Origins of Ariel

TPTT: fan-fiction set in the Ekcolir Reality.

What is the backstory and origins of the linked science fiction stories "Terminus Planet" and "Time of Theurgency"? Here in 2020, I'm celebrating the stories of Isaac Asimov, so it should surprise nobody that Asimov is a character in these stories. In order to facilitate discussion, I'm going to introduce some horrific jargon and call these two tales in combination "TPTT".
 
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The central character of TPTT is Ariel Adler. In the Ekcolir Reality, Ariel's life becomes linked to that of Asimov. Here in this blog post, I'll explain how Ariel originated as a character. It started with two blog posts that I wrote last month:

1) Recently, the Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens traveled back through time to the 1950s and I had a chance to think about my initial reaction {mind blown} to the film Forbidden Planet and its depiction of the advanced technology of the alien Krell.

Terminus: located at the edge of the
galaxy, how does it become the most
important planet of the Galactic Empire?

2) Last month, I also allowed myself to contemplate the possibility that there will soon be a television show based on Asimov's Foundation saga.

With those two ideas simultaneously swirling in my mind, I found myself asking some amusing questions, starting with: what if a Foundation movie had been made back in the early 1950s?

As a young man, Asimov was performing his own conceptual juggling when he decided to write a science fiction story about a Galactic Empire with 25,000,000 human-colonized planets. Having read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he decided to create a story about the collapse of a vast Galactic Empire. That decision eventually led to a series of Foundation stories that he sold to pulp Sci Fi magazine editor John Campbell.

Planetary gods.
image source

Because Asimov could not accept Campbell's idea that humans must be naturally superior to all aliens, he did not include any aliens in the Foundation saga.
 
Terminus Planet
There was a Roman god called Terminus. Here is a line from Gibbon's book: "It was an ancient tradition, that when the Capitol was founded by one of the Roman kings, the god Terminus (who presided over boundaries) alone refused to yield his place to Jupiter himself."

In Asimov's Foundation saga, the planet Terminus becomes the home world of the First Foundation. The first people to live on Terminus are part of a project aimed at preserving all human knowledge and archiving it in advanced of the anticipated collapse of the Empire and subsequent dark age.

agent from Tar'tron

Encyclopedia Galactica
Terminus was selected as the site of the Encyclopedia Foundation because it was a world located far from the heart of the Empire, a place where physical scientists could begin a new renaissance of scientific advancement after the fall of the old, stagnant Galactic Empire.

A Second Foundation was also established which had its headquarters on the planet Trantor, located in the galactic core. Previously, I've imagined that Trantor was known as Tar'tron in other Realities besides the Foundation Reality.

The ancient Romans had the quaint idea that all roads led the the temple of Terminus in Rome. Similarly, Asimov made it central to his Foundation saga that Trantor was at "Star's End". Asimov imagined a type of psychohistorical symmetry linking Terminus to Trantor by which the last planet settled by humans (Terminus) would inevitably become the Capitol of a new galactic empire.

Map of some Roman provinces including Asia.
Smyrna was an important Roman era city
on the west coast of Asia.

Some fans of Foundation have suggested that Asimov named the worlds of his Four Kingdoms after cities in the Roman Empire (such as Smyrno = Smyrna).

I like to imagine that when he was creating his stories about the early years of human settlement of Terminus and the struggle of the Foundation to survive during times of anarchy, Asimov must have been imagining plot elements by thinking in analogy to a more peripheral part of the ancient Roman world than Asia.

Terminus was close to the Province of Anacreon, far out in the galactic periphery. Anacreon Province splintered into the Four Kingdoms after the Galactic Empire went into decline.

The four Kingdoms of Ireland.

By ancient tradition, some have divided Ireland into four parts, representing four kingdoms. I'm more interested in the idea that during the peak of the Roman Empire, Romans in England traded with people living in eastern Ireland. In my imagination, west-central Ireland was relatively unaffected by the Romanizing influences of this trade. I like the romantic idea that monks in Ireland helped preserve some ancient knowledge from Roman times. So, I prefer to model the Province of Anacreon on Ireland.

How I imagine Terminus, near
Anacreon, at the edge of the galaxy,
just beyond the border of the Empire.

Sadly, Asimov did not provide his readers with a map of his Galactic Empire showing the boundaries of Province of Anacreon, the peripheral province closest to the planet Terminus. 

In the map for Anacreon Province shown here, I imagine that the planet Terminus, just a short distance beyond the outer border of the Empire, was relatively close to the Kingdom of Anacreaon in the time of Salvor Hardin.

In my imagination, the Anacreon province was settled because it is a remnant of a dwarf galaxy that collided with our galaxy. Relatively rich in stars but far from the galactic core, Anacreon province was one of the last parts of our galaxy to be settled by human explorers.

What if?

image source

What if the analogue of Isaac Asimov in the Ekcolir Reality had a long and successful career as a scientist? For "Terminus Planet" and TPTT, I imagine that Asimov wrote a few science fiction stories and was fairly well known for his series of linked Foundation stories that were written during the 1940s. However, that version of Asimov did not publish any robot stories in the 1940s. Then, in the early 1950s, a trilogy of science fiction films was made about Asimov's Galactic Empire.

The Origin of Ariel
Who might have been properly motivated to make the three movies? I imagine that Ariel was the Ekcolir Reality analogue of Allen Adler while Marcia was the Ekcolir Reality analogue of Martin Greenberg.

image source

In our Reality, Allen Adler helped write Forbidden Planet. For TPTT, I imagine that Ariel Adler wrote most of text for the screenplays of the Foundation trilogy.

In our Reality, Allen had a connection to New York University. In the Ekcolir Reality, New York was founded in Virginia, but it also had its own version of New York University and that is where Ariel met fellow students Marcia Greenberg and Isaac Asimov.

In our Reality, Martin Greenberg was a founder of Gnome Press, the first company to publish Asimov's Foundation stories in book format. In the Ekcolir Reality, Marcia established a company called Gnome Films and recruited her old school friend, Ariel, to adapt Asimov's Foundation stories to film format.

Writing about the Bimanoid Interface
in the Ekcolir Reality.

I've long imagined that in the Ekcolir Reality, the early days of the science fiction genre were dominated by female authors. In fact, the culture of New England was distinctly matriarchal in the Ekcolir Reality. In order to populate the Ekcolir Reality with imaginary authors, I often invent female analogues of male science fiction writers and that is exactly how Ariel Adler came into existence.

Space Aliens
Since I never had to deal with an intellectual bully like Campbell, I've never shied away from including aliens in my fan-fiction stories that are set in the Foundation Fictional Universe.

View towards our galaxy
from the dwarf galaxy of the fain.
source

In my case, this year I've been inserting stories about the alien fain into my own Exode Saga. I imagine that the fain home world was in another dwarf galaxy some distance even further out from the Galactic Core than the Province of Anacreon. However, when the fain began to have contact with humans, it was natural that they visit worlds in the galactic periphery closest to their own home planet. Terminus was such a world.

The fain lurk in the background of TPTT, but Ariel has always had "visions" of the fain and faith in the idea that they might provide a counter-balance to the alien Fru'wu. In TPTT, there are fain-human hybrids secretly working on Earth to mitagate some of the problems caused by advanced Fru'wu technology.

Theurgency

Grean the Kac'hin

Yes, I made up the word "theurgency", but think about combining the meanings of "theurgy" and "urgency". Back in the early 1970s, I fell in love with the idea that humans living in pre-technological societies might have been tempted to view space aliens as gods. In TPTT, 20th century Earth is being watched over by aliens who are rather desperately trying to find a stable path to the future for Humanity.

In TPTT, during her entire life, Ariel has been provided with "memories" of her future life by her replicoid. When a copy of Ariel is teleported into the Hierion Domain, she does not assume that Grean the Kac'hin is some kind of god. However, through her access to advanced Huaoshy technology, Grean can travel through time and View possible alternative futures. Thus, from the perspective of some Earthlings, Grean does have seemingly god-like powers and she's in the business of using the tricks of time travel to alter events on Earth.

Dani

1939  A copy of Ariel is taken into the Hierion Domain where she becomes the partner of Deomede the Ek'col. This newly created copy of Ariel adopts the name Relda and helps prepare one particular fain-human hybrid for her mission on Earth: Gertrude Blugerman.

1972  In an act of devine alien intervention, Grean also deploys Relda and Deomede as her agents on Earth in the year 1972. They act to win financial support for a new Foundation for Science Fiction.

About this time, the on-going neuroscience research in Asimov's laboratory is getting close to the discovery that femtobot endosymbionts reside inside humans. How will this discovery change how Earthlings interact with aliens?

Petra Nicholls and Gina Hay.

A follow-on story for TPTT shows what happens when Petra and Sven, working in Asimov's neuroscience research lab, discover how to modulate the activity of the femtobot endosymbiont inside Petra's brain.

Mind Clone Network
With Gina on Earth as part of a mind clone network linking Relda to Ariel, it becomes easier for the Writers Block to send stories to the writers on Earth who are given financial support by the Foundation for Science Fiction. I'm thinking that when Asimov's research team discovers the existence of femtobot endosymbionts, that might lead to a practical application of what I previously called the "Clarke-Brunner Effect".

collaboration with the Witers Block

However, the "Clarke-Brunner Effect" is dangerous technology when first made available on Earth in the Ekcolir Reality. I'm imagining that positronic robots such as Dani must carefully control how the "Clarke-Brunner Effect" is used. I'm thinking that the researchers in Asimov's laboratory will learn how to detect the rare individuals who are consciously aware of how their replicoids modify their memories.

In the Ekcolir Reality;
a story from the Writers Block.
In the Final Reality.

After meeting Asimov, Petra Nicholls becomes a test subject in his lab and she is able to develop a type of two-way telepathic communication with the analogue of Asimov who works at the Writers Block. In this way, Petra can collaborate with the analogue of Isaac Asimov who was brought into the Ekcolir Reality from the Asimov Reality.

The other part of TPTT remaining to be expanded upon is how the alien fain first make contact with humans in the Foundation Reality, in the time of Salvor Hardin.

Related Reading: an alternate Asimov

Next: the Foundation Reality Simulator

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