|
|
|
|
|
|
that it was a series written for one to two cents a word by a part-time writer for the readers of a single science-fiction magazine with a strong-willed editor over a period of years in which the author aged from twenty-one to twenty-eight? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most traditional criticism consists of textual analysis. In magazine science fiction, textual analysis finds little to work with. The important aspects of science fiction are the characteristics that transcend the text. The first of these is narrative. When the Trilogy was being published in Astounding Science Fiction, piece by piece, the story was the thing; if not the whole thing, at least the main thing. An entertaining style, a bit of wit, characters who had some resemblance to real people could be added, but those elements were not essential. And sometimes they were handicaps, as in the case of Stanley Weinbaum, whose work, relatively more stylish and with more realistic people than other writers of his time, was more successful after his death than in the brief year and a half in which he tried to sell his stories to the magazines. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Story in The Foundation Trilogy is plentiful. Events move on a grand scale, beginning with the approaching dissolution of a galactic empire that has ruled 25 million planets inhabited by humans who spread out from Earth, although they have long forgotten their origin. The Empire has brought 12,000 years of peace, but now, according to the calculations of a psychologist named Hari Seldon, who has used a new science for predicting mass behavior called "psychohistory," the Empire will fall and be followed by 30,000 years of misery and barbarism. Seldon sets up two Foundations, one of physical scientists and a Second Foundation of psychologists (about which nothing more is heard until the last book of the Trilogy), at "opposite ends of the Galaxy" to shorten the oncoming dark ages to only a thousand years. The Foundation Trilogy covers the first four hundred years of that interregnum and tells how the Foundation meets one threat to its existence after another and alone, or with the help of the Second Foundation, preserves Seldon's Plan. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Into this overall pattern fit the individual stories. Foundation, the first book of the Trilogy, consists of five novelettes. The first, "The Psychohistorians," was written specially for the book version that first appeared in 1951. The action takes place on Trantor, the administrative center of the Empire, where 40 million bureaucrats and their families inhabit a world entirely covered with buildings and tunneled a mile deep into the surface. The viewpoint character is Gaal Dornick, a young psychohistorian from a distant planet who arrives on Trantor to work with Seldon and is immediately plunged into intrigue that culminates in the trial of Seldon for treason because his calculations predict the fall |
|
|
|
|
|