Christina's Thoughts - Post a comment

1. Apocryphal Tales by Karel Čapek
2. The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? by Jan Zalasiewicz
3. Life As We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search For (and Synthesis of) Alien Life by Peter Ward
4. Deaf President Now!: The 1988 Revolution at Gaullaudet University by John B. Christensen and Sharon N. Barnartt
5. Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries
6. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
7. Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements by Austin Burt and Robert Trivers
8. The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Catherin A. Liszt
9. She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
10. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'engle
11. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer
12. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl by John Colapinto
13. Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs Edited by Jonathan Ames
14. Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden
15. Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female by Phyllis Burke
16. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell
17. The Transgender Companion (Male to Female) by Jennifer Seeley
18. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serrano
19. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex by Alice Domurat Dreger
20. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul by Leslie Feinberg
21. I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir by Jennifer Finney Boylan
22. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
23. Sexing The Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto-Sterling
24. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
25. Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
26. Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
27. Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov
28. Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov

It's been a long time since I read the Foundation series. And I have to say that, upon rereading them, I was rather less impressed than in the past. Oh, there are some interesting ideas, certainly. Extraordinarily weak characterizations, but interesting ideas.

The idea of Psychohistory is an interesting one. And I think it is, in general, quite plausible. We can already make some crude statistical predictions of human behavior. I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could predict the behavior of entire worlds and interstellar unions, at least in the short run. However, several problems exist in Asimov's idea of psychohistory:

1. Technological progress would destroy psychohistorical projections in the long run. Any predictions of how humans would respond to a new technology would require an understanding of how that technology works, which, by definition, is impossible for a technology that does not yet exist. Even small-scale incremental development could strain psychohistory, unless one could predict just how much improvement would be made. As an example, improvements in gas mileage would reduce the amount of oil required, which would surely shape international politics, at least to a small degree. However, one would have to be able to predict just how much improvement there could be to mileage. In addition to how much that improvement would come at the cost of, for example, decreased acceleration or poorer handling. Without knowing that, you couldn't predict how well those improvements would fare in the marketplace. Would consumers consider the better gas mileage worth it or not?

2. Even if the overall progress of history is based on large-scale processes, socioeconomic trends out of the control of any one person, the timing of events is often largely a matter of chance. For example, WWI was pretty much inevitable by the late 19th century. I could even believe that an early 18th century psychohistorian could predict the development of such alliances. However, the specific incident - the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand - which set off WWI was a matter of chance. Had the archduke's driver taken a different route, he wouldn't've been killed. Something else would've set off the war, to be sure, but it would've been at a later time. However, Seldon's plan included the appearance of his image at specific points in time. In other words, exact timing of historical events. Okay, so he could've seen the civil war that broke out between the independent traders and the elite on Terminus. But to predict the exact timing so precisely as to be able to appear right after the war had ended? (Of course, in this example the Mule's appearance threw things out of balance) Of course, many of the political units that arose from the Empire's ashes were monarchies. And the history of monarchies is always reliant on individual quirks. An infertile king can throw a monarchy into disorder, or create an unexpected union between two kingdoms, as when Queen Elizabeth I of England died without heir, and her cousin King James VI of Scotland found himself King James I of England as well as King James VI of Scotland. Had Elizabeth left an heir, Scotland and England would've remained separate kingdoms! Oh, sure, there probably would've been a continued dominance of Scotland by England, and perhaps even some kind of political union, a federation, perhaps. But British history would've proceeded quite differently. Or going back a bit further, Mary I of Scotland was married to King Francis II of France. He died young. However, had he survived longer, and had they had a child, then that child would've been King of Scotland and France, uniting the two kingdoms! And what a difference that would've made to world history! Especially if Elizabeth I still died without heir, uniting Scotland, England, and France! (Of course, a civil war might very well have arisen preventing the union - but that, too, would've had a major change to world history) Now, obviously, such marriages were political, and shaped by socioeconomic pressures - but still influenced by random chance, as, for example, the marriage of Mary and Francis was only possible because, well, King James V had had a daughter and no sons. If he'd had a son, the marriage of Mary and Francis wouldn't've been so crucial. Mary would've been Queen of France, but not Queen of Scotland, and her children would've been a collateral line of succession, with a small chance of succeeding. So, the genetic lottery that produced a daughter instead of a son created the possibility of a Franco-Scottish (and later Franco-British) union. Elizabeth's refusal to marry prevented her from having an heir, and therefore lead to the Union of the Crowns. Individual personalities matter hugely in monarchies!

3. Individual leaders did make a difference in the Foundation's rise! Had Hardin behaved differently, the Foundation would've been crushed before it ever got started! There are several other examples of Mayors going against the public tide and making the right decisions. This completely throws the whole "forces of history" angle out of wack.

4. The planned Second Empire was to be ruled by the psychohistorians of the Second Foundation. An unelected, unaccountable, body of mind-controlling mathematicians with a superiority complex. Lovely. Did Asimov (and by extension his fictional hero Seldon) completely fail to understand that such a body would be more interested in preserving its own power than in the good of mankind? Oh, sure, to some extent the good of humanity would be congruous with their own personal good. A stable society would be beneficial to them, so they wouldn't want wars and riots going on. But stable society doesn't necessarily mean a fair, just, prosperous, society. Their ability to predict social movements long in advance and to mentally control individuals would make their position virtually impossible to destroy. And, given their condescending attitude towards the non-mentalic majority, I can't see them going to any extra effort to make sure that their stable society is a happy one. I could easily see them accepting, say, the genocidal extermination of a few trillion people (a minuscule proportion of an Empire with 25 million planets) to be an acceptable way to relieve social pressures. They certainly had no qualms in Second Foundation with allowing the population of the planet of Tazenda to be ruthlessly wiped out by the Mule's forces in order to preserve their own secrecy. Or later in sacrificing 50 of their own people to the Foundation (and if they have little hesitation in sacrificing their own people, how much less would they have in sacrificing other people?).

5. The Foundation's history is, quite frankly, highly implausible. There is an obvious parallelism with American history. A small group of colonies of the British Empire, located on the edge of Western civilization, breaking away at the start of the Empire's decline, gradually grew to become a global superpower. A tiny planet on the edge of the Galaxy, breaking away at the start of the Galactic Empire's decline, gradually grows to become a galactic superpower, and eventually a new pan-Galactic Empire. However, it is based on some extremely implausible events:

5a. Technology immediately being lost in the surrounding areas. And immediately replaced by new technologies. They lost atomic power - and replaced it with coal and oil. The use of fossil fuels requires a number of technologies that would not exist in a nuclear-powered civilization. Not only the knowledge of how to find them, but also the knowledge of how to refine them and the facilities to do so. Special power plants and engines that can use fossil fuels. An entire economic infrastructure designed to extract, refine, and distribute these fuels. A society that cannot even maintain an existing technology would not be able to develop these new technologies (and they would be new to them - humanity hadn't used fossil fuels in 25,000 years, they'd have to reinvent those technologies from scratch)

5b. The Four Kingdoms passively allowing the Foundation to establish religious domination. Supposedly they were held off initially by mutual rivalries between the four kingdoms. Bull. Either the most powerful of the four, or an alliance of two of the Kingdoms, would capture Terminus and defend it from the others. Or possibly all four would cooperate in capturing Terminus and exploiting its knowledge to use the regained technology against other peripheral kingdoms. This is only the earliest such implausible history.

5c. The only plausible explanation is the mind-control powers of the Second Foundation forcing history to comply with Seldon's Plan. We know that that was their purpose, to "safeguard" the Seldon Plan, to make sure it went according to plan. So, if that requires making sure that leaders behave in a certain way, and they're able to control individual minds, then that would be sensible. Given this:

5d. The Second Empire was supposed to be a federation-type government. If so, then why use a single planet as the nucleus? Why have a single world gradually growing to power, increasing its control? Why not simply use psychohistory to direct the various kingdoms that arose from the Empire towards a federation of their own? Direct them in such a way as to gradually build up a fabric of treaties until, without anyone even realizing it until it was too late, they'd gradually ceded individual autonomy, a tiny piece at a time, to a galactic federation? That would also have the advantage of greater flexibility - it would not be reliant on a single political unit - nay, a single planet at the start. Even after the Foundation's rise to power, individual Mayors of Terminus were still crucial. In a gradually developing treaty-based federation, any one political unit would be unimportant. While individual leaders might shape the history of their own nations, they wouldn't be crucial in the greater Galactic picture.

Now, by Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, Asimov seemed to have realized some of the flaws in the whole idea of the Second Foundation, in the domination of the psychohistorians. But only a glimmering. He still seems to have thought that the Second Foundation would have the good of all in mind.

But, what's his solution? A more organic empire? One not dominated by a small clique? No. It was an even more-creepy galactic consciousness. The loss of individuality to a group mind. And through a rather bizarrely mystical agency. We are told that Golan Trevize has this mystical sense of rightness, a super-intuition that, when it kicks in, is infallible. We are told this. We are given no evidence of this, but both the world-mind of Gaia and the psychohistorians of the Second Foundation believe this. And based on this irrational super-intuition, he decides on Galaxia. A single human, responsible for completely altering the entire galaxy. And then he jaunts off to find Earth, with no rational explanation, only that he "knows" that there he'll discover if he's right. And when he gets there, what does he decide? That he was right because of the remote possibility that at some point in the future, extragalactic invaders might arrive, and if they found a disunited galaxy they could dominate humanity. Umm ... what? First off, the founding of Galaxia was supposed to take centuries. By that time, the Second Empire would be founded anyways. And even if the Second Empire fell, too, humanity has a tendency to unite against outside threats. Furthermore, would Galaxia really be an improvement over hypothetical alien domination? Surely, assuming the Psychohistorians remained (and I can't see how they would be overthrown, or how their empire could fall, given their ability to foresee troubles centuries or millennia ahead and prevent them), then they could investigate the new aliens and figure out psychohistorical projections for them, too!

There was a planet, Solaria, which was given as the opposite extreme from Galaxia. A planet of 1,200 hermaphroditic humans, self-reproducing and living in total isolation from each other, surrounded by their robots. Supposedly Galaxia was the opposite extreme. Instead of total isolation, total unity. But is it really the opposite? I would say, rather, that Galaxia is more like Solaria than the galaxy as it was. At least, from the perspective of minds. A Solarian had only the remotest dealings with other minds. Only rarely, and via impersonal holographic conferences. A member of Gaia - or of Galaxia - does encounter other minds - but minds that are also part of the same supermind. Members of Gaia did have some degree of independence, but only a limited degree. They therefore encountered only a limited range of other minds. Bliss, as a member of Gaia, showed tremendous naivete about what she called "Isolate" minds, born from her lack of experience dealing with independent minds. A member of an "Isolate" civilization regularly encounters minds very different from his or hers. If anything, the variations in an Isolate Empire would be more likely to produce a mind that could understand an alien invader than a group-mind like Galaxia's could. They'd have the kind of variation that would be essential to figuring out a way to fight off the aliens or to come to a mutual agreement with them. (And, really, what're the odds that an alien race would have the same needs as humans? Wouldn't they be more likely to have different requirements, and therefore to prize worlds that are useless to humans, and reject worlds that are useful to humans? So, the humans would have their millions of planets, and the aliens would have their millions of planets, and the two could get along quite well)

Another problem with the 4th and 5th books - the idea that the suns of the Spacer worlds and of Earth could be simply cut out of galactic maps and, by that way, avoid ever being found. Stars are visible from a long way. It would be inevitable that any discrepancies between official maps and reality would be discovered by someone. An amateur astronomer observing the stars in the sky of their world or a mapmaker updating maps (stars move, after all, and therefore a map would be obsolete after a while). Having discovered these unmapped stars - and stars that, by definition, are of the kind that could potentially harbor a habitable world - someone would investigate it, if only to find out if there was a suitable world for colonization. A much better way of hiding those worlds would be to simply change the information in the records to place a plausible, but fictitious, set of orbiting planets - none of which would be habitable. Then you'd simply see in the maps a star with no useful planets, and they would be ignored. Removing them from all the records would merely arouse suspicion. Likewise for the deletion of records referring to Earth. More reasonable would be to simply insert false information about Earth, especially if written in such a way as to cast doubt on the real records!

Also - why the hell did Asimov have to make not only Earth but Saturn so unique? Okay, it's plausible that only one planet in the galaxy might evolve intelligent life. There are legitimate scientists who believe that Earth is very unusual, and that the chances of sentient life evolving even on an Earth-like world are so low, that there might well be less than one technological civilization per galaxy on average. Other scientists disagree, of course. I'm not informed enough to have an opinion on which view is more likely correct, but for this purpose, that doesn't matter. Both views are, in our present state of knowledge, plausible (hopefully we will one day know enough to figure out which view is closer to the truth). However, even the staunchest Rare Earth advocate doesn't suggest that Earth's complex ecosystem is unique in the Galaxy, only that such planets are rare, and that, given the low probability of intelligence evolving, there is likely no other intelligent species in the galaxy. So, while planets with complex ecosystems of their own may be rare, it's a bit much to suppose that Earth is totally unique in that aspect, that all other life-bearing planets have only simple life on them. Furthermore, even if you assume that Earth itself is unique - Saturn's rings are unique? Really? That's just ridiculous. What connection does Saturn's rings have to Earth's life? I could buy factors such as Earth's large Moon being unique, if you assume that Earth's biology is unique, since the large Moon may well have played an important role in the evolution of Earth life, but Saturn's rings could have nothing to do with Earth's life, so to assume that no other gas planet in the galaxy has such an impressive ring system is just absurd. I could buy that it's an unusually rich ring system, that, let's say, only about 5% of gas giants have such an impressive system, but not that it's unique. Two completely unique planets in the same solar system?

Also, another rant, more general to a lot of sci-fi, but present also in the Foundation series. The idea of a single galactic language. There are thousands of languages on Earth, including dozens with tens or hundreds of millions of speakers. I cannot believe that only one language would leave Earth. Speakers of many languages would leave Earth, especially once space travel became relatively cheap. The first wave would probably only have a few major languages, such as English, Spanish, Chinese, maybe a few other European languages. But other languages would follow. The earliest planets would almost certainly be multilingual. In the early days of space exploration, there would be few suitable planets available for colonization. And the first colonies would be small in number. I cannot believe that the first colonists on a planet would be able to stake a meaningful claim to the entire planet. There would be a number of independent settlements. Later on, as space travel became easier and the number of colony worlds grew, you might be able to have colonies staking a claim to their entire planet, so later worlds might be monolingual, but different worlds would have different languages. Some would speak English, some Spanish, some Chinese (probably several different Chinese languages), Japanese, Hindi, Swahili, German, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and a whole host of other languages. Even small languages like Icelandic might find worlds of their own. Furthermore, even if somehow only a single language left Earth (all but one language had died out by that point? Don't believe it. I could buy the number of languages declining to a few dozen, but not to one), over the 8,000 years that had been said to have passed between the origins of hyperspatial travel and the rise of the Galacti Empire (and the 12,000 years between the rise and fall of the same), there'd be plenty of time for each world to evolve its own language. The Indo-European family of languages, which includes languages as distinct as English, French, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, is descended from a common ancestor generally believed to have been spoken somewhere around 6,000-10,000 years ago. 20,000 years would be enough to turn a single language into descendants unrecognizable as being related to each other (at least, under current linguistic understanding; but given both intermixing of languages and the obscuring tendencies of linguistic changes, I suspect that it would never be possible to reconstruct a family stretching back that far). There could be no "Galactic". At best, there'd be a dominant language, such as "Trantorian", known and used throughout the Empire, in the same way as English is often used in our world by non-native speakers. Even Star Wars did better than Foundation in that regards! C-3PO was said to be "fluent in over six million forms of communication"!