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nature. Just as those scientific elites in our world who comprehend nature's laws manipulate nature to their advantage, so, too, the guardians and the First Speaker, who alone understand Seldon's Plan, manipulate individuals and control the course of history. "Psycho-history is," as (Donald A.) Wollheim quaintly puts it, "the science that Marxism never became" (. . .) With the proviso that neither Wollheim nor Asimov has understood Marxism (and that one should substitute "mechanical pseudo-Marxism" for their mentions of it), it is precisely this treatment of history as a "science" above men which accounts for the Foundation trilogy's ideological fascination and evocativeness as well as for its ultimate intellectual and artistic bankruptcy. |
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Reading the Foundation novels, one experiences an overriding sense of the inevitable, of a pervading fatalism. Everything in the universe is predetermined. Unable to change the preordained course of events, man becomes, instead of the agent of history, an object, a "pawn" (using Asimov's chess metaphor) in the grip of historical necessityi.e., of the actualization of Hari Seldon's calculations. (. . .) |
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The sense of fatality and futility evoked in the Foundation novels is a consequence of the reader's recognition that not only will Seldon's Plan remain hidden but even those who preserve it are almost overwhelmed by its complexity. A few will be free; the rest will be under the thumb of those who can understand the Plan. The First Speaker (and clearly Asimov himself, along with many other science fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein) envisions a society organized not according to the principles of equality but according to a hierarchy of merit. It is a society similar to the one urged by Saint-Simon, the French utopian thinker; he also argued for a society governed by savants (mathematicians, chemists, engineers, painters, writers, etc.), who would form a Council of Newton and, because they were men of genius, would have the right to determine human destiny. In the Foundation trilogy the masses merely follow. Unable either to discover or to comprehend the Plan's "synthesis of the calculus of n-variables and n-dimensional geometry," the great majority of mankind is at the mercy of complex forces which they can neither understand nor control, and surrender their freedom to a techno-bureaucratic elite. Asimov thus expresses a modern version of Saint-Simon's ideology, namely, the necessity of society's being governed by a technocratic elite. |
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Charles Elkins, "Asimov's Foundation Novels: Historical Materialism Distorted into Cyclical Psychohistory," Isaac Asimov, ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1977), pp. 1045 |
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