Genres are constrained conversations. Constraint is essential, defining the rules and assumptions open to an author. If hard SF occupies the center of science fiction, that is probably because hardness gives the firmest boundary. Science itself yields crisp confines.
Genres are also like immense discussions, with ideas developed, traded, mutated, their variations spun down through time. Players ring changes on each other-more like a steppin’-out jazz band than a solo concert in a plush auditorium. Contrast “serious” fiction (more accurately described, in my eyes, as merely self-consciously solemn). It has canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, looming great and intact by themselves.
Much of the pleasure of mysteries, of espionage novels or SF, lies in the interaction of writers with each other and, particularly in SF’s invention of fandom, with the readers as well. This isn’t a defect; it’s the essential nature of popular culture, which the United States has dominated in our age, with the invention of jazz, rock, the musical, and written genres such as the Western, the hardboiled detective, modern fantasy, and other rich areas. Many kinds of SF (hard, utopian, military, satirical) share assumptions, code words, lines of argument, narrative voices. Fond remembrance of golden age Astounding and its letter column, of the New Wave, of Horace Gold’s Galaxy- theseare echoes of distant conversations earnestly carried out.
Genre pleasures are many, but this quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. In contrast to the Grand Canon view of great works standing like monoliths in a deserted landscape, genre reading satisfactions are a striking facet of modern democratic (pop) culture, a shared movement.
There are questions about how writers deal with what some call the “anxiety of influence,” but which I’d prefer to term more mildly: the digestion of tradition.
I’m reminded of John Berger’s definition of hack work, describing oil painting in Ways of Seeing, as “…not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art.” Fair enough; but this can happen in any context. Working in a known region of concept-space does not necessarily imply that the territory has been mined out. Nor is fresh ground always fertile.
Surely we should notice that a novel Hemingway thought the best in American literature is a sequel-indeed, following on a boy’s book, Tom Sawyer.
Sharing common ground isn’t only a literary tradition. Are we thrown into moral confusion when we hear Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini? Do we indignantly march from the concert hall when assaulted by Variations on a Theme by Haydn? Sharecropping by the Greats? Shocking!
Reinspecting the assumptions and methods of classical works can yield new fruit. Fresh narrative can both strike out into new territory while reflecting on the landscape of the past. Recall that Hamlet drew from several earlier plays about the same plot.
Isaac himself revisited the Foundation, taking different angles of attack each time. In the beginning, psychohistory equated the movements of people as a whole with the motions of molecules. The Second Foundation looked at perturbations to such deterministic laws (the Mule) and implied that only a superhuman elite could manage instabilities. Later, robots emerged as the elite, better than humans at dispassionate government. Beyond robots came Gaia…and so on.
In this three-book series we shall reinspect the role of robots, and what psychohistory might look like as a theory. More riffs upon the basic tune.
I had always wondered about crucial aspects of Asimov’s Empire:
Why were there no aliens in the galaxy? What role did computers play? Particularly, vs. robots?
What did the theory of psychohistory actually look like?
Finally, who was Hari Seldon-as a character, a man?
This novel attempts some answers. It is my contribution to a discussion about power and determinism which has now spanned over half a century.
Of course, we know some incidental answers. The term “psychohistory” was commonly used in the thirties and appears in the 1934 Webster’s Dictionary; Isaac greatly extended its meaning, though. He didn’t want to deal with John w. Campbell’s notorious dislike of aliens who might be as clever as we, so his Foundation had none. But it seemed to me there might be more to the matter.
As well, Asimov’s uniting of his robot novels and the Foundation series became intricate and puzzling. The British critic Brian Stableford found this “comforting in its claustrophobic enclosure.” There are no robots in the early Foundation novels, but they are behind-the-scenes manipulators in both Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation.
Some form of advanced computing machines must underlie the Empire, surely. Isaac remarked that “I just put very advanced computers in the new Foundation novel and hoped that nobody would notice the inconsistency. Nobody did.”As James Gunn remarked, “More accurately, people noticed but didn’t care.”
Asimov wrote each novel at the level of the then current scientific understanding. Later works updated the surrounding science. Thus his galaxy is more detailed in later books, including in Foundation’s Edge both advanced computers and a black hole at the Galactic Center. Similarly, here I have depicted our more detailed knowledge of the Galactic Center. In place of Isaac’s “hyperspace” ships I have used wormholes, which have considerably more theoretical justification now than they did when Einstein and Rosen introduced them in the 1930s. Indeed, wormholes are allowed by the general theory of relativity, but must have extreme forms of matter to form and support them. (Matt Visser’s Lorentzian Wormholes is the standard work on current thinking.)
Isaac wrote much of his fiction in a style he termed “direct and spare,” though in the later works he relaxed this constraint a bit. I have not attempted to write in the Asimov style. (Those who think it is easy to write clearly about complex subjects should try it.) For the Foundation novels he used a particularly bare-boards approach, with virtually no background descriptions or novelistic details.
Note his own reaction when he decided to return to the series and revisited the trilogy:
“I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense.”
But it worked, famously so. I could not manage such an approach, so have taken my own way.
I found that the details of Trantor, of psychohistory and the Empire, called out to me as I began thinking about this novel-indeed, they led me on my subconscious quest of the underlying story. So the book is not an imitation Asimov novel but a Benford novel using Asimov’s basic ideas and backdrop.
Necessarily my approach has harkened back to the older storytelling styles which prevailed in the SF of Isaac’s days. I have never responded favorably to the recent razoring of literature by critics-the tribes of structuralists, post-modernists, deconstructionists. To many SF writers, “post-modern” is simply a signature of exhaustion. Its typical apparatus-self-reference, heavy dollops of obligatory irony, self-conscious use of older genre devices, pastiche, and parody betrays lack of invention, of the crucial coin of SF, imagination. Some deconstructionists have attacked science itself as mere rhetoric, not an ordering of nature, seeking to reduce it to the status of the ultimately arbitrary humanities. Most SF types find this attack on empiricism a worn old song with new lyrics, quite quaintly retro.