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Science Fiction," Campbell had encouraged social science fiction from his first days as an editor. Moreover Campbell had pointed out the logical basis for using the soft sciences for the kind of extrapolation he preferred, in his 1947 essay for Lloyd A. Eschbach's Of Worlds Beyond "The Science of Science Fiction Writing":
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To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction if they're logically explained but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and parapsychology are, today, not true sciences: therefore instead of forecasting future results of applications of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology.
Psychohistory is the art of prediction projected as a science; later it might have been called "futurology" or "futuristics." The ability to predict or foresee the future has been a persistent notion in science fiction almost from the genre's beginnings. Hundreds of stories have been based on various mechanisms for doing it and the various out-comes of attempts. One might cite as examples Robert Heinlein's first story, "Life-Line," Lewis Padgett's "What You Need,'' and James Blish's "Beep." What Asimov brought to the concept was the science of probabilities as a mechanism, the element of uncertainty for suspense, and the philosophical question "What is worth predicting?" for depth. His method statistical probability prohibited the prediction of any actions smaller than those of large aggregates of population. Four decades earlier, incidentally, H.G. Wells had told the Sociological Society that a science of sociology was impossible because everything in the universe was unique and sociologists could not deal with sufficiently large numbers to handle those things statistically, as physicists did. Asimov could deal with large numbers, and he defined psychohistory, in the epigraph quoted from the Encyclopedia Galactica for Section 4 of "The Psychohistorians," as "that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli. . . . Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment. . . . A further necessary assumption is that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random." Finally, Asimov answered the question "What is worth predicting?" Not individual human lives but a great event whose consequences might be avoided, such as the fall of

 
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