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an empire and the dark ages of barbarism, war, hunger, despair, and death that would follow.
Asimov was as open about the origins of the Foundation stories as he was about the other details of his life and writing. One of the charms about the man was his openness. Well, openness may be understatement: after 1962 all of Asimov's anthologies and collections of stories were strung together like ornaments on the string of his life story, culminating in Opus 100, Opus 200, Opus 300, his 640,000-word autobiography and his 260,000-word memoirs.
In his autobiography and a piece he contributed to the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin in 1967 titled "There's Nothing Like a Good Foundation," Asimov traced the idea for the Foundation stories to a 1941 subway ride when he was going to visit Campbell at his Street & Smith office. Searching for an idea, Asimov looked down at a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan plays he was reading, opened it to lolanthe, and saw a picture of the fairy queen kneeling in front of Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards. His mind wandered to soldiers, to a military society, to feudalism, to the breakup of the Roman Empire. When he reached Campbell's office, he told the editor that he was planning to write a story about the breakup of the Galactic Empire. "He talked and I talked and he talked and I talked and when I left I had the Foundation series in mind." Exactly what Asimov had in mind may affect the critic's judgment of the work. He had not, for instance, thought out all the different permutations in idea and story; they were built, one on another, as the years passed and the Trilogy developed. But he must have discussed with Campbell the implications of prediction. Some critics have tried to explain "psychohistory" on philosophical bases, as ''the science that Marxism never became" (Wollheim) or "the vulgar, mechanical, debased version of Marxism promulgated in the Thirties" (Elkins). Elkins also related the Trilogy's enduring popularity to its fatalism, which "accurately sizes up the modern situation."
People do talk a great deal about determinism in the Trilogy. When Bel Riose is informed by Ducem Barr of Seldon's predictions, he says, "Then we stand clasped tightly in the forcing hand of the Goddess of Historical Necessity?" But Barr corrects him: "Of Psycho-Historical Necessity." And Riose is defeated, apparently, by what seem like Seldon's inexorable laws.
Psychohistory had its origins not in Marxism (Asimov has called Wollheim's speculation "reading his bent into me," for Asimov had "never read anything about it") but in John Campbell's ideas about symbolic logic. Symbolic logic, if further developed, Campbell told the

 
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