,
who are going to sweep in and rule everybody for their own good
forever, and everyone will think that's a good thing. An optimistic
future! And it's very clear that Asimov himself can see no possible
downside to this: of course the smartest people should be in charge!
No other qualification or knowledge, or approval by anyone else, is
necessary or desirable.
Thirty years later Asimov wrote more books in this universe,
eventually connecting it with his "Robots" setting for no obvious
reason. Two sequels, two prequels, and then the Killer Bs (Bear,
Benford, Brin) apparently contributed a trilogy too after he was
safely dead. I shall not be along for the ride.
I'm glad, I suppose, to have read these. Now I can say from a place of
knowledge that the emperor really does have no clothes, that what
Asimov didn't take from Gibbon and Thucydides he simply universalised
from his own life in the 1940s.
- Posted by David Pulver at
01:22am on
24 May 2026
Good review. Of the three originals, Foundation and Empire is the only one I still somewhat enjoy, for reasons you mostly outline in your reviews of both - it had some memorable plot and characters on a human rather than society-level.
Given the influence of the Foundation series at the time, I'm actually surprised that we never really saw "Psychologist" as an RPG character class/profession in any late 70s-early 80s SFRPG with a bunch of pseudo mind- whammy powers ascribed to it instead of "psionics."
- Posted by RogerBW at
10:22am on
24 May 2026
There's an essential suspicion of psychology here which seems very like what L. Ron Hubbard would do once he moved from fiction to religion. Except Asimov doesn't carry it through to any conclusion.
Though looking at early Traveller in particular there seems to be a strong feeling that PCs should have weak psionics at best, and the cool stuff is reserved for the enemies.
- Posted by David Pulver at
12:23am on
25 May 2026
Hmm, I hadn't thought of Hubbard, but yes. I suspect Asimov's views of psychology as a math-based super science probably derived from John Campbell, but perhaps the suspicion was his own. A more positive view of psychologists appears in DeCamp/Pratt Harold Shea series. I wonder if one could get an article or book on the treatment of psychology in SF/F? (Checks: and someone has written it. Gavin Miller of U. Glasgow "Science Fiction and Psychology").
Psionics don't seem to appear that much in "official" early Traveller at all, outside of a relatively even-handed treatment of the Zhodani that aside from them inexplicably attacking first, treated them as more civilized.
I don't recall many articles on psi in JTAS and I remember in my early games the younger PCs would all go running off looking for high pop worlds to find a psionics institute - the rules seemed to be set up so that if you got kicked out early with 1-2 terms and not enough skills your best bet was to hope for psionic powers, as your ability strongly correlated to being young. If I remember my own gaming experiences in the 80s correctly, I recall a lot of groups borrowing the much more high-powered and Lensmen-influenced psi abilities from SPACE OPERA to graft onto Traveller for their Jedi and what not! Later on people who wanted that mostly just played other games like Star Wars ...
- Posted by RogerBW at
04:06pm on
25 May 2026
Heh, I think some copies of Space Opera made it to the UK but I don't believe there was ever a cheap and more locally printed edition, the way Games Workshop did with Traveller,, which may in turn be why e.g. the people who came together to form BITS focused on that game much as many British fantasy players focused on RuneQuest.
The feeling I get from this book, and of course it's impossible to say how much is actual Asimov and how much is his characters, is that psychology is weird and different compared with "proper" hard sciences. Of course, the people expressing that view are people who've grown up in a culture that would inevitably produce such a view because it has continuity with the old Empire's physical sciences but has had to reinvent psychology from scratch.
- Posted by John P at
11:23pm on
25 May 2026
Wasn't it Heinlein who was big on turning everything into maths/symbology in order to explain social stuff? Can't remember exactly where I saw that though.
Only time I came across psionics used in Traveller was during a game at Origins '89 where we were mercs stranded on a planet during a contract and we used it to send a message to our ship to try and get them to pick us up.
- Posted by RogerBW at
10:58am on
26 May 2026
IIRC there are hints of that in "Gulf" (1949, so similar in composition date), but Heinlein didn't make it the most important thing the way Asimov did; I think he was more interested in sharing lots of ideas, and in developing characters, than he was in arguing just one political philosophy or whatever. (So there's Starship Troopers for example but there isn't anything else in that universe. He'd said what he wanted to, and gone on to the next thing.)
It's fair enough, I suppose, in that Asimov's trying to do a Last and First Men, a story with grand scope, but he keeps coming down to the individual character level and he keeps doing it badly.