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Page 38
that the characters accept their world as commonplace. This is the technique that Heinlein perfected as an alternative to the "gee whiz!" school of writing about the future, which introduced a character from the past in order to elicit his wonder at each new future marvel.
A story of the future is a lot like a historical novel, and its problems are similar to those of a translation from a foreign language. Verisimilitude always is desirable, but how much and of what kind? Asimov chose what might be called the verisimilitude of feeling over the verisimilitude of language or of character, just as a historical novelist or a translator might choose the flavor of the original over a literal representation. Science-fiction stories about changes in humanity or its language have been written, but the Trilogy is not one of them and does not pretend to be.
Asimov creates a sense of reality in another way: by choosing appropriate but unfamiliar names for characters, objects, and processes. Every name seems foreign yet credible. The science-fiction reader values this kind of invention above subtle differentiations in character. The non-science-fiction reader often finds "the funny names" puzzling at best, off-putting at worst. "Psychohistory" has proved so apt a name that it has been picked up as terminology for an academic discipline, though not, to be sure, the discipline Asimov had in mind. The names of characters are subtly altered, by changing the spelling, or dropping or rearranging letters, to suggest evolution within continuity, and the shifts increase as the series progresses: Hari Seldon leads to Hober Mallow leads to Han Pritcher leads to Bail Channis and eventually to Arkady Darell. Possibly only Heinlein was Asimov's superior in creating future societies, though several other writers have been better with names.
Asimov, however, was the master of the epigraph. Models of imitation, clarity, and dramatization, they offer some preview of his later skill at science popularization. The epigraphs serve as a medium for exposition, which became increasingly burdensome as the series continued a long essay Arkady writes for school in "Search by the Foundation" serves this function (and also convinced Asimov that the series had to end there) but which helped Asimov provide essential back-ground information. They also provide a framework that puts events into context and lends to the structure the verisimilitude of a future perspective.
The final virtue of the Trilogy, and perhaps the most important to its extended popularity, is its exhaustive treatment of an idea. That idea was not psychohistory or even determinism: it was the Foundations.

 
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