Foundation, part 8: Forward the Foundation

So here it is, I have reached the end of Asimov's Foundation series. For a minute I was going to sit down and write an outline for this post but I think I am just going to plow through the thing as is and maybe edit it later for clarity.

This novel is second chronologically in the series but it was the last one published. In the Author's notes in a couple of these novels Asimov mentions that he wrote a number of the constitutive short stories at the beginning of this career that were then wrapped up together and marketed as novels and it wasn't until the third or fourth one in the series that he actually wrote as a cohesive novel. Thinking back over the novels, that much does seem clear. In previous posts I have mentioned some of the problems of writing this way. There is another problem that this series suffers from and that is from having been written ad hoc rather than as a planned series. I will come back to this point later on, but I think that this novel shows some of the worse signs of wear due to this process. But first, the novel itself.

This novel takes up more or less where Prelude to Foundation left off. Hari Seldon is on Trantor, working on his science of psychohistory. The narrative action of that novel is more or less chronologically continuous, meaning that there are some of the expected jumps in time, but the action all takes place more-or-less in a restrained span of a few years. In this novel, the narrative keeps leaping forward in ten year increments. Seldon at 40 becomes First Minister to Emperor Cleon I and is waylaid in his study of psychohistory. At 50 he returns to his studies and benchmark events keep occurring in these 10 year increments. This, in itself is fine. It seems as though Asimov is racing to the starting point of Foundation, his original novel, to perhaps avoid having to write another book in this series. What is less fine however, is how much Hari whines as he ages. He mourns his lost youth at 40 and again at 50 and lets everyone around him know how it pains him to age. This does not come off well.

As Seldon continues through the novel his fortunes wax and wane. He is well know as an academic and for his role as First Minister, but as people learn more about psychohistory and Seldon's predictions about the decline of empire, he loses popularity and comes to be seen as a crank. There are a couple of reveals that do not seem entirely presaged by the texts and seem to be mainly narrative conveniences meant to tie up loose ends. The final 50 or so pages of the novel just seem to unwind. They are pro forma wrapping up the series and not a lot is left answered. This is a problem for the prequel because the reader already knows where all of this ends up. All of the big reveals such as the true nature of the Foundation, the existence of the Second Foundation, the appearance of the Mule and his revealed connection to Gaia all have already taken place. All that is happening is getting from the beginning to there, and all of that heavy lifting has already been done.

One of the biggest obstacles that this novel faces is something that has plagued the entire series. We are told that the science of psychohistory depends on the civilization involved being largely ignorant of its existence. The explanation goes that knowing about psychohistory or hearing predictions based on the science would alter humans' actions and would, thus, disrupt the equations and predictions involved. This is basically the time-traveler's paradox built into this science, and it is a good one, at that. But, and this is a big one, everyone seems to know who Hari Seldon is and what he does. And not just in a couple of novels, everyone seems to know about psychohistory throughout the series. This tension is never resolved. Asimov does not do anything to explain away the fact that the most well-known figure in the galaxy has a created a science that every does and does not know about. This should trash Seldon's science but it seems not to.

This novel is interesting in the sense that it does make some connections and it gives us more of Hari Seldon, a figure who is mythical throughout the series until these two prequels. This novel also sees the beginning of the Foundation. But Seldon's discoveries also suffer a bit from explanation. The science of psychohistory is more effect the less it is known. The more that Asimov tries to explain it, the thinner it seems. This is a shame because the promise of psychohistory in Foundation is so strong and is such a compelling idea. I think that most readers of science fiction understand that creating and explaining impossible technologies and sciences is pretty much impossible to pull off convincingly and most of these readers are more than willing to extend a healthy suspension of disbelief and allow authors to explain away inconsistencies in their theories. This is a bedrock of most sci-fi. We don't always need things like time travel or the like to be explained and I know that I would prefer it not be unless there is some really good way of doing it. Usually these explanations fall flat. This did a bit and it sort of deflated the entire series for me. This, again, is a shame because I think that the younger Asimov who wrote those original short stories understood this aspect of narrative. I think that younger Asimov would also not have felt the need to connect the Foundation series with his Robot series. But this is what we end up with.

There is also a problem in narrative continuity. I have not gone back to look this up, but if I recall correctly, Seldon is tried for treason at the beginning of Foundation and is exiled to Terminus where he builds Foundation. In this novel, however, the Encyclopedia Galactica entry on Seldon has him dying at his desk at the university in Trantor. There is also no Public Safety Committee or whatever it is called in Foundation to try him. These inconsistencies aren't huge and don't really change the nature of the novels but it seems odd to me that Asimov would neglect to double-check his own novel to see where this one needs to end.

But now I am done with the series. This part of the project is complete. On the whole, I really enjoyed the novels. The idea of psychohitory is brilliant and I loved the connection with the encyclopedia. These are stellar ideas and made some great reading. In the end, though, I am not certain that the series lives up to all of the hype. I found problems throughout the novels and there were some turns in the narrative that I really did not care for. I don't think I would rank this as “the greatest science fiction epic of all time” as the cover claims but it was still pretty good.

 

Foundation, Part 7: Prelude to Foundation

 Nearly a year and a half ago, I undertook to read through Asimov's classic sci-fi series, Foundation, and write about the books. This is one of several sci-fi series that I decided to read, including Frank Herbert's Dune series (which I bailed on after 4 books), Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series (which I also bailed on after 2 books), and James SA Corey's The Expanse series (of which I am currently reading the sixth book and will likely continue). One of the major differences that I see in these series are those that were planned to be series of novels (or even novels to begin with) and those that were not. Corey's series was planned to be a long-running series from the start, and the novels show it. Each novel is more or less complete on its own, but they also build to a broader arc across the novels. The novels serve more as episodes than as simple stand-alones, meaning that you could read just one of the novels without the others, but it would make more sense to read them together.

These other series, though (I am necessarily leaving out a lot of other series and authors I could include, but this is the choice I am making), seem to be caught by surprise by their own sequels. That is, the sequels must pick up after a conclusion has been reached in the predecing book, and not always convincingly. Both Herbert and Asimov get around this problem by jumping hundreds or thousands of years into the future. This way, there is no messy character continuity to keep up and any narrative gaps can be explained by the chronological gap. The exception to this is that Herbert keeps bringing Duncan Idaho back from the dead for some reason.

When I catch myself wondering if I am being overly harsh in judging these authors for returning to worlds that may be personal or fan favorites, and may well have proven lucrative as well, I just keep remembering all of the series I have quit reading for one reason or another. I also think about the nose-dives that some of these series take. Redezvous with Rama, for example, may be one of my favorite golden era sf books, but Rama II was enough to stop me in my tracks. Likewise, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is a personal favorite while Forever Peace is merely okay and I haven't yet tried to get into Forever Free. I also think about the series I have loved. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and the book of short fiction that followed remains among my favorite novels. The same is true for Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past series. So it isn't the form of the sequel itself that is bad. There are a lot of writers who can beautifully pull off continuing novels in a fictional world.

To bring this back to my original topic, Asimov must have felt a bit like Arthur Conan Doyle resurrecting Sherlock Holmes after killing him off in returning the galaxy of Foundation. After all, he had written the series to an end in Foundation and Earth that was, if not completely satisfying, at least conclusive. Prelude to Foundation takes up Hari Seldon's rise to prominence on Trantor and his early adventures. Some of it is good and, as a stand-alone novel, it has its charms. However when taken in the context of the rest of the series, it leaves a little wanting.

Prelude to Foundation takes place first chronologically in the Foundation series, but it was written second-to-last. At the beginning of the novel, Seldon has traveled to Trantor and delivered a paper on psychohistory. This immediately catches the attention of Cleon I, emperor of the Galactic Empire. Seldon presentation proved the science of psychohistory as theoretically possible but Cleon thought that this meant that Seldon could predict the future and brings Seldon to him in order to gain his services. Hari resists, explaining that there is no practical application for the science and that it might take his entire lifetime to actually apply it.

Disappointed Cleon lets him go but instructs his right-hand to keep tabs on Seldon so that they can take him back when they can use him. Seldon is rescued from his surveillance by a friendly stranger who then helps to keep him in hiding for most of the rest of the novel.

Seldon ends up traveling to varied parts of Trantor to stay ahead of imperial reach and there is a lot of local flavor type interactions that haven't aged well. Seldon creeps on women and he meets a kid whose speech wouldn't be out of place in a Horatio Alger novel. In the end (no worries, I won't spoil it), Seldon already knows where things will end up in Foundation and Earth, even though this takes place several thousand years after his death.

This is the problem of prequels. There is no real tension in the danger that Seldon faces because I have already read five novels in which he plays a major role and know that he doesn't die yet. Granted, he dies in the opening pages of Foundation, but by then his mark is made and his influence extends millennia. Next, Asimov retcons “foreshadowing” of events that take place far in the narrative future, but which the reader has already experienced if they are reading in publication order. This generally doesn't read well and it seems more like an aging rock group begrudgingly playing the hit they wrote 30 years prior than an authentic narrative embellishment. There are then also the connections that Asimov wants to make between Foundation and his Robot series. This connection seemed unnecessary in Foundation and Earth and it leads to more phony foreshadowing in this novel, too. I haven't read enough of the Robot series to know how this affects that series, but perhaps I will head to those books after this series is done to find out for myself.

Also, and most damningly, Asimov tries to be funny in this book. For all that I admire in Asimov's writing, it is never for his wit. See, on Trantor there is a rival faction to the Emperor and that is Wye sector. More than once, a character will mention the name “Wye” and the interlocutor will proceed to give an unneeded and unasked-for explanation, thinking the first character was asking, “Why?” They are homonyms, get it!

I've shit on this book enough. There are things that I liked about it. Hari Seldon has been a force in this whole series but he has been distant. As I mentioned, he dies very early in the series and he just keeps showing up as a pre-recorded hologram. But here, he is an actual character, and he is one of Asimov's more dynamic and round ones. Beyond this, he is a moral character who wants to both do the right thing and stand by his science. The narrative itself is cohesive and shows Asimov's inventiveness in creating these different sectors with different traditions and styles. There are a couple of genuine surprises that kept the novel interesting and it ended up being an enjoyable read.

I won't say that this is my favorite in the series, but it was serviceable. I have one more book to go before I can put this series to bed and I'm not sure what to expect from it. I suspect that it will be a grab bag, a little like this novel is. I know that it follows Hari's story between the end of this novel and the beginning of Foundation, but I don't know what time period it covers. I am hoping that there will be a bit more explanation of psychohistory and I am really hoping that it doesn't go in a direction that undoes what made Foundation great.

Foundation, part 6: Foundation and Earth

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.

 

Foundation, Part 2: Re-reading Foundation

I meant to sit down and write this post after I finished reading the novel about a week and a half ago but I got caught up in some other writing projects and this fell to the wayside.  What this means is that I meant to give a more in-depth summary and analysis of Asimov's classic Foundation but what you are going to get is more nebulous.  I still have some notes from what I was going to write before, so I am going to work from that.
This may get sloppy and I know that I am going to miss some of the details.  I am okay with that.
This was my third reading of this novel.  The first time I read Foundation was in graduate school when I was working on the encyclopedic novel.  This novel is not encyclopedic, but it does contain thematic elements of the encyclopedia.  This is something that drops out of other novels (as I have written elsewhere) but is pretty heavy in the first one.
The second time I read this novel was with my sci-fi reading group.  We would alternate between reading classic sci-fi and newer novels.  Foundation filled the bill for a classic sci-fi novel that many in the group wanted to read, so we took it up.  I don't remember much about that conversation now, but I probably spent some time talking about the Encyclopedia Galactica.
This third time I am taking it up is with a view toward reading the entire series.
Foundation opens with a couple of really fascinating premises: the science of psychohistory and the aforementioned Encyclopedia Galactica.  I have written about the encyclopedia elsewhere, so I want to focus on psychohistory here.  This science blends sociology, group psychology, and statistical analysis into a science that may be used to predict future events.  The idea is that a properly trained psychohistorian can take a set of data about a current culture and its broad trends and use this to judge the likely outcome of certain events.  Hari Seldon is the most gifted practitioner of psychohistory and he uses it to predict long-scale historical events, including the eventual downfall of the current galactic empire, the dark ages that will follow the fall, and the eventual rise of the second empire.

The science of psychohistory is interesting because it seeks to quantify human action on a macro-scale.  Asimov explains away individual action by relying on probability and using civilization-wide sample sizes to make predictions.  This means the psychohistory relies on the broadest of trends, making individual contributions much too small to be a factor.
In order to show actions on this broad scale, the narrative must make leaps into the future.  This is not an uncommon device in sci-fi, but it takes special care to pull it off.  The author must keep certain thematics steady enough draw along plot and must be careful to re-establish context after each jump forward in time.  Each jump requires new characters as well.  This means that there are a lot of balls to keep in the air at once to pull it off.
Asimov does this with varying success.  The idea of psychohistory and following the plotting of civilization is compelling enough to draw readers along, even as they may have difficulty keeping characters and events straight.  Hari himself remains a constant throughout the narrative despite dying early on in the timeline.  He does this by preparing holograms of himself that are designed to appear at specific times in the future to help guide civilization along its proper course.  Seldon realizes that he must simultaneously nudge civilization in the right direction while also keeping it ignorant of his plan.  This is an unresolved problem of the whole scheme because people begin anticipating these emergences of new information, these "nudges" from Seldon.  Asimov never gets deep enough into the mechanics of psychohistory to deal with this kind of anticipation.  There must be a profound faith in Seldon's prescience for this to be carried off at all.  And this seems to be at odds with the tenets of psychohistory itself.

Ultimately, this is a really enjoyable book.  It is compelling and there is a lot going on.  Asimov is always a big idea author and I am generally ready to forgive the small details that don't always add up.  I tend to think that his characters are generally weak, but again, his are novels of ideas and not character studies so it is easy to set this to the side and enjoy the novel as thought-experiment.

Foundation, Part 1: An Introduction

I first read Isaac Asimov's classic novel Foundation while in graduate school working on my doctoral dissertation.  I was interested in the way that Asimov uses the encyclopedia as a focal point at the beginning of the novel.  As I have noted elsewhere, this is a point that drops out of the series fairly quickly.  At the time, I read the first couple of novels  before posting interest.  Later on, I read Foundation with my sci-fi group.  I don't remember the conversation about this one but I probably brought up encyclopedism and the Enlightenment a bunch.
Just recently, I decided to take a run at the whole series.  I have accumulated all of the books over the last few months and this is my attempt to read all of them and to write about them here.  I don't expect to enjoy all of the books, but I do hope to find the good in them.  Asimov is a writer who I think is great with ideas and plotting but terrible with character.
I don't have any particular aim in reading these books this time, so we'll see how this goes.
Be on the lookout for subsequent installments in this series.

Sci-fi's rule of 3

A lot of classic sci-fi share a similar narrative strategy of creating a novel out of district vignettes that all meditate on a similar theme or project the actions of one group of people into the future to demonstrate the consequent actions of another group of people.  Books that adopt this structure are typically more interested in thematics than in character.  At times, this structure can be unsatisfying when the author leaves off one narrative arc to pick it up in the future.  This structure is most noticeable in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, though he does employ it in other novels.  In Foundation, the narrative opens with Hari Seldon's discovery of psychohistory, but quickly moves away from Seldon to jump decades and centuries into the future.  In this case, the chronological jumps make sense to the narrative and the form actually works with the function, as Seldon's psychohistory allows him to use current data to accurately predict future events to the point that he can engineer the direction of civilization in the direction he believes that it should go.
In other cases, however, the narrative device of jumping into the future is disruptive.  For example, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz uses chronological jumps to show the development of Leibowitz's legacy through time.  Arguably, Miller is better at characterization than Asimov and he is better able to draw his reader into the narrative.  The novel opens with an acolyte encountering a man in the wilderness while he is on a retreat of bodily mortification and reflection.  The acolyte discovers holy relics of Leibowitz (who was an engineer in the pre-apocalyptic world) and struggles between his faith and his desire to forward the sanctification of Leibowitz.  The jumps into the future in this novel are jarring because the reader becomes invested in the acolyte's progress.  The acolyte dies at the end of the section and the jump forward picks up on a different protagonist and different challenges.
James Gunn's The Joy Makers picks up on the trope and splits into three distinct narrative sections.  In this novel, the study of Hedonics (human happiness turned into a science) is introduced, implemented, and then made into law.  Each of the three sections features a new plot line, new characters, and a different treatment of Hedonics.  In this case, Gunn shows a progression from a hopeful new direction for humanity through to the inevitable conclusion that assured happiness is incompatible with freedom.  There is greater unity in this novel than in many others that adopt the same structure, but it is jarring nonetheless.
The structure of novels like these rely on a different narrative logic than most novels.  In more traditional novelistic structures, the reader can track progression and resolution in a straightforward way.  Even in postmodern novels or in those that play with time and causality, there is generally still an arc that will lead through to a sort of conclusion. This diegesis has a momentum that draws the reader along and propels meaning.  The logic of a novel like The Joy Makers is based on syndesis, or a connection of different parts.  The novel presents the different sections and asks the reader to fill in the meaning between them, to synthesize the connections and discern meaning.
Many of these novels also probably began as separate stories or were published serially, so that they were originally written to stand alone.  This was the case with Miller's book.  Whatever the origin of the novels, the work of making sense of the finished novel remains the same.  The reader must still work to re-assemble the discrete plot lines to make sense of the larger thematics at work.
The rule of three, then, refers to the tendency to split these novels into three sections.  In this way, it does mirror a story arc: the initial section sets up the conceit of the novel, in The Joy Maker, it is the idea that happiness can be mathematically calculated and, thus, ensured to everyone.  The second section builds upon the topic of the original, typically to demonstrate growth of the idea from its initial stages to broader acceptance.  In this case, Hedonics is made the law of the land and Happiness rather than the pursuit of the same is considered to be an inalienable right.  Finally, the third section makes clear why this is actually undesirable.  The story arc, re-written as disconnected stories creates a sort of ironic structure that requires extra effort on the part of the reader.  The author trusts in the reader to make connections between the sections and to grasp the direction of the whole.