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on everything and because he was tired of it. In his autobiography he reveals that while he was writing "Search by the Foundation" (". . . And Now You Don't") he "disliked it intensely and found working on it very difficult." Even Campbell's persistent demand for open endings that would allow sequels could not persuade Asimov. The future history that had envisioned one thousand years of Seldon's Plan ended after less than four hundred (more than thirty years later Asimov agreed to write a fourth volume which became Foundation's Edge and Asimov's first bestseller, and then Foundation and Earth, but that is a story for Chapter 8). Nevertheless, Asimov used his concept of a humanly inhabited Galaxy, of an outward movement of humanity from Earth until Earth itself was forgotten, and of the rise of an Empire and its eventual fall as the background for half a dozen later novels and several dozen shorter stories, and eventually found a way to tie nearly all his novels into a self-consistent future. |
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Other authors have used the background as well, taking it not so much directly from the Trilogy as from the assumptions about the future (to which the Trilogy contributed) that became the shared property of a generation of science-fiction writers. What author Jack Williamson called "the central myth of the future" begins with the expansion of humanity into the galaxy in the same way that Europe ventured forth in the Age of Exploration to discover and then to colonize the rest of the world. The myth was not original with Asimov; it was developed by many writers, particularly by E.E. "Doc" Smith and Edmond Hamilton in the magazine period. But Asimov said it best and most completely in his series of stories published in Astounding between 1942 and 1949. It has since been used by writers as diverse as Jerry Pournelle and Ursula K. Le Guin. Moreover, Asimov described a totally human galaxy, partly to avoid Campbell's prejudice against relationships between humans and aliens in which the humans were inferior. In some ways readers may have preferred an all-human galaxy. |
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This, however, does not completely explain the Trilogy's popularity. The reader must delve into what the series is about and how its narrative is handled. |
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One significant aspect of the series is Asimov's invention of psycho-history, with its implications for determinism and free will. Psychohistory was put together out of psychology, sociology, and history not hard sciences, which Campbell had a reputation for preferring, but at best soft sciences: a behavioral science, a social science, and a discipline that has difficulty deciding whether to define itself as a social science or a humanity. Actually, as Asimov pointed out in his 1953 essay "Social |
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