At the core of SF lies the experience of science. This makes the genre finally hostile to such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical ground. Deconstructionism’s stress on contradictory or selfcontained internal differences in texts, rather than their link to reality, often merely leads to literature seen as empty word games.
SF novels give us worlds which are not to be taken as metaphors but as real. We are asked to participate in wrenchingly strange events, not merely watch them for clues to what they’re really talking about. (Ummm, if this stands for that, then the other stuff must stand for….Not a way to gather narrative momentum.) The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: Life isn’t like this, it is this. Journeys can go to fresh places, not merely return us to ourselves.
Even so, I’ve indulged myself a bit in the satirical scenes depicting an academia going off the rails, but I feel Isaac would have approved of my targets. Readers thinking I’ve gone overboard in depicting the view that science does not deal with objective truths, but instead is a battleground of power politics where “naIve realism” meets relativist worldviews, should look into The Golem by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. This book attempts to portray scientists as no more the holders of objective knowledge than are lawyers or travel agents.
The recent “re-norming” of the Scholastic Aptitude Tests so that each year the average is forced to the same number, thus masking the decline of ability in students, I satirize in the very last pages of the novel; I hope Isaac would have gotten a chuckle from seeing the issue framed against an entire galaxy.
From Verne and Wells to somewhere near 1970, science fiction was mostly about the wonders of movement, of transportation. Note the innumerable novels with the word star in their titles, evoking far destinations, and stories such as Robert Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll.”
But in the past few decades we have focused more on the wonders of information, of transformations at least partly internal, not external. The Internet, virtual reality, computer simulations-all these loom large in our visions of our futures. This novel attempts to combine these two themes, with several conspicuous scenes about travel, and a larger background motif on computers.
As James Gunn noted, the Foundation series is a saga. Its method lies in a repeated pattern: Out of the solution of each problem grows the next problem to be solved. This became, of course, a considerable constraint on later novels. Asimov seemed to be saying that life was a series of problems to be solved, but life itself could never be solved. As Gunn remarked, considering that the combined and integrated Foundation and Robot saga now covers sixteen books, perhaps a directory of it all is called for, named, perhaps, Encyclopedia Galactica?
Galactic empires became a mainstay frame for science fiction. Poul Anderson’s Flandry novels and Gordon R. Dickson (in his Dorsai series) particularly studied the sociopolitical structure of such vast complexes, for a powerful, autocratic imperial system demands great organizational skill-the primary asset of the Romans themselves.
Isaac was not always consistent in his numbers. How many dwell on Trantor? Usually he says forty billion, but in Second Foundation it is 400 billion (unless that’s a typo). Spread forty billion over an Earth-sized world (with all its seas drained), and that’s only about a hundred per square kilometer. Surely housing them would not demand a half-kilometer-deep city.
Dates also get difficult to follow, across such immensities of time. Trantor is at least 12,000 years old-and note that we assume that the year is Earth’s, though Earth’s location has been forgotten. By the Galactic Empire calendar, Pebble in the Sky, which has references to hundreds of thousands of years of expansion into space, occurs about 900 G.E. In Foundation atomic energy is 50,000 years old. The robot Daneel is 20,000 years old in Prelude to Foundation and in Forward the Foundation. How far away in our future do the Sun and Spaceship emblem rule? Perhaps 40,000 years? No one date reconciles every detail.
Not that it truly matters. I know the dangers of writing a long series over decades. I took twenty-five years to wrestle with the six volumes of my Galactic Center series. Undoubtedly there are contradictions I missed in dating and other details, even though I laid it all out in a timeline, published in the last volume. The aliens of that series are not those implicated in this novel, but there are clearly conceptual links.
Science fiction speaks of the future, but to the present. The grand issues of social power and the technology that drives it will never fade. Often problems are best seen in the perspectives of implication, before we meet them on the gritty ground of their arrival.
Isaac Asimov was ultimately hopeful about humanity. He saw us again and again coming to a crossroads and prevailing. The Foundation is about that.
What matters in sagas is sweep. This, the Foundation series surely has. I can only hope I have added a bit to that.
Works tracing the intricacies of the Foundation include notably Alexei and Cory Panshin’s historical The World Beyond the Hill, James Gunn’s insightful Isaac Asimov, Joseph Patrouch’s thorough The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, and Alva Rogers’ Requiem for Astounding, which gives a sense of what it was like to read the classic works as they appeared. I learned from all these studies.
For advice and comments on this project I am especially grateful to Janet Asimov, Mark Martin, David Brin, Joe Miller, Jennifer Brehl, and Elisabeth Brown for close readings of the manuscript. My gratitude goes to Don Dixon for his fantastical, future beastiary. Appreciation for general help is due to my wife Joan, Abbe, and to Ralph Vicinanza, Janet Asimov, James Gunn, John Silbersack, Donald Kingsbury, Chris Schelling, John Douglas, Greg Bear, George Zebrowski, Paul Carter, Lou Aronica, Jennifer Hershey, Gary Westfahl and John Clute. Thanks to all.
Gregory Benford
—physicist, educator, author-was born in Mobile, Alabama. He is a professor of physics at the University of California-Irvine, and conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a visiting professor at Cambridge University and has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy.
Many of his best-known novels are part of a six-novel sequence beginning in the near future with In the Ocean of Night, and continuing on with Across the Sea of Suns. The series then leaps to the far future, at the center of our galaxy, where a desperate human drama unfolds, beginning with Great Sky River, and proceeding through Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and concluding with Sailing Bright Eternity. At the series’ end the links to the earlier novels emerge, revealing a single unfolding tapestry against an immense background.