Conspirational Cold War

ISAAC ASIMOV — FOUNDATION, 1951 — FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE, 1952 — SECOND FOUNDATION, 1953

In many ways as an action science-fiction trilogy, it is very interesting and fascinating. It reads like sweet lemonade though it contains no emotions at all, no feelings, no real love, no nothing humane. It is the most dehumanized science-fiction I know and at this level, it competes with Lafayette Ronald Hubbard who is by far oriented on more warlike situations, machines or robots fostering substitutes, or mechanical soldiers and torturers having no taste or distaste for blood and thus, are able to cut a prisoner into small cubes for aperitifs. Asimov is definitely more human but in no way humanistic or humane. He is a cold frozen vision of a future that will never ever be able to even be born. With this limitation in mind, you can get into it and enjoy the developments, the U-turn dramas, and the Z-slithering-slaloming direct non-straight lines of intrigue and plot. I will give a global comment now on the project of these three novels.

The three novels came out in the USA in the early 1950s. The author is a refugee in the USA who is both Jewish and Russian by origin. He has some education and thus can lure us into some sciences that he gathers and merges under the title of psychohistory. History is following a line that is absolutely unchangeable though we do not know who or what initiated it — except maybe the Big Bang — but any attempt from one individual, one particular group of people, or one specific country to disrupt this line will be countered and defeated to go back to the line itself. He wants us to believe it is the invention of one particular scientist (who was the psychologist who invented psychohistory), specifically Hari Seldon. The general idea — though it is never made explicit, just asserted — is that we consider the masses of people in the world, and only, absolutely only, these people, as one unique and sole mass to be acknowledged (this is becoming circular like Hitler in Munich). If we reduce them all to one mass of people that have the mass psychology that goes along with this massive blended and chipped existence, then there is no choice, no detour, no deviation, no hole in the hedge, not even a rabbit hole, or even a wormhole. We are in one galaxy and that galaxy is entirely…