Isaac Asimov: Foundation's Edge (1982)

Edition: Granada, 1984 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1132

Foundation's Edge was the first science fiction novel Asimov had written for a decade, most of which he had spent concentrating on non-fiction. It had a mixed reception, composed on the one hand of the desire to extend a welcome to an old friend long absent (which brought it the Hugo award for 1983), and on the other of the feeling that it was a sequel which failed to live up to the classic Foundation trilogy which it follows.

Reading Foundation's Edge now, after the fuss has died down, and doing so just after revisiting the original trilogy, I am more inclined to the former view, changing my mind after first acquaintance twenty years ago. This is because the earlier books have now come to seem dated, like a lot of Asimov's early fiction.

Foundation's Edge is set about halfway between the creation of the Foundation and its predicted establishment of a new empire a thousand years after the fall of the old one. (This little piece of chronology makes it clear just how large a scope Asimov had left himself for a sequel.) The Mule is long defeated, and the Second Foundation has returned to obscurity, convincing the Foundation that it too has been destroyed. Seldon's plan is back on course - and this eventually provokes suspicion in both Foundations; after so great a disruption as the reign of the Mule, how can centuries old predictions suddenly become minutely valid once again? This prompts both Foundations to begin searching for whoever or whatever has caused this, and this search is what Foundation's Edge is about.

Asimov's science fiction revolves around two great ideas: the laws of robotics and the science of psychohistory. In practice, the main interest of the plots he devises using these ideas is the ways he finds to circumvent their limitations - almost all the robot stories are about attempts to bend or break the laws of robotics, and the Foundation stories are about applying the laws of psychohistory to small numbers of individuals (because novels need to have personalities in them), something explicitly forbidden by the statistics on which the rules are supposedly based. (Alternatively, he allows an individual like the Mule to overturn the predictions, using precisely the justification that it is impossible to apply psychohistory to the actions of individuals.) One of the biggest problems that the original trilogy has, it now sdeems to me, is that the tension this produces is not fully integrated into the plot; in Foundation's Edge, it is handled much more expertly, as befits a writer with thirty years' more experience.

Asimov's characterisation is generally pretty perfunctory (the most obvious exceptions being Elijah Baley and the members of the Black Widowers), but here it is rather better than usual, the personalities of those involved playing an important part in the way that the plot is resolved.

The greater maturity of the writing should ensure that Foundation's Edge dates more slowly than its predecessors (though they, of course, first appeared over four decades ago). However, it is still the idea behind the series as a whole which is of central interest, much more so than the merits of the individual novels. The sweep of galactic history and the interest of psychohistory will probably mean that the original trilogy continues to be read for some time yet.

Isaac Asimov: The Stars Like Dust (1955)

Edition: Panther, 1958
Review number: 1114

In retrospect, The Stars Like Dust is one of Asimov's most disappointing and dated science fiction novels. I'm not sure, reading it now, whether or not it was originally explicitly aimed at a young adult audience (the one that many people assume still that all science fiction is written for), but it certainly doesn't really have enough to offer to impress a reader who is not a novice reader of the genre.

The Horsehead Nebula region of the galaxy was divided into a large number of smallish aristocratic nations, until they were all suddenly overrun by the banally named Tyranni about a generation before the story is set. The old royal families have been left in place in a ceremonial role; the hero of The Stars Like Dust is the son and heir of the titular ruler of one of these planets. Biron Farrill is studying on Earth - largely ruined in an ancient nuclear war - when his father dies, executed for treason by the Tyranni. An apparent attempt on his own life leads him to flee back to the Horsehead Nebula, to the palace of the Hinriads on the planet of Rhodia. A series of adventures follow, which even at the time must have seemed derivative (they're a poor imitation of A.E. van Vogt or E.E. "Doc" Smith), ending with a stupendous discovery which should mark the end of the Tyranni.

This stupendous discovery is the main problem with The Stars Like Dust, at least for a non-American. It turns out that this is the long-lost American Declaration of Independence, a document whose explosive power is supposed to doom tyrants. It shows, perhaps, a touchingly naive faith in the power of the admittedly inspiring words about freedom and independence (Asimov's background as a first generation immigrant in the thirties makes the alternative possibility, cynical manipulation of the reader, unlikely.) But it can hardly be argued that the example of the US constitution has made the Earth free of dictators, and even the US cannot be considered the epitome of freedom and equality. (Rodney King can't have thought so, in his final moments.) To use the discovery as the climax of the novel is not only a major weakness, it is the sort of twist which smacks of the inexperienced writer at this length - it is typical of the genre's short stories.

Other problems with The Stars Like Dust include the frankly unbelieveable plot - the base of a rebellion which is being gradually stocked up with men and weapons would be hard to hide economically, let alone be kept a secret by the thousands of people involved. The various conspiracies and plots which fill the book are not very convincing, and the people involved have inconsistent characters - to much insight in some areas, not enough in others. There is a romance subplot, but that is based on exactly the kind of portrayal of a female character that is one of the commonest criticisms of the science fiction genre ("it's written by and for geeks who have no idea what women are like").

Roger MacBride Allen: Isaac Asimov's Caliban (1992)

Edition: Orion, 1993 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1091

In recent years, this kind of "collaboration", billed on the cover of Caliban as "unique", has become quite common. Basically, someone who is a relative newcomer as a writer (and almost anyone would have fallen into this category when compared to Asimov in the early nineties; Allen was a reasonably well established author) takes a classic piece of science fiction and writes a new novel or series based on it and under the supervision of the original author. The results are frequently surprisingly good; writers other than Asimov who have allowed their work to be used in this fashion include Anne McCaffrey. The benefit of course is that these novels have a ready-made appeal to fans of the original, and many authors of successful novels have a problem fulfilling the demands of their fans and publishers for more of the same. (They frequently want to move on to something related to current interests - and develop as writers.) Also, the younger writer may well have ideas which put a science fiction classic in a new light.

This is indeed what Allen has done with Asimov's robot stories, even though you might be forgiven for thinking that all the possible variations on stories based on the famous three laws of robotics have already been written. In fact, the scenario for this novel and its successors (it is the first of a trilogy) seems to tacitly agree with this, being concerned as it is with the development of a new set of laws to replace those which have been the basis of robot design for centuries. As in Robots of Dawn, the plot of Caliban is a mystery where a murder attempt has proved possible in a situation where the presence of robots should have made it impossible. The victim in this case survives the attack, but has no memory of it as she recovers. Her position as a developer of New Law robots, as one involved with a controversial terraforming project and the freeing of an experimental robot with no law constraints at all (enabling him to harm people and disobey orders) complicate matters. Allen's investigator, sheriff Alvar Kresh of the city of Hades on the Spacer planet of Inferno (marginally terraformed, as its name suggests), is made sufficiently an outsider by his job and his intelligence (the average citizen of Hades coming across as pretty obtuse) that he is in a similar position to Asimov's central character Elijah Baley. Baley works better as a character, because in his person he is a focus for the tension between Spacer and Earth human, and Allen has to import this to Inferno. (He does this by making the terraforming project run by Settlers, descendants of Earth people who began colonising space again after the Spacer embargo on this was lifted after Robots of Dawn.)

The major flaw in Caliban for me is the way that the research into replacing the Three Laws is described. It is said that the laws are impressed into the design of positronic brains at a fundamental level, with the result that new laws require the development of new hardware, the gravitronic brain. This is stressed throughout, but seems extremely unlikely to me, being based on identifying hardware and software in a way which has never been a big part of the design of the electronic computer. (It may come from ideas in some of Asimov's early stories, where computer Multivac is described in mechanical terms.) Even if the laws were partly encoded in hardware, it surely wouldn't be difficult to redesign the positronic brain either to move this encoding to software (as the most difficult part of getting a computer to follow the laws would be to provide sufficiently usable definitions of concepts such as "human", "harm" and so on) or to redesign the hardware to cope (working to redefine things in a familiar environment being far easier than at the same time having to work in a completely new background). Even the way that conflicts between the laws cause the robots to freeze up makes the whole setup seem more like software than hardware.

Since this part of the background is quite fundamental to the plot, it does have an effect on my willingness to accept Caliban (those who do not work as computer programmers may be happier with it). Ignoring the problem leaves a neat little detective story with an well realised if naturally not particularly original background. Best suited to its target audience of the fans of Asimov's robot stories (of which there are many), Caliban would nevertheless have something to offer a more casual reader.

Isaac Asimov: Pebble in the Sky (1950)

Edition: Grafton, 1986
Review number: 638

In 1949 when he was writing his first novel, Isaac Asimov had already had some success with published short stories. Pebble in the Sky shows both experience as a writer and inexperience in the longer form, as it tends to jump around rather too much for a continuous narrative to emerge. The style is basically fully developed, and (in his fictional writing) did not change a great deal over the next forty years.

In terms of the rest of Asimov's fiction, Pebble in the Sky is set in the galaxy ruled by the Galactic Empire based on Trantor whose downfall is the starting point of the Foundation trilogy. Its central character is an archaeologist, who sets out to prove the crackpot theory that Earth is the original home of mankind (the orthodox position is a form of convergent evolution). Earth is a galactic backwater, largely radioactive, ruled by a religious cult in uneasy co-existence with the Galactic authorities, a portrayal clearly based on the position of Judea in the first century Roman Empire. Any question of human origins and the source of the radioactivity is going to conflict with this cult, causing the trip to have major political repercussions.

This in itself would make an interesting story, but Asimov weakens it with his second major element. On twentieth century Earth a physics experiment goes wrong spectacularly, catapulting an unsuspecting passerby into the future. No explanation is given for what happens (which is unlike Asimov), and the presence of the time traveller is in the end used rather ineptly, as a treatment given to him to increase the learning capacity of his mind so that he can pick up the language turns him into a kind of superman. The whole of this strand of the plot is rather like a stereotype of a Marvel comic, and the original physics experiment is strikingly similar to that which kicks off E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark.

It is interesting that his big success of the next few years, the Foundation trilogy, is made up of shorter, pre-published elements. If I remember the chronology of Asimov's novels correctly, it was some years before Asimov wrote another novel conceived as a whole, the SF whodunit Caves of Steel.