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Page 35
says to Hober Mallow, "There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings." He might have been speaking of Asimov.
The series of searches for the Second Foundation, the various clues pursued to inconclusive ends, the near revelation by Ebling Mis of its location (though he may have been wrong), and the succession of incorrect solutions shows Asimov imitating the methods of the detective novel. In response to Campbell's challenge, he later shaped those kinds of devices more obviously into science-fiction detective novels and stories beginning with The Caves of Steel (serialized in 1953). In the final chapter of Second Foundation, with its succession of " `I've got the answer' `No, I've got the answer'" reversals, Asimov no doubt is parodying the concluding scenes of a thousand formal detective novels.
But even the problem-solving aspect of the Trilogy does not account completely for the success of the series. Other aspects, more peripheral to the central structure, might be cited: the characters, for instance, though scorned by some critics, engage the reader's sympathies. They are similar to each other, it is true, mostly by being men and women of action. They do not let events happen to them (as might seem more appropriate if the theme of the Trilogy actually was determinism); they make things happen. The Trilogy, after all, is a history, and history is about people who have made things happen. The characters may not be strongly differentiated Salvor Hardin, Limmar Ponyets, Hober Mallow, and Lathan Devers may seem interchangeable but they may be as differentiated as the personages in most histories. Men and women of action, in and out of fiction, are much alike. Clearly Asimov's characters are adequate for the purposes they serve in the Trilogy.
Asimov also provided some of his philosophy of history in his storytelling. History fascinated him. He almost took his graduate degree in history instead of chemistry; his customary method of developing both his fiction and his non-fiction was historical; and a number of his non-fiction books are concerned with history (of his 470 books Asimov listed 19 under "history"). Some of what Asimov says about history comes from his model, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; little seems to derive from Marxism or whatever impressions of it were in the air when the Trilogy was being conceived and created, and a good deal seems to be Asimov's own observations. Government, for instance, never is what it appears to be: in the Trilogy figureheads and powers behind the throne proliferate. Every innovation rigidifies into sterile tradition, which must, in turn, be overturned: the grip of the Encyclopedists, for instance, must be broken by Salvor Hardin, and the political

 
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