Empires fall, civilizations burn,
but somewhere out on the periphery,
the light of science is still lit.
(theme music)
It's 1941,
most of the world is at war,
Asimov is working at the Philadelphia dock yards.
He hasn't had much time to work on his stories, but he has been reading.
In fact, he's been reading one of the most seminal works
of modern history,
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He has a meeting with Campbell today.
He knows Campbell is going to want a story idea,
and he's got nothing.
Then, as he's walking to the astounding stories office, it hits him.
Why don't we just do Decline and Fall
IN SPACE?
But he wanted to do it a little different.
He wanted to explore how to lessen the impact of the fall.
He wanted to discuss
what might of happened if there had been a conscious effort
to preserve knowledge in the last days of the empire,
before the empire faded away.
So, he began to write the Encyclopedists,
a story about a world on the far edge of the imperium
whose only task is to collate all human knowledge
so the post-empire dark age might not be so dark.
But in doing so, in rapid succession,
he gave us some of the most important and most
frequently borrowed ideas in science fiction.
First is the space empire itself.
No one had really built a fully-realized
feudal empire in space before. Why would they?
In many ways, the concept makes no sense.
In the real world, the more complex human civilizations became,
the more we found that rule by a single individual, was simply too inefficient to sustain.
But who cares about the real world when the idea is so enticing?
What if we took all those medieval romances,
and those legends of the last day of Rome,
but gave them technology beyond our wildest dreams?
What happens when the medieval understanding with its
emphasis on hierarchy and its etiquette, is tasked with
managing whole worlds, rather than simple rural estates?
This idea of space empire,
combines the most romantic notions from the past
with some of the most exciting possibilities in science fiction,
and it's a concept sci-fi will draw upon time and time again.
But that wasn't Asimov's only innovation,
he also came up with Psycho history.
This idea that, with an advanced enough understanding
of mathematics, psychology, and sociology,
the broad strokes of the future could be predicted;
which becomes the impetus for the Foundation.
But this psycho history effectively becomes a form of
pre-science, introducing the question of fate and free will
into science fiction in a, truly, science fictiony way.
Because where other forms of literature have debated
whether all of our actions are pre-ordained
or if we have choice, only science fiction gets to
play around with the consequences of knowing for sure.
And while the foundation series simply seems to take the idea of
pre-ordained actions as things which are necessary and
good, later books, like Dune, will address
the question of whether actually knowing the future
might be a curse in a way we haven't seen since the midst of the Greeks.
But for a galactic empire to form,
and for science as advanced as psycho history to be established,
he needed to set his novel not just in the future,
but in far, far future,
50,000 years from today.
And while other science fiction had been set in the far future,
Asimov was the first to try to make it real.
Rather than "50 THOUSAND YEARS IN THE FUTURE"
acting as a hand wave for everything being different than it is today,
Asimov attempted to give his future some sense of history.
This really cemented an idea that hadn't been too prevalent in sci-fi up to this point.
The idea that world building wasn't just about interesting aliens and strange landscapes,
but about giving the reader at least a little bit of a sense of how we got there.
How the world they knew,
could possibly become the fantastic place these sprawling
futures sometimes described.
But he uses this history to play a trick on his audience.
He sets them up to believe that his story
is going to be about a group of encyclopedists
on a planet dedicated to preserving human knowledge.
That their goal is to catalog and store
all of humanity's ideas in order to prevent a
29,000-year dark age. But coming out of
a 50's mindset, he's actually
got very different ideas.
Dropping the dark age from 30,000 years, down to a thousand,
isn't actually about the preservation of knowledge,
but the spread of it through religion and the reestablishment of commerce.
Interestingly though, since Asimov
was an atheist, he gave us the religion of science.
Here is the origin of the tech-priest,
the figure who reveres technology without understanding it,
knowing only the rites and rituals to repair it
or make it operate.
And this religion of science, in these books, serves as both a critique of religion
and those who make no attempt
to actually understand the technology they use.
So,
Foundation,
that idea Asimov had on the way to the office
would inject into sci-fi
space empires, tech priests, and pre-science.
It would become the only book series to ever win the Hugo award for best all time series,
beating out Lord of the Rings.
It inspired people from noble prize winning economists, to some of the seminal thinkers behind
positive psychology. From a former speaker of the house,
to, well,
Elon Musk.
It influenced work ranging from Star Wars to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
And I personally can't see it not
having some impact on Frank Herbert when he was penning Dune.
You know, what with the whole feudal space empires,
discussion of pre-science,
and religion-created-for-a-purpose thing it had going on.
Today, foundation may seem dated with characters
that are a little flat and language that's so clearly from 1940's Earth,
that it seems a little out of place in the far future.
But it will probably always remain one of the works
that any true student of science fiction must read
because of its Titanic influence on everything that came after.
So that's it for Asimov, the great idea man of the Golden age.
Join us next time for Robert Heinlein,
one of the most controversial figures in sci-fi.
We'll see you then.
(music)