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young Asimov in their first discussion, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind that human actions would be predictable. Campbell more or less forced Asimov to include some references to symbolic logic in the first story, "Foundation" "forced," because Asimov knew nothing about symbolic logic and did not believe, as Campbell insisted, that symbolic logic would "unobscure the language and leave everything clear." Asimov made a comparison to the kinetic theory of gases, ''where the individual molecules in the gas remain as unpredictable as ever, but the average action is completely predictable." |
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The spirit of the early stories, however, is determinedly anti-deterministic. If intelligent, courageous, and forceful individuals do not attempt to retrieve the situation, most crises all but one, perhaps will not be resolved satisfactorily. Seldon's predictions, like God's will, are hidden from all the characters except the psychologists of the Second Foundation, as they are from the reader. Seldon's prophecies are revealed only after the fact, and even the solutions that he or others say are obvious are obvious only in retrospect, as in all good histories. At the time, they are not obvious to anyone but Salvor Hardin or Hober Mallow; the reader has no feeling that the crises would have been resolved if persons such as Hardin and Mallow had not been there. Moreover, the predictions of psychohistory are expressed as probabilities, and one of the necessary ingredients of Seldon's Plan, discussed in detail in "Search by the Foundation," is the exercise of normal initiative. |
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As a matter of fact, Asimov has the best of both determinism and free will. Psychohistory and Seldon's Plan provide the framework for diverse episodes about a variety of characters over a period of four hundred years, and those episodes feature a number of strong-minded individuals seeking solutions to a series of problems as they arise. If determinism alone were Asimov's subject, the Trilogy would reveal characters continually defeated in their attempts to change events, or manipulated like puppets by godlike prophets, or unable to fight the onrushing current of necessity. |
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A work in which characters were inexorably defeated by psychohistorical necessity would be so depressing that it would not have remained popular for more than a quarter of a century. Bel Riose is the only character who stares into the face of determinism; only he is frustrated by psychohistorical necessity rather than by the actions of an individual. But in "The General," Bel Riose is not the viewpoint character. The basis of the story is not Riose's predicament but how he is to be stopped, and the resolution does not celebrate the victory of determinism but the survival of the Foundation, even though the efforts of the Foundation |
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