Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Pt. 2
“Bridle and Saddle”
Greetings and salutations! In this issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter, we’ll be circling back on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series for part two on my read through thereof. The first installment is here.
As a reminder, I’m looking at the series in its original magazine publication in Astounding Science Fiction from 1942 through 1950 which vary slightly from the later trilogy of fixup novels published between 1951 and 1953. Doing it this way justifies breaking up reading the series over many months rather than doing it all in one go. Let me explain why.
Take the story under review, “Bridle and Saddle,” first published in the June 1942 issue of Astounding and later adapted into chapter 3 of the 1951 novel Foundation. Most readers today expect to read the first few chapters of a novel in one sitting. But in 1942, the installments in this series were self-contained short stories instead of chapters in a novel. This one was published a month after the previous installment and it would be two more months till the next installment was published. Notably in the early 40s, the science fiction book market didn’t exist yet, so this was originally going to be the definitive way to read them.
I think spreading it out like this will probably prove to make sense for reading Foundation because it’s an epochal series—the different episodes happen decades or more apart. As a refresher, the premise of the series is that a powerful psychologist or psychohistorian Hari Seldon used Promethean social science to predict a coming galactic dark age. Through careful planning and calculation he and his comrades foresaw a narrow path by which to foreshorten this dark age to a mere millennium by establishing two scientific and cultural foundations on opposite ends of the galaxy. Important to the plan was limiting the foundations’ knowledge and resources in such a way as to circumscribe their actions during moments of crisis. In essence, if things are going right for the putative good guys in this series, the dead hand of Seldon is guiding everything.
“Bridle and Saddle,” like “Foundation” before it, deals with the Foundation on the sparsely populated and isolated planet Terminus which is surrounded by four interstellar barbarian kingdoms. This story raises questions about the credibility of the series’ underlying premise including with the way information flows within its fictional world. Plausibility in such matters are less of a problem than the story’s underlying philosophy. It betrays a profound disrespect for people.
As with “Foundation,” the main protagonist is Salvor Hardin, the Mayor of Terminus who in most ways acts like the long dead Seldon’s avatar among the living. It’s at least a few decades since the last story and he’s still mayor. “Bridle and Saddle” quickly deals with the cliffhanger left at the end of “Foundation.”
At the end of “Foundation,” Anacreon, the foremost of the neighboring barbarian kingdoms, was coming to set up a military base on Terminus. Hardin had just overthrown the ancien regime of scholars on Terminus and a time-locked recording of Seldon assured him there was some way to rout the barbarians with what was at hand but, of course, Seldon’s electronic ghost wasn’t going to say what it was. In a conversation with some political upstarts on Terminus near the beginning of “Bridle and Saddle,” Hardin recalls how he played the four kingdoms against each other, conspiring with the other three to have them threaten war against Anacreon if it didn’t withdraw its forces from Terminus.
Apparently, Seldon had foreseen this and our takeaway is to be that it was the only thing Hardin could have done under the circumstances. My problem with this explanation is that it seems to involve the individual creativity of one politician more than it does any kind of social trend. Indeed, the text itself states that Seldon couldn’t predict the psychology of individuals far out and that he dealt in the psychology of mobs, and blind mobs at that.
And yet this story is all about how small groups of elites can make history by manipulating large groups of people through controlling their access to good information and feeding them a steady diet of disinformation. The climax of this story features a 62 year old Hardin individually taking upon himself to lead black ops deep inside Anacreon on the occasion of the coming of age of its soon to be 16 year old king. The main feature of this is directing a fifth column of pseudoscientific priests who have been duped into a religion invented by Hardin et al. to bolster the Foundation’s political power.
These priests, who control, e.g., all the atomic power in Anacreon’s star systems, are of barbarian origin but are educated on Terminus. They are taught to literally believe Seldon was a prophet of something called the Galactic Spirit and that to go against his teachings endangers their souls. They are only empirically trained in how to operate technology and the underlying principles are carefully withheld from them. They are made to understand that the technology operates basically by magic.
This is all very clever in the worst way and it seems implausible that Seldon could have circumscribed the Foundation’s direction so that someone would have to hatch the scheme of creating a new religion from whole cloth. I was also left questioning how the government of Terminus prevents the bare fact that it totally made up a religion from spreading to the populace of the barbarian kingdoms.
Consider that Terminus is an ostensibly democratic polity in which the legislature openly discusses matters of foreign policy. Consider further that there is at least one newspaper on Terminus and that commercial travel for individuals exists between Terminus and Anacreon. Consider also that there is a large body of men from the barbarian kingdoms on Terminus training to be priests. The story congeals in part because it doesn’t take these fictional data points together.
The focus on scientific elites and the story’s implicit belief that it is good for them to restrict information and even spread disinformation lends itself to anti-democratic sentiments, classism, and downright misanthropy. Sadly these attitudes aren’t unique in the history of science fiction fandom. Science fiction readers aren’t actually smarter and better than anybody, just weirder and perhaps more interesting especially to other science fiction readers.
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