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In another sense, perhaps, Asimov's old science-fiction enthusiasms may have emerged victorious over his rationality. After her comments on Eternity's choosing safety and mediocrity, Noys says, "The real solutions . . . come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it." Carried to their ultimate conclusion, these statements, which Asimov implicitly accepts for the sake of the novel, imply that humanity cannot improve its lot by rational choice. Or perhaps, if Asimov is given credit for dealing with a special case, they mean only that humanity cannot change the past. |
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If one wished to personalize the message of the novel, one might speculate that Asimov, looking back over his own past, has concluded that no amount of tinkering will change it for the better. This is, indeed, one of the messages of his autobiographical writings. Everything happened for the best: Campbell's early rejections, Sam Merwin's rejection of "Grow Old with Me," the change of administration at the Boston University School of Medicine that led to his full-time writing (which still awaited him) . . .. If he had had the opportunity to make things happen differently, he would have made the wrong choice, he might be saying, would have chosen safety and mediocrity over risk and greatness. In The End of Eternity, at least, Asimov chose, as rationally as he could, uncertainty over certainty and infinity over not eternity but Eternity, that is, over the limitation of man's possibilities by too much tinkering with them. Asimov is not denying humanity's potential for rationality or the need for considering choices rationally but humanity's capacity to play God. Humanity will not consciously choose the uncertainty of adventure, or the adventure of uncertainty. |
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James Gunn, Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 18284 |
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(. . .) Foundation's Edge draws on the cosmogony first used in Asimov's The End of Eternity (1955), which predicates a group of Eternals, who chose from a myriad of possibles (also acutalised) one universe in which man would be the sole intelligent lifeformand in which, no doubt, a man called Hari Seldon would eventually arise to make all events in that universe no longer random but rational. There, indeed, is a larger Plan, a wheel governing wheels within wheels. It mirrors the process of expanding discovery that the novel followsan expansion which widens out not to an infinite, but curiously to a benign 'enclosure', a circumscribing, |
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