Foundation and Earth. Isaac Asimov
The fifth novel in the Foundation series continues in the more traditional novelistic veil as the fourth book, Foundation’s Edge. Both of these novels were conceived as whole narratives rather than put together post hoc as the early novels had been. As I have noted in earlier installments of this string, this allows Asimov more room for character and plot development, both good things.
This novel is further unusual in the series because the plot picks up right where the preceding novel ends. Here is a bit of recap before I get further into the novel. In Foundation’s Edge, Golan Trevize and Janov Pelorat have taken a Foundation ship in search of the Second Foundation, which Trevize comes to believe is on Earth, the planet of humanity’s origin. At this point in history, Earth is mythical and many doubt that it even exists, let alone was the birth world of life. In this world, it seems, the presence of humans across the galaxy is a given and few question their own lineage or the history of space exploration and settlement. Instead of finding Earth, Golan and Pelorat find Gaia, but forces from the Foundation and Second Foundation that are pursing the duo also find them and Gaia at the same time. Gaia represents a third power in the universe, a sort of mental inter-connectivity that links the entire planet and everything on it into a sort of super-organism. The existence of Gaia presents a tri-polar world in which the First Foundation is powered by logic, the Second Foundation by emotion, and Gaia by interconnected mentality.
Unbeknownst to Trevize, he has an unusual mental insight that Gaia prizes and Gaia grants him the choice for the future of humanity from among these three options. Trevize selects Gaia and then Gaia, in turn, makes the Foundation and Second Foundation forces forget that he exists so that Gaia can move forward with Trevize to create Galaxia, and interconnection the stretches the entire galaxy and everything in it.
This is where Foundation’s Edge leaves off. Foundation and Earth picks up with Trevize still wanting to find Earth because he wants to make certain that his decision is the correct one and he believes that he will find the answer he is looking for on Earth. Carrying over from the preceding novel, Trevize picks up clues from the varying legends about humanity’s origins and finds that all the records have been scrubbed of actual evidence of Earth or its location.
Trevize and Pelorat take off in their ship Far Star, along with Bliss, a representative of Gaia who loves Pelorat and will serve as Trevize’s philosophical foil throughout the novel. For, even though Trevize has provisionally decided in favor of Gaia (and thus, Galaxia), he has his doubts that he will repeatedly voice. Remember, he wants to be sure of his decision, although he just seems to regret choosing it most of the time.
This, at least is enough to get started and provide some context for what I think are some of the more interesting points in the novel. So far, there are really three things that stood out to me as I am reading this. The first is that Bliss and Trevize’s constant bickering is entirely wearisome. At nearly every encounter the three have with other worlds, Bliss will take the opportunity to try to convince Trevize of Gaia’s superior interconnected nature. She will point out some aspect of life and try to make an analogy to show that Trevize’s “isolate” position is lacking. Trevize argues back each time, attempting to show why his atomistic, individualistic aspect is superior. Pelorat mainly just tries to keep the peace. The philosophical argument that this series of discussions seems to want to approach would be between a version of Spinoza’s pantheism and an Enlightenment-era perspective on individuality. Couple this latter with a mid-twentieth century belief in rugged individualism that Asimov seems to endorse, and we arrive at the heart of the matter. This is a struggle between the all and the one. But Trevize, who has already decided in favor of Gaia cannot let go of his individuality. He wants to see the value in Gaia, and perhaps he only recognizes its worth as opposed to either of the Foundations, but he does supposedly choose Gaia, and Galaxia, even as he rigorously argues against Bliss’s ideas. Asimov, of course, never makes these philosophical underpinnings explicit (if he was conscious of writing them at the time, that is), but there they are.
I like this complication of the previous novels because it breaks up the simplistic binary logic. The tension between the Foundation and the Second Foundation boils down to an old emotion/logic binary that reinforces a lot of bad ideas. Asimov ascribes stereotypical characteristics to the respective Foundations that reinforce other, mistaken binaries. The Foundation is logical, urban, scientific, and masculine while the Second Foundation is emotional, pastoral, folksy, and feminine. Asimov, thankfully, does not go the route of simply coding one good or bad, but he does seem to favor the first Foundation insomuch as it is a Foundation ship that makes Trevize’s search possible and Trevize does come from the Foundation, wherever his allegiances lie later. The addition of Gaia as a third party disrupts the simple binary, not by just adding a third term, but by working out of line of the other two elements. To put it another way, Asimov could have added Gaia as a third element that reinforces the binary (logical: emotional: artistic), or he could have attempted to dialectically synthesize the two (logical: emotional: humanistic), but instead he extends the third option beyond current human understanding to totality. Gaia, and Galaxia by extension, represents a non-synthetic, non-binarized composition of humanity, non-human life, and inert matter into a single consciousness that, paradoxically also has room for individuality. This take the series off in a much different direction from where the series started when Seldon pitted the order of psychohistory against the chaos of human rationality.
Asimov also introduces a complication in this novel that had not been fully realized in the preceding books in the series. That is, he acknowledges that human involvement on plants (ie., that acts of settling and colonization) throw things off balance. In other books in the series, the only real difficulties that humans face are their political interactions with one another. That humanity has spread across the galaxy to the point that it has forgotten its own origins is presented as a simple fact. Bliss, the emissary of Gaia, points out that “No inhabited world has a true ecological balance,” meaning that every world that humans have molded worlds to suit themselves in every instance and that this “terraforming” throws off that balance. This insight occurs after the trio have visited a world formerly inhabited by humans that has gone feral.
This is the first inkling that there are cracks in the human project of space exploration. In a piece I wrote on Foundation and the Enlightenment project for tor.com, I argued that Foundation invokes some of the problems of the Enlightenment because it is a project that depends on the willing participation of future generations and assumes that those descendants will have the same goals and values that we do. In many ways, space exploration is an ultimate extension of the Enlightenment because it is an attempt to know the galaxy and beyond in human terms. Terraforming is a good from the perspective of those doing the forming. It is right there in the name. From a galactic perspective, human space exploration may be an imposition. At the end of the novel, the characters will be faced with the reality that humanity has been the only species in the galaxy to achieve self-aware intelligence and sophisticated enough technology to travel between stars. But they also face that possibility there may be intelligent species in other galaxies that do not share human values and humanity is inadequate to facing that challenge.
Taken together, this reflection on terraforming points to two tropes in sf that will develop more strongly in other writers. I am specifically thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series that takes up the question of the ethics of terraforming directly and of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past series in which humanity is threatened by interstellar, possibly intergalactic, aliens and the Dark Forest conundrum.
There are just a couple of additional points that I will briefly detail now, since this post is starting to get a bit long.
The first is that Asimov seems to be somewhat forward looking in regards to gender in the future. I will acknowledge here that Asimov does not have a great track record when it comes to treatment/portrayal of women in his work and that there have been reports of his being a groper in his lifetime. These are strikes against an author and should not be ignored. However, in this novel, Asimov does seem to present something of a more nuanced view of gender. The descendants of the Spacers, those among the first to strike out from Earth, inhabit Solaris and have evolved themselves into a hermaphroditic species. During their adventures on Solaris, the crew ends up killing one of the Solarians and kidnapping a child. After the child is aboard the ship, they find that they have difficulty referring to it as “it.” They have a discussion about gendering and pronouns and end up deciding for the child that “it” will now be “she.” This is an interesting moment because this discussion of gendered pronoun usage seems very prescient for a writer who generally does not seem interested in gender politics. Even though the trio ultimately gets it wrong in deciding the gender for the child rather than asking its preferences, this moment does seem ahead of its time.
The last point of interest for me is the way that Asimov decides to cap off the series. In the world of Foundation, there are no robots until this novel. The people in the galaxy had not even known about robots until Trevize and Pelorat begin their search. We find out at the end, though, that the robots themselves are responsible for shepherding humanity throughout time toward a more responsible ecology. Asimov ties this series with his Robot series here and provides an amendment to the laws of robotics. This serves as a kind of deus ex machina that wraps up the narrative rather neatly. Robots guided the Seldon plan and robots are behind the drive to create Galaxia. They realize that humanity will continue to terraform and mangle the worlds they inhabit because they do not have a broader grasp of the world.
In its way, the robots and Galaxia undermine the Seldon plan and the drive of the earlier books which did focus on an Enlightenment rationality and notions of progress. This is a bit of a disappointment after reading more than a thousand pages about the various conflicts surrounding the Seldon plan, the Foundation, the Second Foundation, and all of the rest. These conflicts are largely pointless in the last moments because this unknown entity was manipulating the course of history and, thus, psychohistory.
So, at the end of five novels, I would say that I still prefer the latter novels to the earlier books. There is more space for Asimov to flesh out character and deal with complex ideas in these full-length books. The earliest novels still seem disjointed to me. The patchwork nature of them as stories without connective tissue is jarring and Seldon’s sometimes appearance isn’t really enough to stitch them together. Those books really needed some rewriting to make them into novels.
I have two more books to go in this series and I am really not sure what to expect from them. I know that the last two are prequels, possibly set during Hari Seldon’s lifetime but before the events of Foundation. The series is more enjoyable as a whole than I had expected and does contain some thoughtful points.
