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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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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