Author: sfrarev

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Introduction

James Knupp

It is often argued all art, including writing, is inherently political. An author’s words and ideas are shaped by their environment and reflect their own personal ideology. Science fiction, and speculative fiction more broadly, is no stranger to political critiques and speculation on the future of political society. George Orwell’s works of Animal Farm (1945)and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) were written as the Soviet Union under Stalin entered the Cold War and reflected Orwell’s own personal Anti-Stalinist Left views on totalitarianism. Margaret Atwood speculated on a possible future as the Christian Right rose to prominence in 1980s America in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). What these examples in particular bring to their political critiques is offering alternative forms of governance from the liberal democratic traditions their authors came from. It is divergence from our norms where we can see easily the biggest critiques and possible alternatives to our own ways of governing.

However, much of the science fiction canon is filled with works where the governments underpinning the society are merely set dressing reflections of our own real world and history: simplistic totalitarian regimes, liberal democratic republics, hereditary monarchies, etc. Often there is not much time spent on reflecting on the impact of these governments on society at large, or alternatives to them. They simply exist so the story has a somewhere familiar to take place.

For this symposium, we asked contributors to examine works which do engage with ideas of governing outside our existing norms. Some articles will examine a collection of works with similar themes, looking at how different authors approach the same issue in governing. Other articles look at a particular author to examine the author’s own personal views on governance as reflected in their work. All of these articles look at ways the question “how do we run a society” have been answered by science fiction’s authors. Some of those answers could serve as inspiration for the next wave of reformatory political movement, and some could serve as cautionary tales.

I’ve been excited for the symposium to be released because for me, the core to science fiction is looking at the ways things could be, but aren’t, good and bad. And when we apply that lens to something as grand and fundamental as governing ourselves, you pave the way for discussions that could maybe one day reshape society.

James J. Knupp is a project manager at a think tank in Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, as well as associate editor for the Science Fiction Research Association Review.

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The Utopian Dimension of Starship Troopers: Pedagogy, Militarism, and a Post-Democratic Society

Robert Wood

Much of the early critical work on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers focuses on militarism, responding to Heinlein’s revisionist rereading of the novel in his Extended Universe that minimized that element. (Heinlein 324-325) Both Alexis Panshin and H Bruce Franklin refute that reading and insist on understanding the novel through that lens. As Franklin notes, “Militarism shapes the speech and sets the tone of all the characters, including the narrator-hero; militarism animates every page; militarism—together with imperialism—is the novel’s explicit message.” (Franklin 112) A close reading of the novel tends to reinforce that perspective. The almost exclusive focus is on the virtues of military service. It celebrates governance as controlled violence, but focusing exclusively on militarism misses other aspects of the novel. As Farah Mendelsohn notes in The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein, Heinlein shows a continual interest in education, both institutional and self-esteem, and an abiding interest in child raising. The entrance into the military simultaneously represents the shift from negligent, indulgent parenting to a more proper approach to that process. In that context, the novel acts as a kind of bildungsroman, as the protagonist, Juan ‘Johnnie’ Rico, moves from high school to basic training and then to officer training. He learns to be a responsible adult and a potentially responsible citizen. Starship Troopers imagines a different route from childhood to adulthood and citizenship through that process. Intertwined in that process is the representation of a government that operates on a vastly different logic than our current government.

That developmental journey allows the novel to imagine a substantially different approach to governance to the liberal hegemony of its creation and even current strains of neoliberal governance. A single interplanetary government controls the Earth and its planetary colonies, created out of the ashes of a profound crisis in democratic governance by a small group of veterans. Citizenship is primarily defined through military service, although there are unnamed alternatives. That creates a sharp distinction between the citizen who governs and the civilian who lives in the civil sphere of commerce and consumption. The government is profoundly limited in the civil sphere, demanding only limited taxes and making limited economic demands. Its most significant interventions in that sphere occur in the space of schooling in the form of a citizenship class and punishment for lawbreakers. Students must attend civics classes, introducing everyone to the society’s basic moral and ethical framework. Punishment takes the form of corporal punishment, ranging from flogging to capital punishment. Parents can be punished for the behavior of their children. These shifts are framed in distinctly utopian terms. They represent a shift from a pre-scientific space of ignorant governance to one grounded in scientific knowledge. Those institutional shifts represent an original approach to pedagogy based on a scientific understanding of human nature that allows for human flourishing by creating a distinction between those capable of wielding sovereignty and those not capable of wielding sovereignty.

Heinlein’s military experiences and evolving views on the military are essential to understanding the novel.¹ He was part of a multi-generational military family and entered the Navy via the Naval Academy despite having other academic options. Heinlein left the military due to his tuberculosis, but he remained committed to national defense and attempted to re-enlist with the onset of World War II. When rejected, he accepted work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Alec Nevala-Lee noted that Heinlein had been disappointed by the prosaic bureaucratic labor put in front of him, but eventually accepted the day-to-day bureaucratic work required of him. (Nevala-Lee 168) He expected that same dedication to the war effort from others and became quite critical of individuals in the science fiction community who he saw as shirking their military responsibility. He wrote critical letters to John W. Campbell and Forry Ackerman about their lack of participation in the war effort.² He continued to place a great deal of value in maintaining a strong military presence as a form of self-defense during the Cold War, arguing against the decision to stop nuclear testing on the part of Dwight D. Eisenhower and criticizing advocates of those decisions, such as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He later claimed that both played a substantial role in causing Heinlein to write the novel. (Mendlesohn 45-46) However, that commitment to militarism was complicated by his, at times, more libertarian perspectives. He broadly opposed conscription and felt that no one should be forced to join the military. That service should be willingly given.

Intertwined with that was a shift in Heinlein’s politics. While Heinlein always held the Soviet Union in disdain, he was also initially committed to the social democratic politics that defined Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign, in which he played a significant part. His entrance into science fiction was an effort to move those politics forward after Sinclair’s defeat. He also had real commitments to the fight against racism and sexism, which shaped his collected works. However, his views gradually drifted rightward. His second wife, Virginia, convinced him of the superiority of the free market over his previous social democratic ideals, and his criticisms of the Soviet Union congealed into an increasingly reactionary anti-communism. (Mendlesohn 28) He gradually shifted from supporting the Democratic Party to supporting the Republican Party, eventually supporting Barry Goldwater’s run for president and expressing sympathy for the John Birch Society. He also became increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of the American people living up to his expectations of the governance process, especially after his failed The Heirs of Patrick Henry Society project. (Mendlesohn 46, 227) He was deeply suspicious of shifting pedagogical practices and child-raising practices created by the at-time liberal hegemony. At the same time, his views on marriage and sexuality, along with his ongoing commitment to a genuinely colorblind society, placed him in tension with that conservative project, issues that continued to put him at variance with that project even as he more fully committed to it.

Those various concerns entered into the narrative logic of the story. The novel provides a thin extrapolative thread to explain the legitimacy crisis that created the conditions for the new society. There is no specific description of the collapse of that government or the factors that led to its collapse. “It wasn’t a revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917—the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.” (179) However, juvenile delinquency is a substantial symptom of the collapse. This phenomenon framed as ‘the terror’ is described in the following terms: “Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places—these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.” (113) That threat is then linked to current reforms in child-raising techniques. The coddling of the child leads to the rise of the criminal because they have not received the necessary moral training to create a moral citizen. In effect, the abandonment of corporal punishment created the conditions for the crisis. Children were no longer being molded into citizens capable of defending the nation. The outrage that the nation may consider abandoning its nuclear self-defense by unilaterally stopping testing, a sort of coddling, is then reread through the coddling of the child.

That collapse then allowed for a new mode of governance created by the forces that escaped that very logic of coddling: veterans. As veterans, they began by attempting to address immediate concerns to stop looting and other behaviors, and slowly, they began to create alternative structures of governance that replaced the former system. Johnnie Rico frames that shift in the following terms:

What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice… in a generation or two. Probably those Scottish veterans, since they were finding it necessary to hang some veterans, decided that, if they had to do this, they were not going to let any “bleedin’, profiteering, black-market, double-time-for-overtime, army-dodging, unprintable: civilians have any say about it.” (179-180)

In effect, the transformation could almost be understood in evolutionary terms, shifting from an artificial and destructive mode of governance into one that responded to and accepted a foundational and inherent human nature. That then translated into a new kind of governance that allowed for human flourishing and a stable world government. The conditions for the entire edifice were created by creating that pedagogical system that distinguished between the unreliable civilian and the reliable soldier, one who sacrifices as opposed to one who is too selfish and childish to do so.

That governance is framed through a series of educational processes that operate through the disciplinary structures identified by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Each level is designed to separate the incapable from the capable, to reward the specific willingness to sacrifice and to kill and be killed. Capability can also be understood through Foucault’s terms, a distinction between those capable of becoming the kind of docile body that can be shaped by the state and those who cannot or will not play that role. That process of distinction takes a number of steps. Everyone goes through the basic elements of the education system and must attend citizenship classes that introduce those individuals to the basic principles of governance. It is understood that most individuals will comply with those rules, but only sometimes will they understand them. The first break is between those who enter into military service and those who either continue their schooling or begin to work in the private sector. The opening section of basic training has a basic goal: to drive out as many people as possible and ensure that only those willing to sacrifice are given the possibility of citizenship. After that winnowing process, the training process moves to a molding process, turning those willing subjects into weapons to be implemented by the government, to inflict the ‘controlled violence’ of warfare, or to act as the instrument of the sovereignty of that government. The subsequent division is officer training, where potential officers move from learning to be instruments of violence to understanding the tactics and strategies of implementing those tools and the governing logic of those tactics and strategies. Pedagogy becomes the tool to create these distinctions and to create distinctions between who governs and who is governed, along with further distinctions of the amount of influence on that governance. Each step of the process shapes the citizens’ engagement in the sovereign project of governance through the lens of responsibility.

Embedded in that process is a particular conception of the subject. The infant is effectively understood as a blank page, only responding to the stimuli and internal drives. As a moment in the civics class frames it, “Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it. I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.” (117) An effective pedagogical system understands that original state and attempts to cultivate an ethical subject through negative and positive interventions. Within this context, corporal punishment is presented as the most effective intervention to shape the individual. That form of punishment is commonly accepted in schools, the household, and later in the military. Its minimal usage establishes its efficacy. That use of discipline is intertwined with a strong emphasis on civics. That punishment is used to guide the student into playing the role of a moral and ethical actor in that society. Additionally, the father is expected to play that role for the child at home and can be potentially punished along with the child if he does not fulfill that role. Analogous to the school, the correct use of preventative coercion creates a society in which most people not only obey these rules but embody the logic of those rules. However, this system also assumes that while almost everyone can live up to this bare minimum, it takes an extra level of commitment to be in a position to make decisions about how that governance should occur.

The narrative repeatedly critiques and blames the collapse of the society on the figure of the reformer and the child psychologist. However, its assumptions are strikingly similar to those very figures. After all, similar to figures such as Dr. Spock, it assumes that the science of child development can be founded and placed in a longer tradition of the scientific management of the household. As William Graebner notes, the project of the social psychologist Dr. Spock can be understood as a social engineering project, designed to create a new kind of subject that is immune to the dangers of charismatic authority and totalitarianism in favor of a stable democratic society. He posits a family that acts as a group with the parents at the head but allows for the child’s input. Terry Strathman notes that those views were often in tension with figures such as Dr. John Watson, who argued for a more behavioralist approach, emphasizing using disciplinary measures and a rigorous schedule to instill a sense of self-discipline in the child. (Strathman 4) Heinlein implicitly embraces that alternative tradition, embracing the more authoritarian approach against the democratic inclinations of Spock. The novel idealizes a far more hierarchical image of the family and explicitly criticizes the rejection of corporal punishment by figures such as Spock. Additionally, rather than embracing the more dynamic Freudian notion of the subject embraced by Spock, the narrative embraces the behavioralist assumptions of the tradition of Pavlov and Skinner. The child is to be molded like clay through the controlled use of positive and negative stimuli. Punishment is a key pedagogical tool, and its efficacy is established by creating the conditions of its minimal use. The controlled violence of corporal punishment allows for the creation of a disciplined subject made into a moral subject through the aversion to violence created by the evolutionary instinct of survival itself.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to collapse the story’s logic too entirely into traditions of right-wing authoritarian utopian stories despite the real militarism and authoritarian logic at the story’s center. Most significantly, the story imagines a post-democratic society without racial prejudice. The protagonist is revealed to be Filipino three-quarters of the way through the story. However, the descriptions of the various other characters are continually marked to reveal the diversity of the society and the lack of boundaries for anyone. We see a society where European names may be connected to faces worldwide. The distinction between the formerly colonized and colonizers may exist in the name, but it does not exist in the actual daily lives of the people who hold those names. The state and society celebrate that element and frame the regime’s legitimacy, which retains some connections to the earlier ideal of democracy. “Superficially, our system is only slightly different; we have democracy unlimited by race, color, creed, birth, wealth, sex, or conviction, and anyone may win sovereign power.” (183) We see in the framing the commitment to equal access and the assumption that equal access will allow all to enter. However, equal access is tied to a commitment to service that allows for a genuinely meritocratic test of the worth of the citizen and one that creates a genuinely stable basis for democracy. That commitment is also a commitment to society as a whole rather than to any part of society over another. The citizen must show “Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe.” (184) The state may distinguish between citizens and civilians, but they are all wrapped up in the state and must be protected.

It is additionally significant that there is a mutual debt in this process. Unlike many right-wing authoritarian narratives, the basic logic of the society is not grounded in a social Darwinist image of the fit and the unfit. If the citizen must be willing to sacrifice, the state must find a place for that citizen and the skills they bring to the table. That could take the form of a role as a cook or some other background role of the military, or it could take the form of disabled soldiers entering into teaching. The high school civics teacher is one such example, and the story emphasizes the sheer number of disabled veterans who work as trainers for the officers’ training process. Those individuals are brought in because they can do the job well and create the conditions for other soldiers to remain on the battlefield. Rico emphasizes the capacity of these veterans in his description of the training process. “Our coach in dirty fighting sat in a powered chair, wearing a plastic collar, and was completely paralyzed from the neck down. But, his tongue wasn’t paralyzed, his eye was photographic, and the savage way he could analyze and criticize what he had seen made up for his minor impediment.” (174) The society is enriched by its willingness to create the conditions for these individuals to contribute, bringing the sharp critical skills of the veteran to the pedagogical process and creating a space in which his disability only acted as a ‘minor impediment.’

At the same time, the story emphasizes the oligarchic nature of the state through the sharp gap between civilians and citizens. That gap is explored throughout the novel, starting from the perspective of civilians, and then moving to the military perspective as Johnnie is drawn into military life. Johnnie’s father frames his opposition to Johnnie’s enlistment in the following terms. “Let’s table that, shall we? Listen, and let me tell you what you are going to do—because you want to. In the first place, this family has stayed out of politics and cultivated its own garden for over a hundred years—I see no reason for you to break that fine record. I suppose it’s the influence of that fellow at your high school—what’s his name? You know the one I mean.” (23) The world of non-citizenship is framed as a good in this conversation rather than a lack. Sticking to your own business, avoiding politics, and creating a private space is framed as a virtue, a positive good. It is also notably framed within the language of tradition. It is a stable set of conventions that have lasted over a century, pointing to a stable social order in the private sphere. He then opposes this virtue to the vainglorious nature of civil service, described as “parasitism, pure and simple—a functionless organ, utterly obsolete, living on the taxpayers. A decidedly expensive way for inferior people who otherwise would be unemployed to live at public expense for a term of years, then give themselves airs for the rest of their lives.” (24) Participating in the polis is then understood as a vice, as leaving the cultivation of one’s own ‘garden’ to enter a space of frivolous parasitism.

Civilian life takes on those same qualities for the military, as Johnnie discovers when he travels into the city on a pass after months of basic military training. He observes, “I had no more than stepped out of the shuttle, my first pass than I realized in part that I had changed. Johnnie didn’t fit in any longer. Civilian life, I mean. It all seemed amazingly complex and unbelievably untidy.” (124) The previously familiar space of the city becomes challenging to navigate, and that complexity produces an unpleasant disorderliness. Those qualities can also be seen in the civilians who chose not to serve and confronted the service members. “There were some young fellows there, too, about our age—the right age to serve a term, only they weren’t—long-haired and sloppy and kind of dirty-looking. Well, say about the way I looked, I suppose, before I joined up.” (126) The disorder of the city maps onto the body of the civilian, who is not shaped by the discipline of the military. Johnnie recognizes a former version of himself in those unruly bodies and feels a sense of aversion to that former self. The civilian is the undisciplined self, the one incapable of self-governance and incapable of understanding that lack. Later in the narrative, there is a continual emphasis on the control of civilians when interacting in military institutions. They can contribute, but their contributions are framed in terms of particular tasks shaped by the larger disciplinary structures of the military and in service of goals that allow military personnel to take on more critical tasks.

Those shifts are a product of the training process embedded in the entrance exam and the disciplinary process of basic training. That begins with a series of tests to discover the potential citizen’s capacities and then place that individual into a training track that makes sense for them. The next step is to test the fortitude of those who go through the process. “Its immediate purpose was to get rid of, run right out of the outfit, those recruits who were too soft or too babyish ever to make Mobile Infantrymen. It accomplished that, in droves. (They darn near ran me out).” (53) From there, the process moved into shaping those individuals into soldiers, into weapons for the society. The training becomes individualized and focuses on developing a broad set of skills. Even in the case of the infantry, this shaping was in service of the construction of an elite force. “Most people think that all it takes is two hands and two feet and a stupid mind. Maybe so, for cannon fodder. Possibly, that was all Julius Ceasar required. But a private soldier today is a specialist so highly skilled that he would rate ‘master’ in any other trade; we can’t afford stupid ones.” (29) We again see the expert soldier put in opposition to the image of the soldier as a conscript. The training process creates an elite force capable of incredible specialization, not a democratic mass.

That governance structure is framed as one grounded in scientific and mathematical certainty. Officer training emphasizes this element. Every attempt at a guess is met with a demand of certitude, insisting that there is an answer grounded in science that is mathematically defendable. “Speak up, Mr. Rico. This is an exact science; you must have proof.” (179) At its core, the scientific element of the training process is tied to the evolutionary assumptions identified above. There is a foundational aversion to pain that can translate into a mechanism for changing the behavior of the subject. The process is precise. “It was made as hard as possible and on purpose.” (53) It is both a selection process and a later disciplinary process based on the core tenets of human nature. The educational process evolves from the student and basic recruit shaped by those forces to the officer trained on how to wield those same mechanisms. We see an implicit governing mechanism that goes back to figures such as Aristotle, seeing the need for a potential ruler to learn to be ruled before taking that later role. That is then interlinked with the development of a moral subject from an essentially amoral one.

However, an intellectual elite does not control the technocratic process. The system does not work because it picks citizens because of their intellectual skills, which are never assumed to indicate a unique ability to govern. Instead, they are understood to provide a series of technical skills that need to be directed by others. At the most immediate level, Johnnie Rico is an ordinary individual who does not stand out intellectually. Farah Mendlesohn goes as far as to argue that “his role is to channel the voices of wisdom. Throughout the novel, in fact, Johnnie is positioned as a follower and subject to the rhetoric of convincement.” (Mendlesohn 127) We watch as he imbibes the society’s methods and reproduces them. One can understand this through the lens of Georg Lukacs’s work on the historical novel and frame Rico as a mediocre hero who is transformed by the shifting forces in his world rather than being an active agent in shifting those forces. That very quality makes him such an ideal vehicle for the system. He is the ideal form of the docile body that takes in the disciplinary formation of the state. In a sense, the hero of the story is the method, and Johnnie attests to the validity of that method in his transformation by showing that his transformation is somehow representative of the capacity of that method.

These qualities are not unusual for the average citizen. In a training session for officers, the instructor asks the cadets what distinguishes the average citizen from the average civilian. The candidates provide several hypothetical solutions, ranging from the additional civic virtue of the citizen to additional intelligence and other virtues. In each case, that proposition is shot down. Citizens are not drastically different than non-citizens in many ways. They are not necessarily more disciplined than non-citizens once they leave the military and commit crimes at the same level as non-citizens. They certainly are not more intelligent than non-citizens, and there was even a failed attempt at a coup that attempted to replace the veteran with the scientist as the citizen par excellence. However, there is one distinct difference, according to the instructor:

I’ll state the obvious: Under our system, every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the group’s welfare ahead of personal advantage. And that is the one practical difference. He may fail in wisdom; he may lapse in civil virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history. (182)

That willingness to sacrifice defines the concept of ‘responsibility.’ The citizen has two qualities: to be willing to function as the instrument of the sovereign, to kill and to die, and to do so in a manner that places the group ahead of his interests.

That returns to the question of militarism. After all, the entire logic of the system calls for this act of testing, marking the distinction between those who are willing to sacrifice and those who are not. Early in the narrative, there is a sense that logic does not work well during peacetime. Basic training may put the potential citizen’s life at risk, but there is some sense that the risks in that situation do not have the same impact as the real risks of war. As the later training officer notes in refuting the argument that citizens are more disciplined than non-citizens, “And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked, and endangered—yet their votes count.” (180-181) The focus of that statement may have been a refutation of the inherent qualities of the citizen. However, it also makes an implicit argument about the limitations of peacetime itself, which does not allow the introduction of discipline that can only occur with military engagement. The ultimate focus of the societal transformation may be disciplinary and pedagogical, but those shifts do not work without the adversarial conditions of warfare. Likewise, civilians cannot understand the value of the process without the direct example of warfare. Without warfare, the state can appear to be unnecessary or even parasitical. Only war can legitimate the state and create the conditions for citizens to wield its power. Expansion also allows for the renewal of these qualities; the narrative emphasizes that the outer colonies are far more likely to produce recruits and citizens. In effect, the narrative embraces the logic of the Turner thesis, the need for expansion to allow for national renewal. War plays a role in that expansion, creating new sets of citizens committed to that process.

That necessity then confirms the basic nature of governance from the novel’s perspective, which repeatedly insists that governance is the practice of wielding violence in a controlled manner. In this sense, the disciplinary apparatus of the state is focused on constructing a very old-fashioned sort of governmental practice, the figure of the sovereign. In effect, the recruit moves from being trained to acting as an instrument of the sovereign to killing in a controlled manner to enforce the goals of statecraft. It then shifts to taking the role of the sovereign, of guiding that instrument of violence. The narrative distinguishes the justified violence of the government from the unjustified violence of the criminal through the concept of control, the proper violence is a kind of instrumentalized violence that is directed towards using that violence to accomplish the goal most effectively, minimizing that violence so it does not exceed that goal. That quality is then paired with responsibility. The citizen must be responsible and aware of the implications of their actions to make the right decisions. To do that, they need to learn from the actual practice of war, keeping up with Heinlein’s pedagogical assumptions.

The entire system then depends on that element of antagonism to stabilize the system. Warfare becomes the way that the docile body of the eventual citizen is justified, evaluated, and brought into being. That disciplinary mechanism extends to the civilian in the form of schooling and the judicial system through the select use of corporal and capital punishment, which are used to mold compliance into both spheres. It simultaneously legitimates the divide between civilians and citizens and creates the mechanism to distinguish the two roles. It also guarantees stability by siphoning any potential threats to the military system. However, the system’s success is more than a guarantee of stability; the night watchmen state of the military creates protective insulation to allow the market to flourish. It’s difficult not to see this in the long tradition of wish fulfillment that many scholars of utopianism have seen as a central element of the genre. As Heinlein becomes discouraged at the prospect of real social change, he turns to the realm of fiction to escape that failure, imagining a society that escapes the perceived failures of democratic governance to escape his own failed interventions in the democratic political sphere. The result is the substitution of pedagogy and war for that space, creating a totalizing and expansionist system that ironically reproduces the presumed concerns around the anti-communist politics that initiated the process.

NOTES

1. My understanding of Robert Heinlein’s evolving positions is shaped by Farah Mendlesohn, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. Unbound, 2019 and Alec Nevala-Lee. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Dey St., 2018.
   
2. Robert Heinlein’s criticisms of John C. Campbell are covered in Alec Nevala Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction: Dey St., 2018 (x). The critical letter sent to Forrest Ackerman was covered in Glyer, Mike. “How Did I Not Know This?” File 770, 29 May 2010. https://file770.com/how-did-i-not-know-this/ Accessed 23 February 2025

WORKS CITED

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1995.

Franklin, H. Bruce, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1980.

Glyer, Mike. “How Did I Not Know This?” File 770, 29 May 2010. https: //file770.com/how-did-i-not-know-this. Accessed 23 February 2025

Graebner, William. “The Unstable World of Benjamin Spock: Social Engineering in a Democratic Culture, 1917–1950.” The Journal of American History (Bloomington, Ind.), vol. 67, no. 3, 1980, pp. 612–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889870.

Heinlein, Robert. Starship Troopers. Ace Books, 1987.

—. Extended Universe. Baen Publishing, 2003.

Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Mendlesohn, Farah. The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein. Unbound, 2019.

Nevala-Lee, Alec. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Dey St., 2018.

Panshin, Alexei. Heinlein in Dimension. Advent: Publishers, Inc., 1968.

Strathman, Terry. “FROM THE QUOTIDIAN TO THE UTOPIAN: CHILD REARING LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1926-1946.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 29, 1984, pp. 1–34.

Robert Wood finished his PhD in Comparative Literature fourteen years ago and is currently working as a lecturer in English at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation focused on the shifting aesthetics of feminist science fiction over the 20^th Century, which fits in with his interest in the intersection of aesthetic movements with radical political movements. He is also interested in cultural studies, historical materialism, feminism, literary criticism, and the history of radical social and political movements. While involved in these academic pursuits, he has also been involved in several activist projects, ranging from reform efforts in his union local to opposition to the sanctions in Iraq, the defense of the public university, and other projects. He is currently active in his local union, UC-AFT.

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Political Centralization in the Asimovian Canon

Zachary Reger

Introduction

Can one describe the writings of Isaac Asimov, one of the most renowned authors of science fiction, in a single word? “Prolific” comes to mind. Indeed, Asimov, who picked up the pen in 1938 and refused to set it down until 1992, the year of his death, published multitudes. By one count, his collected works encompass more than 7.5 million words (Lewis). Inspired by an early love of science fiction, a young Asimov studied Chemistry, using his knowledge to become a Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. His works thus run the gamut from the fictitious to the factual, and he has published many pieces for lay readers and experts alike. Asimov was surely a “prolific” writer, producing a corpus of both temporal and topical breadth.

But another word comes to mind: “unifying.” Consider the Good Doctor’s editorial that leads the August 1987 edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Titled “Unification,” the editorial responds to criticisms from “a very patriotic American” bemoaning the trend of many a science fiction story in subjugating the United States of America to an international (or interplanetary) union. Asimov held no such disapprobation. History, he argued, is a long sequence of evolutionarily-advantageous political unification. Those who busy themselves with factional conflict are swallowed up by more centralized powers. The Greek city-states refused to unify; they were conquered first by Macedon and then Rome. The European nations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fought relentlessly; they came to live in the shadow of twin superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. For their part, the thirteen original states voluntarily limited their sovereign powers to found a new nation, the United States, under a constitution that went into effect in 1789. The combined United States, through gradual centralization of its political power, surmounted enemies both within and without. On this note, Asimov concludes with an ode to big government: “[S]omeone is going to govern me; either a distant bureaucrat, or the neighborhood bully. And I may be wrong, but I vote for the distant bureaucrat.” (Asimov, “Unification”8)

Asimov did not hold this view in isolation. To the contrary, the message of “unification” pervades his work. At the micro level, many of Asimov’s science fiction stories—including those encompassing his three most famous series, Robots (1950–85), Empire (1950–52), and Foundation (1951–93)—explore the idea of political centralization as a normative good, and perhaps an inevitable one. In the Robots series, set in the near-future, nations crumble to be replaced by, at first, continent-spanning regional governments, then, eventually, a unified world government. In the Empire series, set in the far-future, the planet Trantor slowly grows its influence, capturing system by system, until it has unified the galaxy beneath a single empire. In Foundation, that empire faces gradual collapse. Yet such collapse is portrayed as a temporary affair. The only question is how long the dark ages of disunity will last before a second empire, or some other politically centralized scheme, will rise from the ashes to reunify the galaxy.

At the macro level, Asimov attempted a grandiose fictional unification of his own. Asimov’s literary career can be divided into two major periods, separated by an interregnum of mostly nonfiction writing. In the Early Asimov (EA) period, spanning from 1939 to 1957, he focused on science fiction short stories and novels in separate continuities. During this period, Asimov would pen the early chapters of the Robots, Empire, and Foundation series. Despite common themes, and a few shared places and names, Asimov did not originally intend for these series to be fully consistent with one another. In the Late Asimov (LA) period, spanning from 1982 to his death in 1992, Asimov returned with renewed vigor to the realm of science fiction. Asimov’s LA works had a new goal: unify Robots, Empire, and Foundation into a single “future history.” Over the course of six novels, Asimov weaved the strands of his separate worlds into one. At the tail end of this chronology, Asimov introduced a new concept, one in which his characters face the ultimate destination of ever-increasing unification, a galaxy-spanning collective consciousness, accepting it as the natural and desired course of all human history.

This essay examines Asimov’s views of political centralization through the lens of his science fiction stories. In Part II, the essay explores Asimov’s vision of the near-future, as informed by the geopolitical climate in which his stories were written during and immediately after the Second World War. In Part III, the essay examines how Asimov’s later works detailing the near-future shifted from an increasingly centralized world to one mired in a bipolar conflict reminiscent of the Cold War. In Part IV, the essay explores Asimov’s vision of the far-future, in which he introduces the idea of cyclical centralization into his fictional canon. In Part V, the essay examines the theoretical endpoint of all political unification, the galactic collective consciousness. Part VI concludes.

Asimov’s Near-Future: Centralization in a Post-War World

The EA period was largely coterminous with two transitional eras, one in science fiction and the other in international affairs. Asimov’s first batch of short stories graced the pages of Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 and 1939. Soon after, the field began to shift. The Pulp Era had dominated the 1920s and 1930s, featuring science fiction that was campy and adventurous. But the Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of “hard” science fiction, in which authors endeavored to adhere to a sense of scientific realism in their fictional worlds. “Science-fiction pulp . . . was declining,” Asimov wrote, “and a new generation of writers was arising, writers who had some feeling for science” (Asimov, It’s Been a Good Life 55). This suited Asimov. As he earned his B.S. (1939), M.A. (1941), and Ph.D. (1948) in pursuit of a career in Chemistry, the field of science fiction moved along with him in a more scientific direction.

The EA period also marked a transition in international affairs. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Allied Powers, victorious in the Second World War, went about crafting a new rules-based international order—one that would place international organizations center stage. The United Nations was founded in 1945, following the ratification of the UN Charter by the five permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and France. Customary international law (also known as the “law of nations”) had a storied pedigree even then, and nations had long cooperated through treaties and the creation of limited international organizations.¹ But the United Nations represented a great leap forward.

The United Nations, acting through the principal organ of the Security Council, was the first international organization with the authority to issue resolutions with binding legal force on Member States composing a critical mass of the human population.² At the outset, the United Nations included fifty Member States. Today, it includes 193 Member States, plus two nonmember observer states. Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council may issue such binding resolutions to “address any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” The power is limited, but it includes the authority to call upon Member States to enforce economic sanctions and communicative or diplomatic disruptions; authorize the use of armed force by Member States; and command the armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council by Member States for specific operations (often referred to as “peacekeeping” forces). Although its legal powers are narrow in scope, focused solely on international collective security, the United Nations is the closest the world has come, before or since, to an Asimovian world government.

The EA vision of the near-future was marked by this substantial shift toward centralization. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “The Evitable Conflict” (1950). The story proceeds against a backdrop in which the Earth of the 2050s has abolished national governments in favor of four continent-spanning regional governments. The regional governments are themselves overseen by a world co-ordinator, Stephen Byerly. Alongside Byerly, roboticist Susan Calvin uncovers a plot by the Machines, vast supercomputer intelligences that administer economic policy, to quietly sideline anti-robot movements for the greater good of humanity. Byerly expresses horror, but Calvin has a different takeaway. “Perhaps how wonderful!” she exclaims. “Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!” (Asimov, I, Robot 272) We see here the beginnings of Asimov’s philosophies on the good of political centralization and the desirability of systems that ensure intra-humanity cooperation—even against humanity’s own inclinations.

Asimov would continue this chronology in “The Bicentennial Man” (1976), published in the decade before his grand return to science fiction in the LA period. In this story, Andrew Martin, a robot with a deep desire to become legally recognized as human, pleads his case to the World Legislature that succeeded the governmental structure of “The Evitable Conflict.” Martin finally prevails on his 200th birthday, becoming the eponymous “bicentennial man,” after a slow process of adopting more and more human physiology and ensuring his own death in the process.

Another interregnum story in the Robots series, “That Thou Art Mindful of Him” (1974), does not refute the EA view of gradual centralization of political power, but introduces the cyclical political development that would become a hallmark of Asimov’s LA stories. In this story, humanity has turned against its robot partners. The main robot-producer, United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation, is able to survive this turn only through consultation with a highly-complex robot. The robot, George Ten, suggests that the corporation focus its production on intellectually simple, non-humanoid creations, so as not to upset the predilection for intellectual supremacy of its human clientele. The story ends on what is, for Asimov, an uncharacteristically sinister note. George Ten, in conversation with his predecessor, George Nine, reasons that robots being more rational than humans, as humans are more rational than animals, the former are more worthy of the designation “human,” and thus the obedience of robotic intelligence. Asimov may have been a self-avowed “technological optimist,” painting his robots more as tools than villainous boogeymen. (Asimov, It’s Been a Good Life 210) But he held a dark view of human nature and our penchant for irrationality, a truth at least two of Asimov’s robots seem to have grasped.

An earlier novella from the EA period, taking place generations after “That Thou Art Mindful of Him,” shows Asimov’s rejection of a strictly linear path to centralization. “Mother Earth” (1949) features a two-sided conflict between the citizens of Earth and the residents of Earth’s space-faring colonies (initially referred to as “Outer Worlders,” but referred to as “Spacers” in subsequent stories). Following a three-week war, Earth is isolated from the Outer Worlds, its inhabitants forbidden from leaving their own solar system. Thus, a proverbial “iron curtain” is draped across the stars. This war seems most directly inspired by historical accounts of colonial uprisings, but its bipolarity also echoes that of the burgeoning Cold War.³ In “Mother Earth,” humanity is no longer unified in a single government, but has split in two, backsliding on the road to centralization. This conflict set the fictional-historical backdrop for the crime-dramas The Caves of Steel (1953), The Naked Sun (1956), and “Mirror Image” (1972), in which Elijah Baley, a plainclothes Earthman detective, teams up with the humanoid robot R. Daneel Olivaw to solve a series of whodunit mysteries. Though the events of these stories do relatively little to shake up the status quo of Asimov’s fictional universe, they maintain the bipolar political structure established in “Mother Earth,” deepen the Cold War–esque tensions, and set the stage for the emergence of a singular empire in a process described in Asimov’s other works.

Asimov’s Near-Future: Bipolar Conflict

Taking the cue from “Mother Earth”and the two Baley detective novels, we start to see Asimov’s vision shift from a sunny future preordained to a clouded one perpetually at risk.If the EA period is defined by its place amid a transitory era in science fiction and world affairs, the LA period is tinged with (though hardly dominated by) a degree of postmodern cynicism.

When Asimov returned to science fiction in 1982, the field was nearing the end of the New Wave, which had begun in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s. As the sheen of the Golden Age dimmed, science fiction grew more preoccupied with the social, as opposed to physical, sciences, continuing the genre’s evolution beyond its pulpish origins. New Wave stories were more literary in tone, introspective of human nature, and cautious of the role of technology in political progress. Asimov’s EA fiction influenced the New Wave, and in turn, the New Wave influenced Asimov’s LA fiction. Asimov had long referred to his stories as “social science fiction,” a term he coined in a 1953 essay to describe science fiction that functions as social commentary (Asimov, “Social Science Fiction”). But it wasn’t until the LA period that Asimov, like many of the New Wave authors, began to truly grapple with man’s natural proclivity for self-destruction when left to his own devices.

In the same period, world affairs saw the limits of the rules-based international order that had been constructed in the wake of the Second World War. The power of legally binding resolutions of the UN Security Council encountered the procedural roadblock of the unilateral veto power of each of the Council’s five permanent members. In particular, the twin Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, held the veto, and they exercised it thoroughly.⁴ The UN Security Council found itself unable to prevent war, even between its own members acting through proxies on foreign soil. In the 1950s, the United Nations could not stave off the growing conflict on the Korean peninsula. With the publication of Resolutions 83 and 84 in 1950, the Security Council merely recommended, but did not require, the aid of Member States in support of a beleaguered South Korea, thereby eschewing the full deployment of its special legal powers.⁵On either side of the conflict sat the United Nations, the United States, and other allies in support of South Korea, and the Soviet Union and Communist China, in support of North Korea. The impotence of the Security Council continued with the war in Vietnam. Once again, world superpowers were on opposite sides of a bloody conflict on foreign soil, and bipolarity muted the ability of the Security Council to effectively respond. Because of dissension within the Security Council on whether and how to address the conflict, the organ remained paralyzed, issuing no binding resolutions. The United Nations’ involvement in ending what some scholars have described as the “gravest and longest violation of international peace and security” since its establishment can, at best, be characterized only as “intermittent and marginal”. (Rahan and Israel 528)

Asimov was well aware of these real-world political developments. In 1975, Asimov reflected on “the hope and ideals with which the United Nations was founded,” drawing a contrast with the body’s then-present state. “The United Nations has become merely a rather despicable forum used for private nationalistic ambitions,” Asimov wrote, “with each nation forming shifting alliances to see which can have the honor of best hastening mankind’s destruction” (Asimov, “The Myth of Less-Than-All” 81). From a supporter of political centralization, this was not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The international order, however, persisted amid these difficulties. For its part, Asimov’s fictional universe did, as well. As in our world, the bipolar regime would not last. As one power waned, the other became hegemonic.

This progression—fractured to bipolar to hegemonic—made its way into Asimov’s vision of a near-future human society. The final two Robots stories, both published in the LA period, pick up where The Naked Sun left off. In The Robots of Dawn (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985), the bipolar “cold war” between Earthmen and Spacers is at risk of becoming hot. The Spacers have suffered from success; with advanced technology, they live centuries-spanning lives but have become complacent in their abundance and wary of the rising power of Earth. With help from the psychic robot R. Giskard Reventlov, Olivaw allows a Spacer plot to irradiate the Earth’s surface to proceed. Olivaw and Reventlov reason that such irradiation, which will slowly make the Earth uninhabitable, is in humanity’s collective best interest. Humans will be pushed from Earth to colonize the galaxy and create a centralized galactic empire, putting an end to the bipolar Earth-Spacer paradigm. By the end of Robots and Empire, then, the course is set: Spacers will decline, Earthmen will triumph, and the Asimovian galaxy will enter a hegemonic era.

Asimov’s Far-Future: Empire, Decay, and Rebirth

Asimov’s far-future begins with the Empire series, published solely in the EA period. Asimov did not originally intend for the three novels that compose the Empire series to themselves form a cohesive narrative, much less be a part of a larger future history that includes the Robots series. Yet the Empire novels share a clear throughline of an increasingly centralized galaxy.

The Empire series takes place thousands of years in the future, long after the end of the bipolar Earth-Spacer conflict. Each of the three Empire novels features a distinct cast of characters, none of whom reappear in subsequent works. The first novel chronologically, The Stars, Like Dust (1951), concerns a conflict between Tyrann, which commands an empire of 50 planets, and Rhodia, a kingdom under Tyrann’s rule. Asimov thus starts with a fairly fractured galaxy, in the grip of regional powers.⁶ But the end of the novel reveals that a hidden rebellion is fomenting in opposition to the Tyranni oppressors. The rebellion’s goal is to lay the groundwork for a unified galactic empire that could subjugate Tyrann and bring an end to all such regional conflicts.⁷By the time of the second novel, The Currents of Space (1952), a single planet, Trantor, has conquered nearly half the galaxy, unifying the captured systems in a combined empire. And in the third novel, Pebble in the Sky (1950), the Trantorian empire has spread to encompass the entire galaxy, centralizing all of humanity under its rule.

Did Asimov aspire to the idea of empire? The answer seems to have shifted as Asimov aged. Asimov was an avid student of History, basing his Foundation series on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. With the Empire series, we also see the influence of Roman history on Asimov’s work. As with ancient Rome, Trantor began as a republic and evolved into an empire, but Asimov’s Empire series does little to explore the corrupting influence of centralized power. Neither do his EA-published Foundation stories. However, Asimov, echoing the pessimism of the New Wave authors, would take up this consideration in his later life. While the EA Foundation was a rationalist, heroic force, the LA Foundation, intended progenitor of a second galactic empire, grew to become a war-mongering villain. Ultimately, Asimov would turn against the idea of imperial centralization as a societal good, charting a different course for the galaxy in the LA-period Foundation novels.

The Foundation series, perhaps Asimov’s most well-known, began as a string of short stories published by editor John W. Campbell in his Astounding Science Fiction magazine. The first four of these stories, along with an exclusive prequel story, are collected in the book Foundation (1951). The second book, Foundation and Empire (1952), is composed of two subsequent novellas, as is the third book, Second Foundation (1953). Together, these three books (containing five short stories and four novellas) compose the entirety of the Foundation series published in the EA period. As such, for nearly three decades they were often referred to as the “Foundation trilogy.”

Asimov’s Foundation series opens in the heyday of the galactic empire seen in Pebble in the Sky. The empire is centered on the planet Trantor, from which it controls the entire galaxy. Trantor itself has become an ecumenopolis, a planet-wide city devoted to the administration of imperial affairs over a vast territory. Chronologically, the series begins with Asimov’s two prequel novels, published in the LA period: Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993). In those books, the scholar Hari Seldon establishes a discipline of Advanced Mathematics that can project the course of collective human affairs centuries into the future. The discipline is “Psychohistory,” and with it, Seldon predicts the inevitable collapse of the galactic empire. In Foundation, Seldon pleads with the empire’s Commission of Public Safety to allow him to establish a Foundation of scientists and other scholars, who can prepare and publish an Encyclopedia Galactica as a reservoir of human knowledge. The Commission authorizes this, provided that the Foundation be established on the far-away planet Terminus. The Foundation is so established, but it soon becomes apparent that Seldon intended it to be far more than a mere publishing outpost. Using the science of Psychohistory, Seldon has charted a course for the Foundation to survive and prosper over the next 1,000 years of barbarism and decline, before reemerging as the nucleus of a second galactic empire. Over the course of the Foundation trilogy, the Foundation faces several crises, both those foreseen by Seldon’s Psychohistory and those unforeseen. The Foundation survives them all.

When the Foundation series began, Seldon’s Psychohistorical predictions were unerring. Over the course of Foundation and the first novella of Foundation and Empire, the Seldon plan never failed. It was only with the second novella of Foundation and Empire, titled “The Mule,” that a reluctant Asimov, at the insistence of Campbell, began to explore how and why Psychohistory may fail to predict the future. In that story, the eponymous character, a mutant with the ability to alter the emotions of others and compel their obedience, rises to defeat the Foundation and place it under his rule. This represented an aberration that Psychohistory—which deals with the general movements of society, not the choices of any particular individual—was unable to foresee. In Second Foundation, the Mule searches for the secretive Second Foundation of mentalics, who covertly push the galaxy in the direction of centralization and continue to refine Seldon’s Psychohistorical predictions. The mentalics employ psychic powers similar to the Mule’s own, but are individually less powerful. Outnumbered and outsmarted, the Mule is unable to defeat the mentalics as he did the First Foundation. The saga of the Mule ends with his death of natural causes and the return of the First Foundation to rule under the Seldon plan, aided by the secretive influence of the Second Foundation.

Asimov thus toyed with abandoning the notion of centralization’s inevitability. The Second Foundation and the Mule represent a shift in the series’ underlying philosophy. Psychohistory posits that societal change comes not from the decisions of a few individual “great men,” but from the broader forces of economics, political science, and social psychology. The Mule is anti-Psychohistory, a “great man” who forces societal evolution to bend to his will. So too are the mentalics of the Second Foundation, albeit with the more benevolent purpose of ensuring that Seldon’s Psychohistorical predictions go according to plan. In later books, Asimov would tie societal evolution more to the decisions of such “great men”—most notably Golan Trevize and R. Daneel Olivaw. Though Asimov never wholly discarded the notion of a preordained path to centralization, his later works did call into question the original presuppositions of Psychohistory.

Asimov’s Far-Future: Galaxia

When Asimov returned to the Foundation series in 1982, the stories took on a new political valence, eschewing established notions of political centralization in favor of a new kind of galactic unification. Foundation’s Edge (1982) picks up about halfway through Seldon’s predicted 1,000-year period of darkness. The galactic empire has withered into irrelevance, and the First Foundation has expanded its territory to nearly match the size of the original empire. The Second Foundation is at the height of its shadowy influence. Near the end of the novel, the main character, Golan Trevize, has encountered a planet-wide collective consciousness called “Gaia.” As the forces of the First and Second Foundations converge on Gaia, Trevize must make a choice: Shall the galaxy fall under the centralized rule of the militaristic First Foundation or the psychic rule of the Second Foundation? Or shall Gaia expand to become a galaxy-wide collective consciousness, named “Galaxia”? Trevize has no love for either Foundation, which now represent twin forms of enlightened despotism. Ultimately, he chooses Galaxia, despite his initial discomfort with the idea of a collective consciousness.

In Foundation and Earth (1986), Trevize, on a mission to find humanity’s home world, discovers that R. Daneel Olivaw, the robotic partner from the Elijah Baley detective novels, has been orchestrating a move to Galaxia as the ultimate way to fulfill his programming to serve and protect not just individual humans, but humanity as a collective. Like the Machines in “The Evitable Conflict,” Olivaw is a paternal figure overseeing the course of humanity in a more centralized direction. Without his guidance, it appears that humanity is at risk of descending into irrationality and violence. Again, New Wave thinking, with respect to human nature if not technology’s peril, emerges in the LA period. But as in Asimov’s earlier “technologically optimistic” works, intelligent technology has the potential to guide humanity, protecting the species from its self-destructive instincts. Meeting Olivaw eases Trevize’s worries over choosing Galaxia. Not only will Galaxia put an end to human warfare and parochialism, Trevize reasons, unification of humanity is the only way to defend against whatever forces may appear from other galaxies. “An invader that finds us divided against ourselves will dominate us all, or destroy us all,” Trevize says. “The only true defense is to produce Galaxia, which cannot be turned against itself and which can meet invaders with maximum power.” (Asimov, Foundation and Earth 498) In this, Trevize takes the author’s earthly views on the necessity of intra-human cooperation and expands them to the universal level. Thus concludes the Foundation saga.⁸

The idea of a galaxy-spanning collective consciousness was not new to the LA-period Asimov. Indeed, the author had previously explored the idea in “The Last Question” (1956), a short story that Asimov himself considered to be his best. “The Last Question” is composed of a series of episodes, taking place over the course of trillions of years of human history, in which individuals from successive generations of humanity ask the AC supercomputer how to reverse entropy and thus prevent the heat death of the universe. In one such episode, humanity has collected itself into a singular mind, named Man. In the last episode, Man has itself combined with AC to form a cosmic being. Only through this combination are Man and AC able to finally reverse entropy, which they do by uttering the biblical phrase of creation: “Let there be light!”⁹

For Asimov, Galaxia (if not Man and AC) represents the ultimate destination of political centralization, but it also sidesteps the authoritarian political structure inherent in a galactic “empire.” As portrayed in Foundation’s Edge, the collective consciousness of Gaia is composed of discrete individuals. They retain individual awareness while participating in a group consciousness that ensures they live harmoniously as one. A rational, Asimovian society is one in which all members work toward a common interest. For Asimov, this could be achieved by opening the respective views of the individuals of society to the truth of the larger whole.

The idea that group civic virtue is akin to the constitution of an individual has ancient roots. In The Republic, Plato analogized the governance of a city-state to the internal composition of a soul. A soul at war with itself creates an irrational person, torn between competing interests. To correct this disunity, Plato believed, reason must become the master of appetite. (Plato 332–33) Likewise, a city-state cannot be truly unified until it pursues a rational common purpose—the good of not only the individuals that compose the city-state, but of the city-state itself.¹⁰ In adopting Galaxia, Asimov embraces this Platonic vision on a galactic scale. As an individual-collective, Asimov’s galactic citizens may overcome the irrationalities of conflict and war, in pursuit of the overarching goal of what is good for Galaxia—the entirety of humanity—as a singularity.

The idea that group civic virtue is akin to the constitution of an individual has ancient roots. In The Republic, Plato analogized the governance of a city-state to the internal composition of a soul. A soul at war with itself creates an irrational person, torn between competing interests. To correct this disunity, Plato believed, reason must become the master of appetite. (Plato 332–33) Likewise, a city-state cannot be truly unified until it pursues a rational common purpose—the good of not only the individuals that compose the city-state, but of the city-state itself.¹⁰ In adopting Galaxia, Asimov embraces this Platonic vision on a galactic scale. As an individual-collective, Asimov’s galactic citizens may overcome the irrationalities of conflict and war, in pursuit of the overarching goal of what is good for Galaxia—the entirety of humanity—as a singularity.

The throughline in Asimov’s future history is toward ever-increasing centralization, with periods of temporary backsliding. The nations of Earth were replaced by four regional governments, then by a world government. Earth unified, but the splinter group of Spacers produced a bipolar conflict. The Earth-Spacer cold war ended with the gradual demise of the Spacers and the colonization of the galaxy by the Earth settlers. Those settlers produced a fractured galactic community that slowly formed the first galactic empire. Though the first empire collapsed, amid a millennium of feudalism and darkness, the creation of a stronger form of centralization was set in motion. The collective consciousness of Galaxia was the endpoint for Asimov, the answer to the last question of how to perfect human governance. To Asimov, political centralization, taken to this logical extreme, represents the ultimate good for humanity.

Conclusion

In Foundation, the first mayor of Terminus, Salvor Hardin, had a knack for defusing political tensions without resort to arms. Hardin represents the prototypical Asimovian hero: an individual who shoots rarely and boldly declares that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Isaac Asimov’s political vision mirrored that of his fictional hero. History, he believed, was a story of humans hurting other humans on an increasingly crowded planet. The solution to this evil, he thought, was increased political centralization, for only in a unified political structure could humanity move beyond eternal war with itself. Expressing support for the notion of a world government, Asimov reasoned that “[o]ur problems are now planetary, and our solutions will have to be planetary too”. (Asimov, “My Planet, ‘Tis of Thee” 211)

Asimov’s vision has yet to become reality. The Good Doctor was initially optimistic regarding the great leap forward that followed the Second World War, in which the nations of the world came together in the creation of stronger international organizations with the purpose of limiting future conflict. But Asimov grew frustrated with the impotence of these organs in the Cold War era. The United Nations could not prevent war backed by major powers in Korea or Vietnam. It was a far cry from the type of world government to which Asimov aspired.

But in his fiction, Asimov created a world of his own unconstrained by the limits of real-life human irrationality. Over a long continuity, combining a lifetime of stories in three separate series, Asimov detailed the path of humanity toward increasingly centralized political structures. In the end, Asimov’s universe accepted the utopian result of subsuming all of humanity in a single galaxy-spanning collective consciousness. Whether Asimov truly believed that a far-future humanity could ever achieve such a feat, we may never know. But if Asimov believed in anything, it was the need for rationality to triumph over violence—the need for humanity to come together to avert catastrophe. It is a message for our time as much as his.

NOTES

1. These pre-1945 international organizations were “limited” in terms of the number of signatory states (the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, included only 58 member states at its height), subject-matter, and legal authority.
   
2. The other principal organs of the United Nations—the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, the UN Secretariat, the Economic and Social Council, and the now-suspended Trusteeship Council—lack the power to issue legally binding resolutions.
   
3. Consider the now-outdated Cold War taxonomy of First World countries, aligned with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (including the United States); Second World countries, aligned with the Eastern Bloc (including the Soviet Union); and Third World countries, aligned with neither coalition.
   
4. The Soviet Union cast the majority of all vetoes during the first two decades of the United Nations, a period in which members of the Security Council usually favored the position of the United States. The United States cast the majority of vetoes during the following two decades, a period in which decolonization and a corresponding increase in the number of Member States overcame the western-aligned majority.
   
5. The Soviet Union may have vetoed these resolutions, except that from January 13 to August 1 of 1950, it abstained from voting in protest of the Republic of China’s (RoC) continued place on the Security Council. The Soviets favored the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an ideologically aligned communist state, which they saw as the rightful government of mainland China. The PRC eventually replaced the RoC on the Security Council in October 1971.
   
6. A fan theory posits that Tyrann is a precursor to Trantor, the progenitor of the galactic empire. However, any existence of a direct Tyrann-Trantor succession was never confirmed by Asimov himself. The theory is plausible, but largely atextual.
   
7. The Stars, Like Dust ends with the rebellion discovery of an ancient document under which a new galactic empire could form: the United States Constitution. The revelation has induced a groan in many a reader, who may note that the galactic empire chronicled in subsequent Asimov stories has a political structure that is nothing like that of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, Asimov wrote in an early autobiography that he regrets including, at the insistence of his editor, this constitutional conclusion. (Asimov, In Memory Yet Green 600)
   
8. Asimov considered continuing the story of the Foundation in novels set after Foundation and Earth, but he was unable to do so before his death in 1992.
   
9. Asimov was an avowed atheist, but he was nonetheless fascinated by the Judeo-Christian bible as a literary creation. His works often contained biblical themes, such as the title of the Robots story “That Thou Art Mindful of Him,” a quote from the Book of Psalms, or the name of Jezebel Baley (the wife of detective Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel), a reference to the biblical Queen Jezebel. Asimov even published a biblical guide titled Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, totaling nearly 1,300 pages across two volumes.
   
10. For Plato, the orderly city-state would be divided into three castes: the Rulers, composed of ascetic and aloof philosophers raised for the purpose of governing; the Auxiliaries, focused on group security; and the Businessmen, focused on production and commerce. This echoes the original vision of the Foundation series. The Second Foundation operated as a set-aside ruling class, separately raised with the power to direct the lives of others. Indeed, Hari Seldon referred to the Second Foundation as “the Empire’s guardians”. (Asimov, Forward the Foundation 345) The First Foundation operated as a scientific and military power. And the galactic citizens were themselves left to commerce and trade. Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth, however, rejected the Platonic tripartite division of society in favor of the unified collective consciousness of Galaxia.

WORKS CITED

Asimov, Isaac. The Caves of Steel. Doubleday, 1954.

—. The Complete Robot. Doubleday, 1982.

—. The Currents of Space. Doubleday, 1952.

—. “The Decade of Decision.” The Roving Mind. Prometheus Books, 1983, pp. 244–250.

—. Forward the Foundation. Doubleday, 1993.

—. Foundation. Gnome Press, 1951.

—. Foundation and Earth. Doubleday, 1986.

—. Foundation and Empire. Gnome Press, 1952.

—. Foundation’s Edge. Doubleday, 1982.

—. In Memory Yet Green. Doubleday, 1979.

—. I, Robot. Gnome Press, 1950.

—. “Is There Hope for the Future?” Science Past, Science Future. Doubleday, 1975, pp. 331–346. Originally published in Galaxy, July 1974, pp. 69–82.

—. It’s Been a Good Life. Edited by Janet Jeppson Asimov, Prometheus Books, 2002.

—. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956, pp. 6–15.

—. “Mother Earth.” Astounding Science Fiction, May 1949, pp. 59–92.

—. “My Planet, ‘Tis of Thee.” The Stars in Their Courses. Ace Books, 1971, pp. 207–218. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1970, pp. 109–118.

—. “The Myth of Less-Than-All.” Life and Time. Avon Books, 1978, pp. 81–87.

—. The Naked Sun. Doubleday, 1957.

—. Pebble in the Sky. Doubleday, 1950.

—. Prelude to Foundation. Doubleday, 1988.

—. Robots and Empire. Doubleday, 1985.

—. The Robots of Dawn. Doubleday, 1983.

—. Second Foundation. Gnome Press, 1953.

—. “Social Science Fiction.” Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. Edited by Reginald Bretnor, Coward-McCann, 1953, pp. 157–196.

—. “Society in the Future.” Past, Present, and Future. Barnes & Noble Books, 1987, pp. 233–236.

—. The Stars, Like Dust. Doubleday, 1951.

—. “Unification.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1987, pp. 4–8.

Carter, Zachary D. “The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.” The Atlantic, 19 Nov. 2021, https://bit.ly/4fQcFzI. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Kennedy, Paul. The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations. Random House, 2006.

Meisler, Stanley. United Nations: The First Fifty Years. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.

Nevala-Lee, Alec. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. HarperCollins, 2018.

Nichols, Lewis. “Isaac Asimov: Man of 7,560,000 Words.” The New York Times, 3 Aug. 1969, https://bit.ly/4fQUlGR. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee, Penguin Books, 2007.

Rahan, M.S., and T. Israel. “The United Nations and the Conflict in Vietnam.” International Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, 1973, pp. 511–540.

Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Zachary Reger is an attorney in Washington, D.C. His legal scholarship has appeared in the Missouri Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review Online. His speculative fiction has appeared in Bewildering Stories and the Sci Phi Journal.

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Science and Society in the Long View: Neal Stephenson’s Anathem as a Simulation of the Governance of Science

Zachary Gallagher Pirtle¹

Introduction

What is the ideal relationship between science and society? How do short-term and long-term approaches to research change the dynamics of scientific work? What effect does centralization or decentralization have on the practice of science and its regulation? Are there other ways of organizing the scientific enterprise that could produce better outcomes for society? Science fiction can explore answers to these questions and other aspects of science policy. I propose that Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem offers a rich and unique examination of how science and society should relate.

Stephenson has been a longtime student of innovation and of the US space program. He has published articles such as his 2011 “Innovation Starvation” that call for much deeper and long-term thinking about innovation policy. Many look to Stephenson as a source of inspiration for thinking about science policy issues writ large; his 1992 novel Snow Crash, for instance, is often cited for its portrayal of an online metaverse. However, Anathem offers significant fodder for a broader reflection on science and policy, as Stephenson carefully thinks through an alternate way by which science and society could relate, with a particular focus on how science and society would interact across many thousands of years.

Stephenson’s consideration of the long-term impacts of science and how to govern it raises questions that are not well captured in broader science policy literature. In this paper, I first discuss how science and engineering policy shapes how science and society relate; then I summarize research approaches that examine how science fiction can help improve the scope and practice of science policy, in particular by informing our imaginations to reflect on what world we want to create. Then I discuss Anathem as a science fiction novel of grand scope about scientist monks who live under a drastically different science policy infrastructure, and I review the book’s backstory of thousands of years of struggle between civilization and science. I conclude by exploring how the book’s denouement gives conflicting answers about how science and society should ultimately relate. While Stephenson might describe the policy implications of his book as “impressionistic,” Anathem offers readers a thought experiment to imagine vastly different approaches to science policy—and should be celebrated and recognized as such. 

Science, Technology, and Engineering Policy Shapes the Future

Many science fiction readers and scholars track updates in science and engineering, and many are scientists and engineers themselves. Less commonly explored in science fiction and among its readers are the institutions and policy choices that shape what scientists and engineers actually do. There is a constellation of people who “do science policy” by shaping the approaches, resources, and culture of science and engineering. These professionals include staff at federal agencies² such as the US National Institutes of Health; Congressional and Presidential staff engaged in science and technology policies and legislation; ethicists, anthropologists, and science, technology, and society (STS) scholars who study the conduct and practice of science; program officers at philanthropies, investors, and other funders; as well as many other decisionmakers who shape how science is used to perform missions like national defense, water remediation, disaster preparedness, etc.; along with innumerable others. I colloquially refer to all these people as “science policy practitioners,” while also embracing science policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz’s holistic approach to defining science policy as shaping the outcomes of science by interrogating its values and inputs. (Sarewitz 2007)

The aspect of Anathem that I focus on here is the story’s depiction of how science and society should relate, a topic long examined in science policy research in part through discussion of a “social contract for science” (Guston 2000a, Kevles 1995) Such a social contract addresses the question of how the collective science community—in which I include, along with scientists, both engineers and technologists, who may outnumber scientists themselves—relates to and potentially serves society.³ Given that the public sector is often the primary funder of science, society can reasonably expect benefits now and in the future in exchange for funding and support—but there are deep debates on what the nature of those benefits should be and when they should occur.

The idea of what benefits and responsibilities are entailed in a social contract⁴ can be quite broad and occur over a range of timespans. Science policy in the United States after World War II invoked one vision of the contract: Taxpayers would support curiosity-driven research at universities, which would provide new insights that are intrinsically worth knowing; some of that research would yield results that could be translated into social benefits such as solving a specific societal problem, creating a useful new technology, or generating economic activity.

The process of deciding what science and engineering is sufficiently beneficial to be worth funding is complex and often highly uncertain. Scientists can disagree about whether a piece of curiosity-driven research is actually worth knowing, as well as disagree about what the practical benefits of research will be in advance of—or even after—a research program’s completion.⁵ Funders and researchers who seek practical benefits do so with a range of desired timespans as well, with some seeking a quick return, which could be economic or societal, and others looking for some promise of future benefit.

We need different conversations about how science and society should relate. Political scientist and science and society scholar David Guston called to retire the social contract for science, to move beyond vague ideas of mutual obligation and assumedly-guaranteed benefits and to instead find ways for people and institutions to better collaborate and get better outcomes. (Guston 2000b) Guston overviewed how the US Congress began to impose oversight on the institutional design and grantmaking process for scientific and engineering work, creating “boundary organizations” that link science organizations and political groups (Guston 2000a). More recently, the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act calls for the National Science Foundation to more proactively encourage engagement with “ethical and societal considerations” of its funded research.⁶ 

Oversight and getting results for a given area of science can depend greatly on the nature of the activity. Sarewitz and Nelson argue that some areas of science and engineering struggle to make long-term progress, such as with health care outcomes, and that exponential efficiency akin to Moore’s Law in semiconductor development is not possible in most industries. (Sarewitz and Nelson 2008) This raises questions about how to actually make technical progress across the long-term. Research on responsible innovation and innovation studies more generally has been working to explore better ways to shape science policy for public benefit across all industries, for longer-term benefit.⁷ However, very little of this literature focuses on how science and society might relate into the very distant future.⁸

There is one extreme of the science and society debate that is worth keeping in mind when reading Anathem. Michael Polanyi’s “Republic of Science” (1962) argued for the independence of science. Polanyi contended that science inherently pursues objective knowledge, and that this pursuit should be supported and funded seemingly at any cost. This perspective is echoed in contemporary calls to significantly increase funding for scientific research,⁹ reflecting a belief in science’s transformative potential. Polanyi claimed that the scientific community operates as a self-organizing system. He argued that scientists, through informal networks and communication, are able to track each other’s work and collectively guide the direction of research, with each researcher focusing on problems suited for their skills. This regulating process allows the scientific community to allocate its resources efficiently and focus on problems best suited to individual and collective expertise. Polanyi’s vision places trust in the motivations and collaborative nature of scientists to assume that they will advance knowledge without the need for external controls or directives from government. There are many critics of this idea, who note that scientists can be inefficient with funding when left to their own devices, and that in a democracy, all funding should be tied to legitimate elected leaders (Guston 2000a). Further, if Nelson and Sarewitz are right that some areas of science are making little progress, this might be evidence that Polanyi’s vision of independence may not work as he hoped.

Science Fiction as a Way to Explore How Science and Society Should Relate

Science fiction can be a great boon for debating how we collectively should want science and society to relate. Several policy scholars have called on science fiction to help imagine and think through future policy choices about science. Notable contributions to this tradition include Miller and Bennett (2008), York and Conley (2020), Finn (2025), Fritzsche and Soldner (2025), and Older and Pirtle (2019).¹⁰ This approach does not focus on the predictive accuracy of science fiction, but instead highlights the genre’s utility as a tool for exploring the values and principles we might wish to apply to future decisions about science. Older and Pirtle, for instance, discuss using science fiction stories as informal simulations, exploring how things might be different if society were composed differently and/or if technologies were shaped and built in different ways. (2021) Reflecting on such alternatives can be extremely useful for the governance of science, with science fiction stories serving as proxies for and thought experiments about deeper governance principles, philosophies, and worldviews.

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem as a Simulation

Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Anathem (2008) provides a rich analogy and an informal simulation tool for exploring the relationship between science and society. Stephenson’s technical depth and research, along with his focus on long-term progress in innovation, has made his work of particular interest for some science and society researchers. In Anathem, he describes scientist-monks living apart from society in separate disciplinary conclaves called “maths,” with their work and existence a point of tension over the thousands of years of backstory described in the book. Its length, approaching 1,000 pages in various editions, reflects its ambitious scope.¹¹ Here, I will make only indirect references to general plot points that will not spoil the story for a prospective reader. Instead, I focus on the background of the book’s world and how that might inspire us to think more deeply about science and its relation to society.¹²

While some science fiction examines various permutations of how scientists exert control or are controlled by society,¹³ as well as how they relate to society, it is rare to encounter a work in which this relationship is central to the story, as it is in Anathem. And yet very little attention has been given to the novel as a science policy allegory (although I did write on this topic back in 2011). Interestingly, while Stephenson extensively explores philosophical influences in the book—recounting the history of Western philosophy from Thales and Plato to Kant and beyond—he does not explicitly discuss any influences on his science policy framing in the novel. It would be fascinating to know his influences, though he has had sufficiently deep engagement on innovation policy to indicate that he is a serious thinker on the topic.¹⁴

Anathem conjures a world in which scientists are kept apart from society, with strictly governed yet volatile connections between science and society. The scientists in Anathem are largely independent, yet they seem to relentlessly deliver new technology and theoretical insight, despite efforts by society to regulate them. It effectively is the Republic of Science that Polanyi sketched out, where the maths have autonomy but one whose political status and power in contrast to the outer world is changing greatly over time.

Background on the Mathic World of Scientist-Monks

Many reviews of Anathem discuss the eccentricities of the scientist-monks that exist on the fictional world of Arbre. These monks—called the “avout”—can be imagined as a cross between members of a religious order and university professors or students with varying levels of expertise and types of research. Their collective community is called the mathic world. The avout live behind walls, separated from the outside, “Saecular” world, in self-sufficient villages called “concents.” The avout must take vows that in some ways are absurd,¹⁵ including becoming sterile and forgoing life with families outside the maths. They are taught that the outside world has varied preconceptions of who they are and what their intent is.¹⁶ Their primary goal and purpose is to perform research and create new knowledge. Many of the people inside the maths have additional practical skills and hobbies that are often useful, such as farming, craftwork, and others that enable their basic needs to be met. This seems to help the maths be economically self-sufficient, although they surely occupy valuable stretches of land and buildings.

The Saecular world has overthrown the mathic world many times, especially when technologies developed in the maths cause trouble and disruption for the broader society. The characters in Anathem emphasize on several occasions that the maths are only permitted to exist on the sufferance of the Saecular world, even though the avout live outside the Saecular legal system. The protagonist narrator of the book, a young avout named Erasmus (or “Raz”), pointedly refuses to discuss the dynamics¹⁷ and politics¹⁸ of the Saecular world (445), which he views as too fickle and changing to be worth describing, whereas the mathic world persists always as a realm focused on intellect, contemplation, and scientific inquiry.

The book’s focus on the separation of the maths from society is what made me interested in Anathem as an informal simulation for considering science policy. The sites of the avout are partitioned into different kinds of maths, based on the level of focus and depth of the research questions of the avout inside. The different maths operate on a series of time scales at which point they open their doors to the Saecular world and to other maths to share their research and potentially bring in new avout. There are Unarians, whose maths open their doors to the world and allow for exchange with the outside world every year;¹⁹ Decenarians, whose maths open every 10 years; Centenarians, whose doors open every 100 years; and Millenarians, whose doors open every 1,000 years. These maths are not only isolated from the outside world but also from each other, with one of each kind of math being located at a single monastery-like site but kept in separated wings.

The supposed purpose of the time-division of the different maths is to allow researchers to focus on correspondingly longer-term problems. The Unarians’ focus allows for study across a few years doing things such as writing theses summarizing research about cosmology, taking astronomical observations. Those who attend these Unarian schools are akin to students pursuing undergraduate education in our world, . The Decenarian maths have a deeper focus on long-term problems, perhaps akin to advanced graduated students and early-career faculty. Erasmus, the protagonist, belongs to one of these maths, and he and his fellow Decenarians do astronomical observations and analysis, even more detailed literature reviews, and other activities that feel similar to those of graduate school in real-world universities. Different maths can study the same topics. Erasmus’s Decenarian math contemplates the “polycosmic” nature of a multiverse—a key topic of the book—which is also studied in Centenarian and Millenarian maths.

The Centenarian and Millenarian maths are said to have a deeper research focus on longer-term problems, but the specifics are not fully explained; the Millenarian math, especially, becomes a bit more fantastical than real-life science. Sometimes the long-term focus of the maths can go awry. For instance, there is a phrase, to “go hundred,” (229) which describes when Centenarian maths open only to reveal that everyone has either gone insane, disappeared, or is dead—apparently driven mad by their isolation.

The only Millenarian character in the book is Fraa Jad (“Fraa” is a title akin to “Friar” or “Brother”), whose intellectual prowess and ability to see across multiple worlds is described as immensely powerful and becomes essential to the plot of the book. Some avout who live in the Millenarian maths are revealed to have longer lifespans, achieved perhaps through a type of research and self-reflection.²⁰ This longevity surely enables much longer-term study and focus, but it doesn’t illuminate what it means to have thousand-year research projects. There are other ways in which the Millenarian maths are supernatural: the protagonists discuss a centuries-old  appearance of a mythical creature’s body²¹ inside a parking structure, for example, is attributed to the transformative abilities of Millenarian scholars. The fear of such power by the Saecular world was then cited as a reason for a “sack,” or the takeover and reform of the maths by the outside world.

Thousands of Years of Science-Induced Civilizational Rise—and Collapse

The timeline of the Anathem universe is fascinating for how it portrays the relation between science and society. The timeline suggests that the story might be approximately 3,700 years in the future, and the book makes various oblique hints that the world of Arbre is more technologically advanced than our own.²² Our current era would align with the end of what the book calls the “Praxic Age,” which corresponds to a period beginning with the Industrial Revolution. (297, 328, 372) While the Praxic Age had great technological advancements, the world of Arbre had several technology-induced calamities that ultimately led to civilizational destruction and collapse.²³

Arbre society then underwent a period of reformation known as the Reconstitution, which redefined the relationship between science and society by instituting the separation between maths and the Saecular world described above. The Reconstitution was so important to Arbre society that they remade their calendar year to be year 0 in the mathic timeline. However, the science-society relationship continued to evolve significantly in the millennia before Anathem’s plot begins. Even with the maths separated from society, new technologies continued to emerge from them that disrupted Saecular society, leading the Saecular world to sack the mathic world and impose new regulations. Each sack resulted in changes to the science-society relationship. The sacks included²⁴:

First Sack
Technological cause: The avout create “new matter,” materials with atoms possessing slightly different atomic masses and emitting different wavelengths of light, causing the laws of physics to function differently. New matter enables the creation of revolutionary artifacts and tools of incredible strength and lightness, but it disrupts society, leading to the First Sack.
Change in Science-Society Relation: New matter’s use is heavily regulated, with the Saecular world controlling new matter production only in limited facilities outside of the math.²⁵ A mathic entity known as the Inquisition is established to monitor compliance with these regulations.

Second Sack
Technological Cause: Maths begin engaging in gene-sequencing work, or what Erasmus refers to as “syndev,” apparently a portmanteau of “synthetic developments.” While not explicitly described in the story, this research evidently leads to the creation of potentially dangerous life forms or diseases that disrupt society.
Change in Science-Society Relation: After this event, additional rules are imposed on the maths, ensuring stricter oversight of their activities and removing any significant research infrastructure outside of astronomical observatory tools.

Third Sack
Technological Cause: Some Millenarians, who became known as Incanters (seemingly akin to wizards, (53, 69)) develop the ability to create matter—even without scientific infrastructure and research equipment. The Saecular world becomes dismayed when a previously non-existent dinosaur mysteriously appears, fused into a construction site.²⁶
Change in Science-Society Relation: Incanters seemingly stopped existing, though the exact change in science-society relations underlying this is unclear in the book. The backstory raises questions about whether some of the inciting research still continued to occur—after all, it’s hard to regulate or prevent people from merely thinking—though the plot of the book does eventually provide more details.²⁷ Three of the oldest Millenarian maths (the so-called Inviolate maths, which were never sacked) that had maintained nuclear waste continued to exist. The book implies that these reforms were enforced after the Sack, though it also hints that an external group was allowed to form outside the maths that pursued research about Platonic ideals. This group’s research focus on the multiverse sets the stage for the book’s climactic events.

Aspects of the Society-Science Relationship in Anathem

The timeline of the mathic world shows a complex relationship between the maths and the Saecular world. This section highlights a few other features of the science-society relationship. They illustrate the thoughtfulness that Stephenson put into his work—but they also raise questions about how separately science and society might be made to act given the long-term perspectives.

Service to Society in the History of the Maths

The maths have come together in the past to help humanity defend against an external threat. When such threats emerge, a “convox” is summoned bringing together leaders across the mathic world. One past convox is described as occurring when an asteroid was projected to impact and likely destroy life on Arbre. (95) The avout worked with the Saecular world to design a spaceship that would travel to the asteroid and deflect it. When it later emerged that the asteroid would narrowly miss the planet, the deflection mission then became a research mission. But the ability and precedent to draw upon the avout to solve problems was a clear sign.

Another such convox occurs as a key plot point in the book, in response to dealing with an external invasion. An interesting nuance in the science-society relationship emerges when the book discusses the views of the Saecular leaders who attend the convox and are trying to understand the avout’s deliberations. It’s mentioned that many in the Saecular world have had concerns on whether the massive amount of resources spent on the avout’s convox were worth it.²⁸

“Big Science” vs. “Decentralized Science”—and How Efforts to Regulate Science Seem to Fail

The cyclical history of the maths, where regulations follow excesses of scientific and technological progress, ties well to real-world discussions about “big science” versus “decentralized science.” Much scientific research takes place in huge, infrastructure-intensive facilities, such as the European Large Hadron Collider or the US National Laboratories. In Anathem, the Saecular world’s regulation of the maths increasingly deprives the avout of access to that kind of major experimental infrastructure, leaving them with little more than their own intellectual capabilities and ability to observe the cosmos.²⁹

Despite being forced to do a form of decentralized science, the avout manage to conduct incredible research through rigorous dedication to their work. The moral for real-world scientific and engineering progress is ambiguous, especially as the progress that occurs in the book takes thousands of years. Most scientific leaders would assume that scientific progress could not occur under Anathem’s restrictions against infrastructure and continuous information sharing, but there are likely some areas of real-world research that could be aided by the long-term discipline of the maths.

Reframing the Science and Society Relationship

Science Saves the World and Becomes Coequal with the Saecular World

The Anathem plot ultimately leads to a reframing of the social contract for science of the world of Arbre, where the avout are no longer sequestered into a separate world of mathic settlements. This happens after a Millenarian uses the benefits of deep research on the nature of worlds in order to end a major invading threat to civilization (which I’ll only discuss in footnotes to avoid spoilers).³⁰ The ending establishes two distinct but equal “Magisteria” or authorities on the planet Arbre, with one Magisteria being leaders of the Saecular world and the other Magisteria being the leaders of the avout. As a character says at the end, “‘Behold.… There are two Arbarns on that vessel, of coqeual dignity. Such a state of affairs has not existed since the golden age of Ethras. The walls of Tredegarh [a mathic concent] have been brought down. The avout has escaped from their prisons. Ita, a group previously segregated from avout to focus on information technology] mingle and work by their sides.” (942) Such language by an avout-related scholar shows the perceived depth of the reordering of the science and society relationship, with science moving from a subordinate to an equal position.

However, the book ends before it describes how the new science and society relationship will emerge in the reconstituted world. The protagonist, Fraa Erasmus, plays a critical role in setting up what the new world will look like. The epilogue describes him setting up a new settlement in honor of Saunt Orolo (with the honorific being the book’s form of “Saint”). In the reconstitution, Erasmus states that avout and non-avout would be able to enter and leave the maths at will, and that families can be close to those inside the maths. All of the avout could now socialize at the same bar, marry, and regularly share ideas, both across maths and with the Saecular world.³¹ The protagonists seem blissfully unconcerned about the rapid reconfiguring of how science and society relate in their world. They are perhaps a bit like practicing scientists and engineers who like to just do their work.

The protagonists in the epilogue do mention thinking ahead about the need to defend themselves several centuries into the future.³² It seems likely that many restrictions on technologies such as new matter will remain; as the avout continue their work in this new world, Saecular leaders may even need to create new restrictions. I’ll leave major spoolers to a footnote, but the avout do also partner with the saecular work on a massive science and exploration project, committing to sending out their own space ark into the universe, on a mission vastly more complex than the Apollo program.³³ There is little discussion about who will fund such exploration, much less the livelihoods of the maths or of the new settlement that Erasmus is establishing, especially if the maths are allowed to create expensive new research infrastructure again.³⁴ It does seem implied that the Saecular world will more directly fund some of this work, especially the work to increase activities in space, since otherwise such an a space ark exploration effort would be difficult to implement.

Considering Anathem’s “Final” Science and Society Relationship

What then should we make of the central social structure of Anathem—the maths, partitioned by time and divided from society, strictly regulated by government, and yet enabling regulated and beneficial progress? The tensions produced by these forms of separation—physical, temporal, disciplinary—simmer throughout the book, having shaped the governance of the avout to regulate risk to society but also ensure some focus on long-term thinking. While the world of Anathem takes the idea to an extreme, its subdivision and regulation of science resonates with real-world issues today.

What does this ending really mean about the book’s revision to the science-society relationship? When I first reviewed the book in 2011, I interpreted Stephenson’s move as a plea to elevate the status of science and remove restrictions placed on science. It seemed to me that the book embodied Polanyi’s Republic of Science. By the end of Anathem,the limits imposed on the avout are gone, especially as the powerful Centenarians and Millenarians can share their insights outside the math (and with each other) at any time. This is a major reversal to the worldbuilding backstory leading up to the events of Anathem.

There have been comparable debates in the real world about the status and governance of science. Prior to World War II, US federal funding for science was minimal, with private foundations leading the way. As the country emerged from the war, the sense that scientists and engineers helped to win it through military systems and the atomic bomb was pervasive. Many science policy histories recount how the then-US science policy advisor Vannevar Bush published Science: The Endless Frontier, which emphasized the importance of long-term, curiosity-driven research that operates largely independently of societal pressures, but is still supported by the government. Such research was projected to always provide future benefits to the US national interest. Bush himself also advocated for the (eventually successful) creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This marked one of the highest profile debates in US history about who should control funding for science—presidentially appointed political appointees or scientific experts chosen by their peers. A compromise was eventually reached, in which the president appointed the head of NSF but the management of the agency was shaped by well-respected scientific leaders, giving some measure of autonomy.³⁵

Anathem’s “coequal” level of scientific autonomy is an extreme—akin to making scientific leaders equal to democratically elected ones, and putting them far above leaders in other areas of society, such as religion, entertainment, or culture.³⁶ This is a status never (openly) dreamed of in real-world science policy frameworks.

Is the Second Magisterium for Science Really a Militaristic Ploy?

On my 2024 rereading of Anathem, I paid closer attention to Emman, the young secular military leader who befriends Erasmus.³⁷ When Emman introduces the concept of the two Magisteria, comprising the separate leadership of the scientific world and the Saecular world, he notes how societal restrictions against the avout doing research contributed to the planet’s insufficient scientific and engineering resources to respond to invaders. After recounting the history of societal restrictions on the maths, Emman says:

Turned out that all we’d been doing was losing the arms race to cosmi that hadn’t imposed any such limits on their avout. And guess what? When Arbre decided to fight back a little, who delivered the counterpunch? Our military? The Sæcular Power? Nope. You guys in the bolts and chords [the dress of the avout]. So the Antiswarm [avout community] has garnered a lot of clout just by doing a lot and saying very little. Hence the concept of the two Magisteria…(933)

Emman describes Arbre as being in an arms race with worlds in other dimensions and stresses the importance of ensuring they do not overly restrain themselves. He emphasizes how much the avout were able to achieve during the crisis that saved the world, and how they did so with humility and seemingly low levels of support. (It is perhaps hard to imagine leading scientists and engineers in our world being willing to so prominently help society while “saying very little.”) Further, the two Magisteria decide to partner on sending an ark to explore other worlds, which is an ambitious project with scientific and potential military implications.

Given this, my interpretation from 2011—that the book was advocating an unfettered embrace of science—doesn’t seem aligned with Stephenson’s actual intent. A more nuanced reading might suggest that the creation of the coequal Magisteria was partly to ensure unfettered research while addressing a very real threat. This ties into a long-standing debate about the extent to which military policy and geopolitics drive science policy decisions—and whether that is appropriate.

If the primary reason for establishing the community of maths as a coequal Magisteria is the protection offered to the rest of Arbre by the Millenarians, then this is not a permanent framework for how science and society should interact. It is an end-state for how science and society should interact in a moment of prolonged military crisis—something like the Cold War.³⁸ It also raises questions about what we should do without the threat of some impending conflict. The once-in-a-lifetime threat of invasion does seem like it might be a uniquely crystallizing force that would unify politics. Could such a unification continue to last for decades—much less thousands of years?

Conclusion: Alternative Science-Society Simulations Suggested by the Anathem Plot

Stephenson’s Saecular world appears to have embraced a Cold War framing to motivate future scientific research. Such a reading is relevant to our world today. Given that Stephenson’s book looks at a future civilization across thousands of years, and given his savviness about the history of real-world innovation policy, it is humbling to consider that his primary rationale for the long-term support of science might be based on a military rationale such as the Cold War, though cultural and scientific desires are also embodied in the space ark project. However, despite this militaristic conclusion, the history of Arbre’s regulation of science and engineering connects with contemporary efforts to acknowledge and explore the ethical and societal considerations and impacts of science.

What would have happened if science had not become a coequal Magisterium? This offers a fascinating chance to informally simulate an alternate outcome for Anathem, supposing that world were no longer subject to a military threat. Other rationale for greater liberation of the avout could have been prioritized, such as the inherent desire for knowledge, the desire to create better quality of life on Arbre, or the broader exploration of the Arbrean universe.³⁹ One could imagine taking any of those rationales, and then exploring how that desire and rationale for continued Saecular support of the mathic world would change over time? How would that relationship evolve over the course of thousands of years? It’s a thought experiment worth consideration.

The recurring focus on the long-term future of humanity in Stephenson’s work—to prevent its fall and to focus longer term research among the Centenarians and Millenarians—does hint at a belief about progress in technology that can arise when enough research and attention is focused on a topic.⁴⁰ This aligns with Stephenson’s work on Project Hieroglyph, in which he authored a story about creating a 10km-tall space launch tower on Earth, focusing on the myriad of policy, management, and cultural challenges that needed to be overcome to build such a tower. (see his paper in Finn and Wylie 2014) There is a strange tension Anathem about whether progress on 1,000 year–level problems is achievable without significant spending on centralized scientific infrastructure, which the book’s epilogue does not hint at.⁴¹

The brilliance of Stephenson’s novel lies in its exploration of long-term thinking and deep research problems framed in the context of a continuously strained and risk-laden relationship between science and society. These tensions are clearly shaping how science is organized and managed in Anathem, which is in turn shaped by the history and culture perceptions of the avout. While the book is most famous for its reconstruction of Western philosophy, it is also perhaps one of the most interesting simulation tools for imagining different approaches to science policy than the ones implemented today.

NOTES

1. The work for this paper was performed in a personal capacity. Opinions expressed in this paper reflect the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect NASA or the United States Government. I am also grateful for a draft review of this by Jonathan P. Lewis, Michael Bernstein, Ryan Faith and for past collaboration with Tind Shepper Ryen. I am deeply grateful for many thoughtful comments and suggestions by Jay Lloyd that greatly improved the paper.
   
2. I am largely writing for a US federal science policy context, recognizing that there are many similarities and differences across countries.
   
3. Funding from “society” can occur directly through grants, agreements and contracts with federal agencies, or there is a large degree of private sector funding and acquisition, much of which can also indirectly supported by federal tax breaks or investments.
   
4. Such a social contract is often implicit, and rarely formally written out in a formal agreement by representatives of science and society. However, much of the legislation supporting science in the United States is framed by legislation passed after consulting scientific leaders. The research goals of such legislation then get translated down into specific funding calls that describe what work should be done, and that scientists then propose to do.
   
5. There’s a broad range of science policy research that explores facets of these topics. Kitcher 2001 highlights how social processes can shape what is deemed to be scientifically significant or not. Bozeman and Sarewitz 2011 provide a framework for doing case studies on how science leads to societal outcomes. Pirtle 2019 discusses history and challenges that have arisen from efforts to track the benefits of R&D in a specific industrial context. There’s increasingly more research about the role of hype in the rhetoric used to advocate for funding of new projects, (Roßmann 2021) which makes it more challenging to ascertain real benefits.
   
6. Per Guston 2023, “Section 10343 of the act, entitled “Research Ethics,” mandates that NSF engage with the “ethical and societal considerations” of the research it funds. It conveys “the sense of Congress” that “emerging areas of research have potential ethical, social, security and safety implications that might be apparent as early as the basic research stage.… [The incorporation of such considerations] into the research design and review process for Federal awards, may help mitigate potential harms before they happen.”
   
7. One could explore publications in the Journal of Responsible Innovation, IEEE Technology and Society, or work in the Issues in Science and Technology journal for examples of considering societal impact more deeply. For work on achieving greater innovation success in the long term, Research Policy and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management have more resources.
   
8. Gordon 2017 explores long-term changes in US innovation growth and recent efforts at understanding “progress studies” touch on the issues. However, a discussion of the very long term doesn’t occur in much of the science and society literature, such as Guston’s work above. This may be understandable, due to the priority of paving new paths in the here-and-now, but it does reflect opportunities for using science fiction to explore what an ideal future state might be.
   
9. Sarewitz 2007 discusses one set of calls to double the budget of the US National Institutes of Health, but he then provides historical context: in almost all cases the research and development budget of the US government merely increases at the same rate as inflation. NAS 2007 also represents a similar call.
   
10. There is a long-standing tradition of using philosophical thought experiments—such as Plato’s Republic—to envision what an ideal society might look like. John Rawls and Philip Kitcher’s work, especially the latter’s Science, Truth, and Democracy, are in this vein. Building on this tradition, some recent efforts have applied similar thought experiments to science itself, asking what an ideal scientific enterprise should entail and what kind of science ought to be prioritized. These explorations challenge us to rethink the societal role of science and to consider how its goals, methods, and outcomes might better align with public needs and values.
    
11. For this research paper, I will reference the Kindle edition for consistency in page numbers.
    
12. Others have mentioned possible connections between Stephenson’s Anathem and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which looks at a religious monastery as thousands of years go by after the fall of civilization. I’ve not done enough research to know how or to what extent Stephenson viewed that book as an influence – it does not appear in his acknowledgments.
    
13. Asimov’s Foundation is another example of a group of separated scientists who think deeply on their societal impact and receive pushback from broader societal groups.
    
14. Stephenson has made numerous comments about innovation policy in other contexts, emphasizing the need for greater societal focus on innovation. Notably, he participated in a debate in 2010 with Arizona State University President Michael Crow, discussing whether science fiction authors were doing enough to inspire society to tackle pressing challenges. This debate took place shortly after the publication of Anathem. and led to Stephenson partnering in ASU’s Project Hieroglyph project to write science fiction that could inspire a more ambitious future. Stephenson has also served as an advisor to the aerospace company Blue Origin, including during the time when Anathem was likely written. His social connections to influential thinkers such as Danny Hillis and Stuart Brand—both of whom are prominent in Silicon Valley—may have inspired the depiction of the ITA (Information Technology Administrators) in the book.
    
15. The avout are prohibited from having children and from maintaining regular contact with family or loved ones outside the maths. They live under the potential fear that the saecular world might decide to invade. Perhaps these exaggerations reflect some of the views and real-world sacrifices that scientists and engineers have or make, where it’s often seen that a life dedicated to research comes at a cost of family and personal connections, with funding support from the state being difficult but attainable. The avout have to also follow rules that are more mundane, such as being forbidden from drugs that can change the state of the mind, to needing to follow rituals of prayer and community behavior, and more.
    
16. There is also a fascinating discussion about “iconographies”—the study of the ways in which the avout are perceived by those in the outside world. (71) Some observers describe the avout as creators of risks that could run amok, hoarders of hidden secrets, or as silly and irrelevant figures. These perceptions significantly influence the perceived and potential value the avout might bring to society, and the young protagonists are taught to identify how those in the outside world are perceiving them based on these narratives.
    
17. The one exception to this is that a religious zealot, the Warden of Heaven, is portrayed as a disruptive leader, whose political clout is so advanced such that he is the first one to be sent over to meet a major invading threat. (483) A minor spoiler: His comical death in the book (893) takes on further meaning when the subsequent saecular leaders seem to be much more akin to technocratic or military leaders on Earth.
    
18. My colleague Martin Stacey shared with me his reading that the world of Arbre doesn’t appear to have deep inequities, and we may have more insight into the broader politics of the saecular world than one might suppose. I’m uncertain, as we only see very limited glimpses of the world, and the world we see still has dire events, such as smugglers taking people across borders.
    
19. The book briefly teases (without explanation) that there are “pinprick maths” outside the walls of concents, consisting of rooms in the saecular world where an avout sits and tirelessly performs research (168).
    
20. Others interpreted Jad’s longevity as tied to his proximity as a thatcher to protect the nuclear waste on Arbre.
    
21. 469; the writing makes it unclear if it was a dinosaur or an actual dragon.
    
22. While there are occasional advanced technologies, such as a “new matter”-based, highly versatile spacesuit that can operate in space for seemingly weeks, my colleague Ryan Faith noted that most of the technology described in the book seems very familiar to people on Earth. This offers another way in which the book is deliberately an exploration of a “long now.”
    
23. The book hints that climate catastrophes and wars occurred but states that the key details were lost (see the glossary entry on “Terrible Times”). The book states that nuclear waste was stored—and remained potentially reconstituable for use in weapons—in a few of the Millenarian maths, which becomes a minor plot point in the book. The history and rationale for this sequestration is never fully explicated. One might suppose they were kept in the maths to ensure that the waste and weapons could be maintained by experts, and perhaps as a play by the maths to maintain some power over the saecular world?
    
24. The best and most concise summary of the timeline for these sacks is described in a late discussion between Emman and Fraa Erasmus. (933–935) The glossary also provides some definitions.
    
25. Somehow, the Saecular world is assumed to have regulated itself (!) and its use of new matter, though this is not explored.
    
26. A mild spoiler: The “polycosmic” or multiverse-like nature of reality led the Millenarians to develop the ability to tie into multiple timelines of the universe. This becomes pivotal to the final plot resolution, as the Millenarian Fraa Jad helps ensure the success of the protagonist’s mission across many dire challenges.
    
27. Another mild spoiler: The book eventually reveals the existence of the Lineage, a group focused on understanding the nature of reality and how ideal forms may propagate across different strands of a multiverse. The conclusion (934, 942) suggests that the Saecular world had enabled the Lineage to operate both within and without maths, and that there had been a secret agreement that the Lineage and its members in maths would help in times of great need. Fraa Jad was secretly given a key detonation device by the Saeculars (as said by the character Emman, 935) which suggests such a partnership.
    
28. For another discussion on the cost, see 297.
    
29. One particularly fascinating aspect is the continued use of astronomical observation. While the avout lack access to advanced laboratories or experimental tools, they still engage in the study of the cosmos as a way to test and refine their theories. This reliance on celestial phenomena underscores the resourcefulness of the avout and highlights the enduring importance of astronomy as a discipline that requires minimal infrastructure while addressing profound questions about the universe.
    
30. A plot spoiler: Given that the mathic theories about alternate universes is shown to be true when an invading alien spaceship seeks to conquer Arbre, there was deep uncertainty about whether the Arbrean Saecular world and the mathic world could combine forces to stop the threat. The young protagonists and a mix of older avout, including the Millenarian Fraa Jad become part of a last-ditch attempt to board the invading space ark and find a peaceful resolution. They seem to stay continually on the brink of disaster and keep moving forward to finally reach the space station, though the crew members have dreams that some among their number had been killed, including Fraa Jad. Eventually they make it to the alien space ark, board it, and face challenges adapting to the atmosphere. Fraa Jad and the Fraa Erasmus at one point awaken together, and Jad reveals that he is able to extend his mind into multiple branching worlds stretching out from their initial mission. While some crew members had died in some of those scenarios, he was able to seemingly blur those worlds together to keep the crew there alive. He then guides Fraa Erasmus on several sorties, including a visit to meet with the leader of the invading army. Fraa Jad then seemingly resets the timeline, but the invaders themselves have nightmares about Jad’s ability to shape, and they began to deeply fear the Millenarians. The book describes Jad’s abilities as a form of praxis (technology) that is a result of his group’s dedicated research. As such, it is research that is described as having saved the day. See footnote [currently 26] for slightly more information.
    
31. Would such intermingling undermine the ability of the Millenarian maths to have their deep long-term focus? I think likely so, but, as noted elsewhere, it’s hard to imagine what the Millenarian research framing problem really is.
    
32. Indeed, as Jonathan Lewis reminded me while reading this draft, Fraa Erasmus and his team were designing in placeholders for gun mounts into their new Concent of Saunt Orolo, preparing for times hundreds of years in the future when the math may need to defend itself. It raises interesting questions about what a steady state balance between science and society might look like.
    
33. Following up on other spoiler footnotes: after the invasion of humans from alternate versions of Arbre, several of the alien visitors wish to continue to explore into future dimensions, and some from Arbre seek to join them. They hope to explore if the next universe they visit will be sufficiently advanced such that they can gain insight on what caused the events of Anathem to take place. Such an expensive mission is admitted in the book to be a massive undertaking but also potentially one needed for defense against future interdimensional interlopers who might come to attack Arbe. The rationale for the ark mission is thus a mix of cultural desires (to continue exploring the multi-verse), scientific desires, and security/defense desires. 
    
34. I think the epilogue is silent on whether any future restrictions against the maths having powerful scientific and engineering infrastructure would continue. The new site Erasmus and Arsibalt are constructing has a workshop but no seeming scaling for a large scientific manufacturing site or the like.
    
35. Significant debates occurred between Bush and Senator Harley Kilgore about to what extent the political leadership of NSF needed to be appointed by the president. Bush opposed such an approach, but Kilgore won out in getting a politically appointed leader from the president, rather than letting scientists decide.
    
36. While I and others often refer to the avout as scientist monks, highlighting the religious similarities between the avout and real-world religious monks, it should be noted that religious groups exist in Anathem separate from the avout, such as the Christian-seeming Ark of Baz. While the avout’s dedication may perhaps be religious in nature, they exist separate from religious groups, and as such organized religion is effectively excluded from the book’s concluding dual Magisteria.
    
37. Emman also provides some of the clearest dialogue about the historical back-and-forth between the mathic world and the Saecular authorities, which is the basis for my timeline discussion above. He seems like a reliable source for understanding why the Saecular world created the coequal Magisteria.
    
38. Continuing the spoiler footnotes: the resolution of this ‘Cold War’ in Arbre might also not conclude on any short time-horizon, as the lingering threat of additional inter-dimensional visitors might not occur for thousands of years. As for sending of a space ark to explore other cosmi, the book only lightly develops the rationale for doing so in its prose, and it’s not a focus of the protagonists in the epilog who go about setting up a new Math. Perhaps it is akin to the world taking on the most ambitious possible scientific project, transcending a military context, though it is seemingly  still undertaken in the context of knowing whether other cosmi might pose a threat to Arbre.
    
39. The decision to partner on exploring a new ark to the multiverse is perhaps fairly similar to this vision for space exploration. This also oddly maps with the series finale of the Star Trek: Lower Decks TV show in 2024, which has a group of Starfleet move from exploring new parts of our universe to explore alternative ones.
    
40. The book implicitly focuses on physics—and a deep focus on its 1,000-year problems—to the partial exclusion of other areas of science such as biology or the social sciences. It would be interesting to imagine what the plot of the book might be if another area of science took to the fore. There are also interesting questions about how knowledge and technology get exchanged at the 1/10/100/1,000-year exchange periods of the maths, which the book does not detail.
    
41. The plan to build a space ark and continue to find more advanced realms may bely that thought. That would be a massive infrastructure project without parallel in our world.

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Dr. Zachary Pirtle is a researcher, engineer, and policy entrepreneur. He works on exploration while also publishing research on innovation policy and engineering ethics. He has several publications tied to his research interest on how science fiction can inform engineering policy. He earned his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from George Washington University, and earned his B.A in Philosophy, B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Arizona State University. While at ASU he did research with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, a leader in research on science fiction and policy studies. Previously, he studied in Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar (2008); and served as a Mirzayan Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering (2009). His opinions reflect his own views and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer. All of his publications are listed on google scholar.

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