Episode: 4280
Title: HPR4280: Isaac Asimov: The Foundation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4280/hpr4280.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:26:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,280 for Friday the 27th of December 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Isaac Asimov, The Foundation.
It is part of the series' science fiction and fantasy.
It is hosted by Avokad and is about 18 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at Isaac Asimov and the writing of the foundation series.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in our series on science fiction and fantasy.
And what I want to take a look at today is one of the golden age authors who has become
very famous, felt by the name of Isaac Asimov.
And specifically, what I want to look at in this is his foundation series.
But first, a little background.
When you look back at the golden age, there are three pre-eminent authors.
And they were referred to, even then, as the big three.
And continue to be referred to as the big three.
And they are Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein.
I will want to discuss each of them.
But in this article, you know, I'm going to start off with Asimov.
Isaac Asimov, born 1920, died 1992.
He was born in Russia, but he and his parents immigrated to the United States when he was
three and settled in Brooklyn, New York.
He was a precocious child who taught himself to read at the age of five.
His parents owed a succession of candy stores that also sold newspapers and magazines, including
the pulp magazines that got him hooked on science fiction.
He attended Columbia University where he got his BA in 1939 and his MA in 1941 in chemistry.
He then joined Robert A. Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp, working at the Philadelphia Navy
Yard during World War II.
After the war, he got his PhD in chemistry, again at Columbia, and then became an assistant
professor of biochemistry at Boston University.
Now, Asimov got involved with a fan group called the Futurians in 1938.
It's the same group that Frederick Poll was a member of, so you can learn a lot about
it from Frederick Poll's book the way the future was, and you can get Asimov's take again
in his autobiography book in memory at Green.
So that was 1938, and that same year he took advantage of his location in Brooklyn,
part of New York, to take the subway downtown.
Under the offices of astounding science fiction, now that was later renamed to analog, but
that was like 1951, I believe.
So he got to the office and dropped off a story with the editor, John W. Campbell, who
we have talked about last time.
He got it back with a detailed rejection letter, and that started a practice of weekly meetings
with Campbell.
By the end of the month, he had a second story written, and which Campbell also rejected,
and as Asimov said, in the nicest possible letter you could imagine, and encouraged him
to keep writing.
His third story, called Marooned Off Vesta, was sold to amazing stories.
Now, amazing stories was the magazine founded by Hugo Gransbach, and we've talked about
that.
Then a few stories later, he sold one to Campbell, a story called Trends, and that appeared
in the July 1939 issue of astounding.
Now if you get a chance to look that up, maybe you can find it in a library somewhere,
microfilm, or what have you, people call that July 1939 issue the start of the Golden Age,
because of all of the great writers that were in there.
But we're talking about Asimov now.
He continued to meet regularly with Campbell, and in 1941 his story Nightfall was published.
Now this story was voted the best science fiction story of all time by the science fiction
writers of America in 1968.
Not bad.
Then one day he was due for a meeting with Campbell, but he did not have a story idea to pitch.
He had, however, been reading Edward Gibbons, the history of the decline in fall of the Roman
Empire, and that provided a spark.
What would happen if a galactic empire went into a decline in fall?
And thus was born the foundation.
Now at this point Asimov really was just a writer of short fiction.
So this began as a series of short stories that were, of course, published by Campbell in
astounding.
They were enthusiastically received by science fiction fans.
And then starting in 1951, Nome Press started to collect them in book form.
And that ended up being three volumes that became known as the Foundation Trilogy, and
Asimov wrote a little additional material to help tie stuff together.
Now, the premise, as Asimov explained it, is that a mathematician named Harry Saldon
had developed a science called psychohistory.
Asimov always explained this as being analogous to the kinetic theory of gases.
In other words, if you're looking at a single gas molecule, you cannot possibly predict
how it will move.
But with a sufficiently large collection of gas molecules, you can apply statistical rules
that tell you how the entire collection of molecules will behave.
Saldon's psychohistory would similarly enable someone trained in this science to make predictions
of how a society will behave if certain conditions were met.
The two axioms Saldon required were the population whose behavior was modeled should be sufficiently
large to represent the entire society.
And two, the population should remain in ignorance of the results of application of psychohistorical
analyses because if it is aware, the group changes its behavior.
Now, Saldon met the first criterion because he was modeling the entire Galactic Empire
of one quintillion people.
As for the second, he created a secret group called the Second Foundation to manage his plan.
Now, Saldon used psychohistory to first forecast that the fall of the Galactic Empire would
usher in a dark age lasting 30,000 years.
This is similar to what is presumed to have happened in Europe with the fall of the Western
Roman Empire.
I would have to say historians are starting to disagree with this characterization that
the so-called dark ages weren't as dark as people say.
But anyway, Saldon's plan that he created would cut this period of dark age from 30,000
years down to 1,000 years.
Now he had to get the support of the Emperor to put his plan into action.
So he sold it as a plan to create a massive encyclopedia called Encyclopedia Galactica
that would collect all human knowledge and preserve it.
The Emperor bought this explanation and gave Saldon a useless world with no natural resources.
On the outskirts of the galaxy.
And this became the home of the foundation.
Initially called the Encyclopedia Foundation.
A group of scholars were collected and moved there to start work.
But this was all a ruse.
He really intended the foundation to be the nucleus of the next Galactic Empire.
And a world with no natural resources was part of his plan.
Now I remember how back in the 1960s Japan was preeminent in the miniaturization of technology
and consumer products.
And one of the reasons for this is that Japan is lacking in almost all natural resources.
And of course this was also one of the main factors leading the World War II in Asia.
So the stories in foundation looked at how the foundation would be pushed in certain
directions that would lead to this eventual empire.
But of course an invisible hand guiding destiny only gets you so far.
To keep up interest in the stories there has to be conflict.
In foundation and empire, the second volume, the first conflict is with the old empire
in the person of a general named Bel Rios, who starts thinking something odd is going
on with the foundation.
Now this name is a clue to Asimov's reading of history.
There was a Byzantine general named Belisarius, who was doing well reconquering the western
parts of the old Roman Empire.
Until the Byzantine Empire, Byzantine Emperor got concerned about such a successful general
and recalled him.
Because you know a successful general could decide, hey maybe I should be emperor.
So you never wanted that to happen.
Now in this book, that's exactly the way it played out.
Bel Rios is eventually recalled by the emperor, and it turns out Seldin had predicted the
whole thing.
Then something Seldin did not predict happens in the form of the Mule, a mutant who has
the capability of affecting people's emotions and thinking.
He creates his own empire at the expense of the foundation which he absorbed.
Now in the third volume of the trilogy, called second foundation, the Mule is defeated
by the second foundation, the hitherto secret organization that Seldin had set up to monitor
his plans.
But this means that the second of Seldin's axioms is now violated.
So in the last story, the foundation, now aware and feeling like they are the puppets,
goes in search of the second foundation to perhaps destroy it or at least destroy its
power over them.
They are ultimately thwarted by the second foundation which means that the Seldin plan
can be put back on track.
Now Seldin was wise enough to foresee that no plan set up could run for a thousand years
without needing course corrections.
So he had set up the second foundation as a group of psychohistorians specifically to
monitor and course correct.
Now Asimov temporarily stopped writing fiction as a result of the Sputnik satellite, which
you may recall was launched in 1957 and created a bit of a panic in the United States because
oh my god, the Ruskys are ahead of us.
Asimov's response was that he could do more useful work by writing about science and
being an educator and he did that extensively.
He wrote a lot, okay.
We're talking about someone who I believe was up around 500 books that he had written and
gotten published.
On one point I think I had 200 of them and so I was as much a fan of his science writing
as I was of his science fiction.
But in 1982 he returned to the foundation universe with a novel called Foundations Edge.
This picks up a bit later when the Seldin plan seems to be back on track but this suggests
to some of the foundation that maybe the second foundation was not wiped out in his back
pulling strings.
So a man named Golan Trevis is sent out to look for it.
He thinks it may be connected to a mythical planet named Earth that appears in no database
but somehow appears in myths and legends.
Meanwhile on the second foundation they find evidence of a group of advanced mentalics
who may be more powerful than the second foundation.
This turns out to be a planet called Gaia where every organism is part of a common mind
and they have been manipulating all the other players.
But they need Golan Trevis to make a decision for them as to who should guide the galaxy.
He decides in favor of Gaia.
Even in the next novel, Foundation and Earth, which was published in 1986, Trevis wants
to find out why he decided in favor of Gaia and goes and search again of the mythical Earth.
He has adventures along the way, eventually meeting up with an intelligent robot who
was behind both Harry Seldin and Gaia.
In the end Trevis decides the reason he picked Gaia was that it would be the best protection
against a potential alien race from a different galaxy, something our galaxy had never experienced.
At this point, Asimov could not see any path forward, he seemed to have written himself
into a corner.
So he went back to the early days of Harry Seldin in a novel called Prelude to Foundation,
published in 1988.
Now this tells the story of how Harry Seldin first came to the imperial capital of Trantor
and how he developed psychohistory.
It turns out Trantor was a pretty good place to research since it had so many different
groups and cultures.
And in this book, Seldin meets and is pushed by the same robot.
We saw at the end of the previous book.
It is interesting to see Seldin as a young man instead of the aged sage of foundation.
Finally, forward the foundation, 1993, was published posthumously.
And it covered the period between Prelude to Foundation and Foundation.
So it looks at how Seldin was developing, finished developing his psychohistory, putting
together his organization and making his plans, you know, now that he had an idea of
how psychohistory would work.
Then after Asimov's death, his widow Janet and the Asimov estate authorized three science
fiction authors, sometimes referred to as the Killer B's because their names all begin
with the letter B.
But to a trilogy that is roughly contemporaneous with forward the foundation, they were Gregory
Benford, who wrote Foundation's Fear in 1997, Greg Bair, who wrote Foundation and Chaos
in 1998, and David Brinn with Foundation's Triumph in 1999.
Now other media.
One has been done as an audio series by the BBC.
This consisted of eight hour long episodes with minor changes to the written stories.
And you can get the audio files there at archive.org, there is a link in the show notes.
Then in 2021, Apple TV released a television series that is pretty good.
The casting did make major changes from what Asimov wrote, since nearly every character
that Asimov wrote was a man.
And it is hard to believe that many millennia into the future that would be the case.
But it has received good reviews.
Asimov's daughter Robin is one of the executive producers, so it can be considered reasonably
authorized.
Now right now it's not available on DVD, but when it is, I do plan to get it.
And finally, we talk about a pretty interesting award.
In 1966, the Foundation series was given a Hugo Award as the best series of all time.
And it beat out such notable series as the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burrows.
The Future History series by Robert A. Heinlein, The Lensman series by Edward E. Doc Smith,
and The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien.
And you know, it's entirely possible that I will talk about all of them before I am
done, because there's some really good stuff in there, too.
But for now, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging
you to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye!
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