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power of the Mayor must be broken, in its turn, by Hober Mallow, and the economic power of the Traders must then be modified by the incorporation of the independent traders, and so on. There is, to be sure, a narrative necessity to keep the series going, but the reader cannot ignore the inevitable feeling of continual change, which seems a philosophy: one generation's solution is the next generation's problem. Asimov probably would have agreed that this is the case in real life. |
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On top of this, and perhaps the most important aspect of Asimov's writing, was his rationalism. More than any other writer of his time (the Campbell era, as Asimov called it) or even during the twenty years between Campbell's death and Asimov's, Asimov spoke with the voice of reason. Avoid the emotional, the irrational, the Trilogy says. Avoid the obvious military reaction to threats of military attack, says Salvor Hardin. Do not throw the slender military might of the Foundation against the great battleships of the Empire, says Hober Mallow, whose continual retreat before the attacking Korellian forces is considered treason. |
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Rationality is the one human trait that can always be trusted, the Trilogy says, and the reader comes to believe that that was Asimov's conviction as well. Sometimes rational decisions are based on insufficient information and turn out to be wrong, or the person making the decision is not intelligent enough to see the ultimate solution rather than the partial one, but nothing other than reason works at all. Even the antagonists are as rational as the protagonists and therefore cannot legitimately be called villains. In the stories that Asimov liked best, rationality does not triumph over irrationality or emotion but over other rationality, as in the conflict between the Mule and Bayta (though the Mule is betrayed as well by an element of emotion unnatural to him), between the Mule and the First Speaker, and between the Second Foundation and the First Foundation. |
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Asimov's confidence in rationality must have been comforting to him not only in personal terms but in terms of the times when the stories were written and published. He was only twenty-one when he started writing "Foundation" and he had passed through a difficult adolescence. He was still ill at ease with women and society in general, and he was writing largely for maladjusted teenagers who had sublimated their sexual and social frustrations into various kinds of intellectual activity, including the reading of science fiction. Asimov's belief that reason could solve all problems not only was desirable, it may have been psychologically necessary. Moreover, events in the larger world, though they did not encourage a belief in the rationality of human behavior, |
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