Episode: 4380
Title: HPR4380: Isaac Asimov: The Rest of Asimov's Foundation Stories
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4380/hpr4380.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:01:24

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,380 for Friday the 16th of May 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Isaac Asimov.
The rest of Asimov's foundation stories, it is part of the series' science fiction
and fantasy.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at the other foundation-related novels of Isaac Asimov.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on science fiction and fantasy, and I'm going to continue our
look at Isaac Asimov by adding the rest of the foundation story because there are some
other novels that tie into this in different ways.
So first I want to look at is something called the Empire Trilogy.
This is three of Asimov's earliest novels and they are tied into the foundation universe
even though they were very early works.
There are some discrepancies since he did not have a completely worked out idea where
everything would go, but that is where you can employ good old retconning, i.e. retroactive
continuity.
For the Empire Trilogy, I want to present the three novels in order of their internal
chronology rather than publication date.
That way we can see the development of this society as Asimov presented it.
The first is called the Stars Like Dust published in 1951.
This novel is a mystery that begins with a young man named Byron Farrell from a planet
in one of the nebula kingdoms.
He is completing his studies on the planet Earth which is mostly radioactive.
Asimov's explanation at the time was that this was because of a nuclear war, but he would
later retcon this into a different explanation.
He is told that the tyranny have killed his father and that he should leave Earth.
The name tyranny is not very creative since the name alone tells you they are the bad guys
in this story.
The plot sends Byron from person to person and planet to planet trying to outrun the danger,
but he is stolen a tyranny ship and there after him.
This was betrayed by one of the people he thought was helping him and ends up captured
by the tyranny.
They go to the coordinates of the supposed rebel world that is going to overthrow the tyranny,
but there is nothing there and the tyranny conclude there is no rebel world.
But it turns out that the world Byron first went to after leaving Earth.
One of the worlds the tyranny have conquered is secretly plotting a rebellion and they
found a document with the power to help them, the U.S. Constitution.
This is not the greatest novel ever written and Asimov considered it his least favorite.
There is reason to think that Horace L. Gold, who is the editor of Galaxy Magazine for
which this was written as a serialized novel, may have been a bad influence, particularly
with that U.S. Constitution thing.
Trantor is in the background, which is why we can place this novel in the same universe,
but otherwise the connection is tenuous at best.
Next, I want to talk about the currents of space published in 1952.
Now in this book, Trantor is now a sizable empire covering about half the galaxy.
The plot revolves around a man named Rick who is suffering from amnesia, but he is gradually
recovering his memories.
He eventually realizes that he was a scientist studying the material of interstellar space
in the realm of the planet Sark.
Sark has a colony world called Florena, which is in the next solar system to Sark, and
it produces a plant fiber called Cure, which cannot be grown on any other planet, though
no one knows why.
As Rick regains his memory, he realizes that he had discovered that Florena's son is
about to go to Nova due to a current of carbon atoms that is hitting the sun.
That's where the title comes from.
And it also explains why Curet can only be grown on Florena, because the carbon atoms
flowing to Florena's son have caused it to emit light in certain frequencies not found
in other stars.
When Rick first discovered all of this, someone else used a psychic probe on him and did
so very poorly, which is what caused his amnesia.
And of course, this is all political dynamite.
Sark depends on Florena for its wealth, and Tranter would very much like to add both Sark
and Florena to its growing empire.
Now it is clear that Asimov is making this an allegory about cotton and slaveholding
in the American South.
But of course, he wants to make a point about the stupidity of racism, and he does this
by making the native population of Florena red-haired and very pale skinned.
And they are exploited by the much darker skinned Sarkians.
And Rick's boss in the scientific agency, who was searching for him, is described as
very dark and with woolly hair.
So the lighter skin people do all the work, and the darker skin people live off the wealth
they produce.
Not terribly subtle, perhaps, and Heinlein would do something similar in Pharnam's freehold,
where he has the aftermath of a nuclear war, resulting in blacks enslaving whites on
the future earth.
But I think this novel is a step up from the stars like dust.
Now, Pebble in the Sky, published in 1950.
So this is Asimov's first novel.
Now he had published the foundation stories as a series of short stories and novellas that
were later collected and treated his novels.
But this was written from start to finish this novel.
It starts in the 20th century, as Joseph Schwartz, a retired tailor, is walking down the
street in Chicago, where an accident at a nearby nuclear facility transports him thousands
of years into the future.
While the amount of time traversed is not specified, a character guesses 50,000 years, but that
cannot be correct given how this fits into Asimov's future history.
But as far enough, the Schwartz can't understand the language.
So he is mistaken as being mentally defective, and thus the perfect candidate for experiments
aimed at improving brain function, experiments that have already killed several people.
But on Schwartz, the experiment works, and he not only quickly learns the language, but
also gains mental powers like telepathy.
Earth is this time part of the Empire of Cranthor, the same empire from the foundation series,
but in an earlier period where it is not yet controlled the entire galaxy.
Earth is a troublesome and rebellious planet whose inhabitants consider themselves superior
to the rest of the galaxy.
A procurator is the governor imposed by the Empire, and he has a garrison of troops at his disposal.
Earth has large areas of radioactivity which are thought to be the cause of some interesting
diseases, such as radiation fever.
When in reality, the planet is a hot bed of viruses.
A rebel group plans to release a nasty and virulent virus to wipe out their enemies
from the Empire, but Schwartz uses his mental powers to stop them.
Now the title procurator is a clue to what's going on here, because that is the title given
to the Roman governor of Judea, and his whole story is an allegory of the Jews versus
the Romans.
As we can see from this and other novels, as am I frequently relied on historical models
for his stories.
Foundation itself came from Edward Gibbons, the rise in fall of the Roman Empire, and
the currents of space from the antebellum south in the time of slavery, and now this one.
I think in this case the lesson is that the rebellion of the Jews only resulted in the
destruction of Judea, and that the rebellion of the Earth people had they released the
virus would only have resulted in the destruction of Earth.
Also note that in all three of the Empire novels, the idea of a radioactive surface of much
of the Earth is postulated.
When they were first written, and from the days it was at the height of the Cold War,
Asimov was clearly fearing a possible nuclear war.
But in the next novel we discuss, he changes this, possibly because it was written later,
and the fears of nuclear war had largely receded.
And that brings us to the novel Robots and Empire.
Now, this last novel is not part of the Empire trilogy, and it was written 30 years later
than those other three novels, more than 30 years.
But it's where Asimov finally decided that he was going to connect his robot series
to his foundation series.
So the action takes place on Aurora, Solaria, and Earth, the three planets that have featured
in the previous robot novels, and many of the previous characters have returned.
Not Elijah Bailey though.
This novel takes place 200 years after his death.
But the spacers are much longer lived, so people like Gladia del Mar, who was at the
center of the naked sun, and then appeared in the robots of dawn, makes her third appearance.
And several others from the robots of dawn appear again, both human and robot.
The two main robots are Ardaniel Olivov and are Jiskard Reventlov, who have been given
to Gladia by their deceased owner in his will.
Now, Jiskard has apparently developed a form of telepathy that includes the ability to
manipulate minds.
And he and Daniel have decided that there is a zero-th law that supersedes the three
laws of robotics, which places humanity as a whole in the primary position.
This allows them to harm individual humans if it is for the good of all humanity, but
only with great difficulty because the first law is so strong.
At the time of this novel, some elements of the Earth population, including descendants
of Elijah Bailey, have overcome their agoraphobia and started to move out to the stars.
But they are not spacers, they call themselves settlers.
And they do not have any robots because they have seen how that corrupted the spacers.
Some of the spacers, though they have become decadent and stopped settling any worlds
after Celaria, see the settlers as a threat and want to wipe them out.
They organize a plot using a device called the Nuclear Intensifier, which will turn the
surface of the Earth radioactive.
Now Jiskard and Daniel stop one of them, but this involves harming a person.
Jiskard can do this because of the zero-th law, but the stress of this ultimately causes
his demise.
But the other spacers intended to set the nuclear intensifier to a lower setting that
would take longer to turn the surface radioactive.
And the two robots decide that actually this would force the vigorous, Earth-imhabitants
to leave and settle the galaxy, so they let him do it.
Jiskard, before he stops functioning completely, transfers to Daniel, the secret of his telepathy,
slash mind manipulation, Paula.
With this novel, Asimov now has a new explanation for the radioactivity of the surface that avoids
nuclear war.
And he explains how he got from having robots to a galactic empire without them.
Daniel will be very long-lived, and some 20,000 years later will appear as the behind-the-scenes
power guiding events in prelude to foundation, foundations edge, and foundation and Earth.
And so that concludes our look at Asimov's foundation and robot series.
He has written some other novels, and so I want to take a look at a few of those as well,
and then we'll move on to other topics.
For now, this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and encouraging you as always
to support Free Software.
Bye-bye!
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