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Apr 28, 2022

The Men Who Make Science

Figure 0.
interior art for "Kid Anderson"
This is the second of two blog posts about Groff Conklin's anthology called Great Science Fiction by Scientists. In my previous blog post, I discussed 8 of the stories and I comment on the remaining 8 stories, below. The marketing blurb on the front cover of Conklin's book proclaimed: "Imaginative tales by the men who make science." However, some of the assembled story writers such as Miles Breuer never worked as scientists. Maybe in an alternate Reality such as the Ekcolir Reality there were scientifically-trained female writers at the dawn of the science fiction genre and maybe there was another version of this anthology that featured some female scientists.

In the Ekcolir Reality
original cover by Leo Morey
 Story number 9. "The Gostak and the Doshes" by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. Who needs doshes when we have science fiction? Just as some people call Gulliver's Travels science fiction, "The Gostak and the Doshes" was sold to -and published in- the first science fiction magazine. However, in my opinion, merely sprinkling words like "relativity", "dimension" and "Einstein" in your social satire story does not make it a science fiction story. 

Figure 1. Fantasy Travel; interior art by Leo Morey
Breuer has a point to make in "The Gostak and the Doshes", a point that Jack Vance made eloquently: "If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind." (source: The Face).

Breuer depicts a senseless war that is caused by a meaningless political slogan. The slogan is repeated with religious devotion by the people of one nation, who rally around their shared fantasy and are ready to die in its defense. Breuer also suggests that scientists can be immune to such nonsense because they actually care what words mean.

cover art by Howard V. Brown

Breuer was from a Czech background and published articles in Czech-language newspapers. I suspect that Breuer carefully followed events in Europe, particularly the political situation in 1920s Czechoslovakia

When the Nazi propagandist Goebbels was elected in 1928, Breuer was probably appalled. "Whether it was a matter of simplification, constant repetition of memorable slogans, or concentration of propaganda materials in regular campaigns, the principles of mass advertising could easily be applied to political propaganda." (source)

interior art by Elliott Dold, Jr.
 10. "A Martian Adventure" (1937) by Willy Ley. Ley left Germany in 1935, having studied math and science, but as was the case for Breuer, Ley was not a scientist. Ley became well-known as a popularizer of rocketry and space travel and published only a few fictional stories. 

"A Martian Adventure" begins on the surface of Mars in 1978 and Ley asks his readers to pretend that people can breath the atmosphere of Mars and human colonists on Mars must contend with the remaining dominant natives of Mars: giant centipede-like creatures (see the image to the right). In Ley's fictional Mars, there were other Martian natives who built cities a million years in the past, but they went extinct before humans arrived.

The professor, Dan and Nadya. Hot, but still fully clothed. 😞 Interior art by Elliott Dold, Jr.

interior art for "At the Perihelion"
"A Martian Adventure" was originally published as "At the Perihelion". After a bad ending to his relationship with a girl friend, Dan ends up on Mars, digging up ancient Martian jewelry and fighting off dangerous centipedes. Then Dan gets caught up in a Russian project aimed at exterminating all of the centipedes. Dan becomes friends with a Russian professor and his daughter, Nadya. After an armed struggle for control of the Russian colony an Mars, Nadya and her father and Dan leave Mars and head for Earth. Dan pilots a spaceship back to Earth using a trajectory that takes them dangerously close to the Sun. They survive the high temperatures during perihelion by taking a drug that allows them to sleep through the worst of the heat. Dan and Nadya live happily ever after.

In the Ekcolir Reality
cover art by Vincent Di Fate
While "The Gostak and the Doshes" featured fantasy travel to an alternate universe (see Figure 1, above), "A Martian Adventure" gets into some details of orbits and space travel trajectories that only an astronaut could love. Jason felt that "A Martian Adventure" was disappointing, but I think it was pretty good for a planetary romance. Sadly, when the story was published in 1937, readers did not get racy images of the naked and sweaty Nadya during the heat of perihelion. 😞

 11.  "The Neutrino Bomb" (1961) by Ralph S. Cooper (PhD in physics). Cooper worked on nuclear propulsion systems for spacecraft at Los Alamos. The "story" is mercifully brief and it is a kind of spoof article that came in the middle of efforts to put controls on the testing of nuclear weapons. The "story" mentions neutrons, and a neutron bomb had been suggested in 1958.

cover art by Karl Stephan
 12. "The Mother of Necessity" (1955) by Chad Oliver. While reading "A Martian Adventure", I hoped there might be some interesting alien archeology, but Ley only provided some casual tomb robbing and readers learn little about the long-gone Martian society. Oliver was Symmes Chadwick Oliver and apparently he had a career as an anthropologist, but most websites that mention him (such as this one) are concerned with his science fiction stories.

Oliver's Future. "The Mother of Necessity" deals with an imaginary society of the future. It begins in 2062, when it has become common for communities to select their own social systems. There are designers like George Sage who invent interesting new social systems. One rainy day, George slaps together a new social system that is quickly recognized as being good... and eventually it takes over the whole world. 

original cover art by Walt Miller
 13. "John Sze's Future" (1962) by John R. Pierce. After the failed attempt by the CIA to kick Castro out of Cuba, tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union were at a new peak and millions of people around the world lived in fear of nuclear saber rattling. So, why not imagine a future in which there had been a devastating nuclear war in the year 1987? The story "John Sze's Future" provides an account of how a physicist named John is taken to the year 2178, by mistake. 

Arriving in the future, John meets a man of the future, Crawden, who had hoped that the time machine would bring B. F. Skinner into the future. John tells Crawden, "I've done some experimental work myself on Hieronymous machines." "John Sze's Future" was apparently Pierce's way of mocking editor John W. Campbell's (John "C" = John Sze) interest in "psionics".

cover art by Frank R. Paul
Crawden lives in a future society where "experimental psychology" dominates science and where mentioning "nuclear physics" is taboo. Although computer driven cars of this future are quickly summoned by radio, using the language of the future, Crawden explains such future technologies to John as being made possible by "psi". After a short time in the future, John is returned to the past, where he writes an editorial proclaiming that the future will dominated by the application of "psi powers".

You might wonder why Pierce would mock Campbell in this way. Pierce had published an essay called "How to Build a Thinking Machine" in the same 1950 issue of Astounding where Campbell had proclaimed Dianetics as a great advance in medical science.

1929 contest cover art by Frank R. Paul. 1930 biographical blurb about Pierce (right).
Pierce's first published science fiction story was "The Relics from the Earth", about a trip to Earth during a time many thousands of years in the future, after Earth had long since been abandoned (everyone moved to Triton). Why, you ask, did humans abandon Earth? So as not to have to contend with pesky insects.

Astounding interior art by M. Marchioni
Pierce published "Pre-Vision" in Astounding in 1936, before John Campbell took over control of the magazine. At the start of his story, Pierce quotes a line from an article, Leigh Page's 1924 "Advanced Potentials and their Application to Atomic Models".

As told in "Pre-Vision", Hardy is a brilliant pulp science hero who invents a device that allows him to View future events. Using the Viewer, he is able to change the course of Time and Hardy saves a woman from being killed in an accident.

I think "John Sze's Future" is a daring story because Campbell was still a powerful force in the science fiction world in 1962. In his introduction to the story, Groff Conklin noted that several publishers had previously turned the story down. Conklin was amazed that other people had refused the story and he praised it as being "subtle and sharp".

cover art by Tom Ryan

 14. "Kid Anderson" (1956) by R. S. Richardson. I've previously blogged about "The Aphrodite Project", a fake astronomy article by Richardson. "Kid Anderson" features a robot that gets used for training a boxer (see Figure 0, at the top of this page). The story was originally published in Space Science Fiction Magazine, but it is hard for me to imagine why Conklin thought it was worthy of being re-published in his anthology.

 15. "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" (1946) by Louis N. Ridenour. Apparently, "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" was first published in January 1946 in Fortune. The story depicts a future planet Earth at a time when all industrialized nations have atomic bombs ready for retaliatory strikes on anyone who starts a war. 

cover art by Carolus Thole
Loss of communications to San Francisco (caused by an earthquake) is mistakenly interpreted as an act of war and that triggers a cascade of strikes and counter-strikes that lead to the destruction of every city on Earth. 

Sadly, in 1946, "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" was too "far out" for most Americans to understand. Ridenour could not precisely envision the future of the nuclear arms race, but he invented a fairly good approximation of where the world got to with Mutually Assured Destruction. Later, in 1959, Level 7 was published, and I suspect that most people could finally understand that it made no sense to keep building more and more nuclear weapons that could be delivered to targets ever more quickly.

1947 cover art by Charles Schneeman
 16. "Last Year's Grave Undug" (1962) by Chandler Davis. When Groff Conklin was assembling Great Science Fiction by Scientists, he was able to arrange to publish "Last Year's Grave Undug" for the first time. The story takes place after a nuclear war has destroyed modern society. Given his path through life, I suppose Davis had to write a story about blaming communists for nuclear war, but I did not enjoy "Last Year's Grave Undug".

I've long wondered what Karel Čapek has in mind for the "manufacturing" of the "robots" in R. U. Robots. In 1947, Davis published "Letter to Ellen" in Astounding. That story is set in a future time when artificial life can be crafted in laboratories. The narrator of the story has discovered that he is a "robot", an artificial man who was made in a lab.

interior art by Edd Cartier
The fictional genetics in "Letter to Ellen" reminds me of "Heisenberg's Eyes" by Frank Herbert (1966). It would be interesting to know if Herbert had read "Letter to Ellen".

I have to wonder why Davis, a mathematician, tried to write a science fiction story about a futuristic genetic engineering project. In 1962, nobody had any idea how to actually make an artificial organism, so I'll award Davis bonus points for going ahead an writing "Letter to Ellen" from such a position of ignorance.

I've previously described 1950 - 1983 as the "Uranium Age" of science fiction. Groff Conklin's 1962 anthology Great Science Fiction by Scientists was caught up in the political concerns of that "age". Just because a story is "timely", that does not mean it is "great". Sadly, while Conklin claimed to be collecting great science fiction, I think his choice of stories like "Last Year's Grave Undug" was unduly influenced by issues that were timely, leading to inclusion in the anthology of some stories that were not great.

cover art by Joel Naprstek
In my previous blog post, I raised the question: were the 16 authors collected by Conklin in Great Science Fiction by Scientists really all scientists? By my count, 9 can be called scientists, three were mathematicians (Wiener, Bell, Davis), two were space enthusiasts (Clarke, Ley), Breuer was a medical doctor and Pierce was an engineer.

 Related Reading: "Invariant" by John R. Pierce... an interesting story about memory storage in brains.

Next: Lefty Baker

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Apr 23, 2022

Reading Project 1962

cover art by Don Punchatz
 In 1962, Groff Conklin assembled and published 16 science fiction stories in an anthology that he called Great Science Fiction by Scientists. Shown in the image to the right is the 1967 edition's freaky cover art. Here in this blog post and the next one, I'm going to comment on this collection of stories and the "scientists" who wrote them. Sadly, not all of the assembled authors were scientists, but Conklin tried hard to beat the bushes and find science fiction stories tellers who might be called "almost-scientists".

cover art by Barye Phillips
 1. I've previously mentioned the lead story, "What If..." by Isaac Asimov, which was first published in 1952. "What If..." seems like a precursor story to Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity. I love the idea of a technology that allows someone to view the future and even possibly View alternative timelines or Realities. (see also: "Pre-Vision")

 2. I've also previously commented on "The Tissue-Culture King" by Julian Huxley which was first published in 1926. Unlike Asimov, who wrote and published many science fiction stories between 1939 and 1952, Huxley is only credited with publishing this one story.

image source
"The Tissue-Culture King" is a very strange story, but interesting to me because it included the idea of experimenting on humans so as to make possible telepathy. According to this page, hypnosis had been included in written stories and some films from the mid-1800s to the 1920s. In his story, Huxley suggested that hypnotism could be used to put human brains into a state that would allow for telepathic linkages between large numbers of individuals.

"The Tissue-Culture King" also deals with a religion that includes weird beliefs such as honoring your god/king by culturing some of his cells. I have to wonder if Asimov was ever influenced by "The Tissue-Culture King". I know that Asimov praised the science fiction of H. G. Wells. In 1927, Huxley began working with Wells on "The Science of Life". Like Wells, Asimov would publish both fiction and non-fiction, promoting public understanding of science.

cover art by Robert Bruce
When Asimov began his famous Foundation Saga, he included the idea of a "scientific religion" that could be used to control the "barbarian" people of the petty kingdoms at the rim of the galaxy during the time when the great Galactic Empire was crumbling.

Along with science-oriented religions, telepathy was another Sci Fi plot element that was "in the air" when Asimov started publishing his science fiction stories. Shown to the left is the cover art for Mars Breaks Through by the English inventor Archibald Low. Like Arthur Clarke (see #4, below), Low served for a time as president for the British Interplanetary Society. Mars Breaks Through concerns long-range telepathic contact between Martians and people on Earth. Like Wells and Asimov, Low also wrote about science and technology for an audience of general readers. One of Low's interests was the possibility of using brain surgery to improve human cognition.

After his death, Tech Engineering News re-printed both "The Brain" and "The Miracle of the Broom Closet".
interior art for "The Brain", 1950
 3. The final story in Great Science Fiction by Scientists is "The Brain" (1950) by "the father of cybernetics" Norbert Wiener. In this story, a frontal lobotomy is used to put an end to the career of a criminal mastermind. You can read both of the fictional stories that Wiener is credited with writing in the April 1964 issue of Tech Engineering News along with other articles about his career as a mathematician who was interested in the brain.

The "secret" identity of W. Norbert.      "The Institute".
interior art for "The Brain"
 I don't really find it easy to call either "The Brain" or "The Miracle of the Broom Closet" science fiction. When published in Tech Engineering News, "The Brain" was presented as having been written by "W. Norbert" and it is not clear how it found its way into a magazine about engineering. Other articles in that issue described topics such as an early IBM punch-card computer and x-ray diffraction (which, in the early 1950s, was being used to reveal the structure of DNA).

Also published in 1950 was The Human Use of Human Beings, which touched on some of the same issues in man-machine relationships that Asimov explored in his positronic robot stories. Wiener wrote about using machines to do factory work, leaving people free to do creative work. In his robot novels, Asimov depicted displaced human workers who resented robots because the machines put people out of work (see Caves of Steel).

cover art by Victor Linford
 4. The story that was written by Arthur C. Clarke and was re-published in Great Science Fiction by Scientists is "Summertime on Icarus". It is rather hard for me to imagine how this story got published in Vogue (1960), but I suppose after Sputnik there was general interest in the "space race". A version of the story from BBC radio is available at the Internet Archive.

"Great" science fiction. Most science fiction story tellers made very little use of robots in their tales about space exploration. In "Summertime on Icarus" our hero, Colin Sherrard, must replace a seismograph data transmitter on Icarus. Working on the dark side of the asteroid, Colin completed his mission by using an EVA pod, but one of its rockets malfunctions, preventing his planned return from the surface of Icarus to his spaceship. Soon poor Colin will be roasted alive when he is exposed to sunlight! 

cover art by Earle Bergey
When he begins to get disoriented, Colin tries self-hypnosis, but staying in that altered state until he is rescued would have been too boring for the readers of Vogue, so we get to follow his thoughts as Colin thinks about his family and the discovery of Icarus and the theory that it originated as part of a planet that long ago fell apart and fragmented into asteroids (see 5th planet).

This might be the time to ask 1) who was Groff Conklin and 2) what did he mean by "scientist" and 3) how did he select stories such as "Summertime on Icarus" for his collection of "great" stories? In 1962, Conklin was well known for having published multiple anthologies. In 1948, Clarke's story "Loophole" was included in A Treasury of Science Fiction. Clarke's "The Fires Within" was included in Conklin's 1950 anthology The Science Fiction Galaxy

cover art by Earle Bergey
 Conklin & Clarke 💕. In 1951, another story by Clarke, "A Walk in the Dark", was included in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction. Like "Summertime on Icarus", "A Walk in the Dark" (1950) features a lone spaceman subjected to danger by equipment failure. Yawn.

 Omnibus of Science Fiction (1952) held Clarke's story "History Lesson" which describes the arrival of aliens from Venus on Earth after humans have become extinct. "History Lesson" was first published in 1949 and it features Clarke constructing his story by assuming that there could be intelligent life on Venus.

cover art by Harry Turner

The 1960 anthology 13 Great Stories of Science Fiction included "Silence, Please!" by Clarke. "Silence, Please!" was first published in 1950, but it featured the appearance of a cheap electronic calculator in 1960. However, a more impressive plot element is the development of a mathematics of "social psychology" which can predict problems arising from new technologies. The only application of the mathematics of social psychology appearing in the story is a prediction of disaster arriving from the sale of portable electronic noise canceling devices. These are not like noise canceling headphones, instead they are magical devices that can eliminate all sound from a location such as an opera hall. "Silence, Please!" was written like a kind of joke story and was not published under Clarke's real name. I suppose Asimov was amused when he read "Silence, Please!" and Asimov later included it in his own anthology, Mad Scientists.

interior art by Roy G. Krenkel
Also published in 1962 was Worlds of When which includes Clarke's story "Death and the Senator", originally published in 1961. Coming right at the start of the race to the Moon, this story deals with a politician who objects to funding research in space.

It is clear that Conklin frequently included Clarke's short stories in anthologies, but was Clarke ever really a scientist? Clarke studied math and physics in college, but it is not clear that he ever really worked as a scientist, unless he did so secretly during World War II. Clarke was certainly a booster of -and advocate for- manned space exploration and I've seen it claimed that his writings helped sway some politicians towards support for NASA.

cover art by Harold W. McCauley

 5. James V. McConnell earned a B.A. degree in 1947. In the March 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, there was a letter from McConnell describing himself as a psychologist. However, in commenting on Campbell's recent article about the atomic bomb, McConnell also stated "I have many friends at Los Alamos". 

After college, McConnell apparently went to work as a writer for radio and television and then got interested in publishing science fiction. He stated flatly "Rhine is wrong" and "there is nothing even close to telepathy" in an autobiographical sketch that was published by McConnell in the April 1955 issue of Imagination.  His story "Learning Theory" (1957) is about aliens who first perform psychological experiments on human test subjects and then decide that the human species should be exterminated.

In the Ekcolir Reality. Original
cover art by Hubert Rogers
McConnell called himself a Texan and it would be interesting to know just what he learned about biology and chemistry before graduating from Louisiana State University in 1947. He claimed that by the time he got his M.A. from the University of Texas in 1954 he had attended "seven different universities". 

According to the ISFDB, McConnell's science fiction stories were all published between 1953 and 1957. However, in 1959, McConnell created his own venue for science fiction: the Worm Runner's Digest where he first published his strange laboratory results about memory transfer by cannibalism. You can read his presentation called "RNA and Memory" from an April 1964 meeting in Kansas (Role of Macromolecules in Complex Behavior). Apparently, McConnell's research on learning in worms was funded in part by the Atomic Energy Commission. While admitting his ignorance about chemistry, McConnell took quite seriously the idea that you could train a rat, extract RNA from its brain and then transfer memories to another rat by injecting (intraperitoneal injection) that RNA. 

original cover art by Robert Jones
 RNA Dreams. The idea of using RNA to transfer memories from one brain to another was greeted with extreme skepticism by biologists, but McConnell's interest in RNA did not spring full grown from his own Sci Fi imagination. McConnell's experiments with RNA were preceded by studies involving the feeding of RNA to human test subjects.

 Donald Ewen Cameron was a medical doctor with a long-standing interest in memory. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association (1952–1953) and then the Canadian Psychiatric Association (1958–1959) and he became involved in CIA-funded research efforts often called MK-ultra. Starting in about 1956, Cameron and his collaborators carried out experiments that involved feeding or injecting RNA into patients with memory problems (for example, see: "EFFECTS OF RIBONUCLEIC ACID ON MEMORY DEFECT IN THE AGED"). 

image source
It is thought that many records of secret government-funded biology research projects were destroyed, but some of the horrific experiments that were performed on unwitting patients by Cameron starting in 1957 did eventually came to light. 

We can speculate that the CIA would have been thrilled to have the means to control human memories and behavior through something as simple as injecting RNA into a person. I would not be surprised if money was channeled to McConnell through the Atomic Energy Commission and led to his students going into institutions where they injected radioactive RNA into unsuspecting patients. Later, when these terminally ill patients died, their brains could be studied to see if the radioactive RNA was taken up into their brains.

interior art by Virgil Finley
It is impossible for me to read McConnell's 1957 story "Learning Theory" without wondering if he was aware of secret psychological experiments on human test subjects. The story is written from the perspective of a psychology teacher (a full professor) who is abducted by aliens and subjected to experiments to test his cognitive abilities and see if human behavior is similar to what has been seen previously by the aliens in other "animal colonies". 

However, the teacher does not actually get to meet the aliens and he soon begins to wonder if one of his human colleagues is subjecting him to "some fantastic human-in-isolation experiment". Indeed, this was one of the types of experiments that people were subjected to by Cameron. In the end, the human test subject in "Learning Theory" tries to escape from the alien experiments by behaving in unpredictable ways. This prompts the Dalek alien experimenter to propose that all humans should be exterminated.

source
 6. The story by Leo Szilard called "Grand Central Terminal" was also included in Laughing Space, an anthology by Asimov. Beyond the lame toilet humor, I think "Grand Central Terminal" does have a serious side to it. The story takes place after a nuclear war and the destruction of all life on Earth. An alien visiting Earth suggests that the problem leading to the extinction of humans was that they used money and their capitalistic ways led inevitably to war and the extinction of the human species.

cover art by Howard V. Brown

 7. "John Taine" was a pseudonym for the mathematician Eric Bell. Bell was never a scientist and it shows in his story "The Ultimate Catalyst" (1939). The titular catalyst is gold, which in the story is used by "the world's greatest biochemist" to catalyze the rapid exchange of magnesium for the iron atoms that are normally found in hemoglobin. 

iron (Fe) binds to O2 in the heme of hemoglobin
 Fantasy Chemistry. Readers of "The Ultimate Catalyst" are supposed to believe that a person who has their hemoglobin chemically altered in this way will then quickly be transformed from an animal into a plant-like lump of rooted and immobile tissue.

Consuelo and the dictator
interior art by Virgil Finlay
 "The Ultimate Catalyst" is set in the Amazon rain-forest. In order to remove from Earth its last remaining murderous dictator, a noble biochemist sacrifices his own life, but mercifully his lab assistant and daughter (Consuelo) escapes. The biochemist must consume the "ultimate catalyst" (hidden inside a delectable fruit) in order the get the wary dictator to consume it. Thus, the biochemist is converted into a living lump of plant-like tissue, retaining memories of his animal existence. Before fleeing from the rain-forest, Consuelo sets fire to her father and the dictator, saving them from existing as immobile plants while still being able to remember their prior human existence.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939
cover art for the June 1939 issue

As noted in the biographical information shown in the image above, Bell had been publishing novels since 1924. After Nazi Germany began World War II, Bell published a guest editorial in the March 1939 issue of Startling Stories in which he described his belief that dictators could be combated by scientists and populations of non-scientists who had an appreciation for science. Bell thought that science fiction could be used to help make people understand science and trust scientists. "The Ultimate Catalyst" was published a few months latter in Thrilling Wonder Stories.

1927
It is an amusing exercise to contemplate the possible thoughts of Isaac Asimov when he read "The Ultimate Catalyst" in 1939. Asimov was interested in biology and was a chemistry student and would eventually teach biochemistry at Boston University. In his guest editorial for Startling Stories, Bell suggested that even the wildest science fiction story could contribute towards public appreciation for science. I suspect that Asimov struggled to see the science education benefits of a wildly absurd story like "The Ultimate Catalyst". However, Asimov did go on to develop his own theory that by reading science fiction stories, people could become accustomed to thinking about changes in society caused by new technologies. 

The Voice of the Dolphins
In his 1927 novel Quayle's Invention, Bell had a character ask: "Are the chemists to blame for the use that politicians make of science?" That is the kind of question that was on Leo Szilard's mind when he wrote "My Trial as a War Criminal". I suppose for some people such as Donald Cameron (see above), such thoughts never cross their minds as they busily pursue their "scientific" objectives. This is why all biomedical research now must be reviewed by an oversight committee that evaluates the ethics of the research. Of course, good capitalists such as those at Purdue Pharma are still able to use the fruits of science to make billion$, regardless of the human cost.

The Man with Two Memories
 8. "The Gold-Makers" by J. B. S. Haldane. According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Haldane left behind an unfinished science fiction story when he died that was published as The Man with Two Memories in 1976. However, The Man with Two Memories seems quite rare and I've never read it. 😞

For "The Gold-Makers", the story is told from the perspective of a physical chemist who can recognize at a glance any of the "forty-two simultaneous differential equations that would enable one to predict the behavior of carbon". You can tell this is a science fiction story because the chemist resents the fact that nobody can smoke while riding the Paris Metro. However, the chemist is drawn into the "biggest thing since the steam engine", which has already cost the life of a famous French mathematician who figured out the wave equations for gold atoms.

In the Ekcolir Reality
original cover by Gustav Klimt

Since readers of "The Gold-Makers" have read the title of the story, it comes of little surprise that the wave equations for gold atoms are not simply an esoteric matter that can only excite chemists. Not only did the French chemist solve the gold equations, but he also was able to predict the chemical structure of a particular organic molecule that has a high affinity for gold atoms. With the help of an organic chemist who synthesizes the gold-binding molecule, soon it becomes possible to purify gold from sea water. 

In 1927, Haber published a journal article about the possibility of obtaining gold from sea water, but I have no idea if that was inspiration for Haldane. I also have no idea if Asimov ever read "The Gold-Makers", but Asimov's psychohistory as a way to mathematically predict the future seems as far out as predicting a gold-binding molecule's structure from the wave equations for gold.

image source

In "The Gold-Makers", a shortage of gold is blamed for the Great Depression, and a plan is hatched to solve that problem by obtaining gold from the sea. Part of the plan is to also use the profits from gold purification to better pay scientists. However, some gold miners figure out that a new source of gold has begun upsetting the gold market and they try to kill everyone with knowledge of how to get gold from sea water. 

Related Reading: Conklin's 1951 anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction.

Next: comments on the remaining 8 stories in Great Science Fiction by Scientists.

Apr 13, 2022

Foundation Season One

Demerzel kills the emperor (1 of 3).
 This is the third of three blog posts about the first season of Apple TV's Foundation series. Previously, I commented on each of the show's ten episodes (episodes 1-5, episodes 6-10). Here, on this page, I'll be reflecting on the overall story arc and assessing if Apple TV's Foundation series is capturing the essence of Isaac Asimov's original Foundation Saga. I seldom watch television and I did not subscribe to Apple TV until April of 2022, half a year after the show was released. Will I bother to watch Season Two?

 Robots. The original Foundation stories that Asimov wrote in the 1940s did not include robots. During that decade, Asimov also wrote and published many short stories about positronic robots. 

cover art by Michael Whelan
Eventually, Asimov suspected that he would be remembered most for his robot stories. Starting in 1986 with his novel Foundation and Earth, Asimov introduced positronic robots into his Foundation Saga. In my opinion, that was a triumphant addition to the Foundation Saga and I'm very pleased that Apple TV's Foundation series has been making the robot Demerzel an important part of the television show right from the very first episode. ✅

 Telepathy. However, the Demerzel robot in Apple TV's Foundation series is very different than Asimov's Demerzel. Two major features of Asimov's robots were 1) they were programmed with the Laws of Robotics and 2) the fact that robots could be endowed with telepathic abilities. Neither of these features of Asimov's robots were explicitly included in Season One of Apple TV's Foundation series. 😞

1942 interior art by Charles Schneeman
Instead, Apple TV's Demerzel was portrayed as having religious faith. There was explicit discussion in Season One of Apple TV's Foundation series of the question: does Demerzel have a soul?

 Religion. Back in 1942, Asimov imagined how the early Foundation on Terminus could make use of religious faith to control the militaristic "barbarian" peoples who lived on planets at the rim of the galaxy when the Galactic Empire began to crumble. So far, in Apple TV's Foundation series, several different religions have been depicted as existing in the Galactic Empire. Before I had seen a single episode of this TV show, I was puzzled by the big role for religion that had been included and I wondered if this would be part of transforming Asimov's science fiction story into a magical fantasy tale.

A vision in the Salt Pool.
 Cloned Cleons. One of the big changes made to Asimov's Foundation Saga was the insertion of the cloned Emperors. This leads to discussion of whether a cloned human has a soul. This issue gets tied up with the idea that the Emperor can't rule the Empire unless trillions of people believe that the Emperor has a soul. In Apple TV's Foundation, we are asked to wonder: will the Pope Proxima support the Emperor? The idea of collaboration being needed between religious "authorities" and politicians was raised by Asimov in his 1942 story "Bridle and Saddle".

psychohistory
So, it is not a surprise to see this issue included as part of Apple TV's Foundation series. However, it was strange to see this subject shifted over into the the context of the Emperor and the problems he faces during the decline of the Galactic Empire.

 Is it science fiction? Asimov's story of the falling Empire focused on psychohistorical forces such as scientific and technological stagnation. For Apple TV's Foundation series, the issue of stagnation was focused on the the person of the Emperor and the idea that a series of cloned emperors might contribute to the destruction of the Empire. However, if the true cause of the collapse of the Galactic Empire is Demerzel, then does it matter if there are cloned emperors who behaviorally stagnate? 

For me, it does matter because Asimov's explanation for the collapse of the Galactic Empire concerns an interesting mechanism that falls in the domain of science and technology. 

Halima the soul authority
In contrast, Apple TV's Foundation series goes off into fantasy religion and involves religious authorities who believe they are "soul detectors". This is one of my biggest problems with Apple TV's Foundation series: it seems to be morphing into a magical fantasy 🧙🧚 story rather than trying to stay within the bounds of Asimovian-style science fiction. 🤖

 Long Distance and Deep Time. Show runner Doyer has commented that Time is like a character in the Foundation Saga. Hollywood story tellers have always struggled to deal with complex stories that unfold across vast distances and long periods of time. In the previous century, science fiction story tellers like Asimov invented ways to tell complex stories like the Foundation Saga and their fans loved it. Apple TV's Foundation series has failed to capture the spatial immensity of the Galactic Empire. 😠

interior art by Charles Schneeman
As I explained previously, the way that people are moved around the galaxy by Goyer makes no sense. This is a constant distraction and a major failure in science fiction story telling. However, if you are doing fantasy, nothing matters... you can move people around your galactic stage on broom-sticks if you want to. 👻

 Psychohistory. A central science fiction element in the Foundation Saga is the fictional science of psychohistory. Asimov had fun with an audacious analogy in which human populations are treated like collections of molecules. Asimov noted that chemists can use statistical analyses to predict the properties of gasses, so let's imagine a science of psychohistory that can predict the future of civilizations. Due to the butterfly effect, I never took psychohistory very seriously and I like the idea that psychohistory was a smoke-screen for Daneel and his positronic robots who were secretly guiding Humanity into the future. 

cover art by Ed Valigursky
The only way that Asimov's Foundation Saga makes sense to me is if the Galactic Empire has had technological stagnation for many thousands of years. The explanation for that stagnation is that Daneel was at work, trying to prevent humans from disrupting his plans which involve first Gaia and then Galaxia. I like to think that Daneel did not want humans doing genetic engineering and altering "human nature". Psychohistory was fragile, and could not deal with changes in human nature. More importantly, Daneel needed a stable concept of "human" against which he could lean his programming of the Laws of Robotics.

I like the way Apple TV's Foundation series has gone ahead and equipped the Galactic Empire with technologies that Asimov could not imagine in the 1940s. However, they also show technology research and development continuing, even as the Empire if starting to collapse. Maybe Apple TV's Foundation series is going to blame the collapse of the Empire entirely on the Cleon Clones.

Daneel
I like to believe that the true power behind Daneel and positronic robots was based on telepathy and time travel technology. After Season One of Apple TV's Foundation series, we have only a fuzzy view of where things are going with the "mentalic" powers of Gaal and Salvor. However, I'm intrigued that there are suggestions of a "mentalic" ability to "look" forwards and backwards through time. How Apple TV's Foundation will merge these "mentalic" abilities with the science of psychohistory remains to be seen.

It may be that psychohistory was only good enough to predict the fall of the Empire; in Apple TV's Foundation series the predictions of psychohistory were quickly derailed by Gaal. In one interpretation, Gaal is playing the role of the Mule and she derailed the Seldon Plan right at the start of the Apple TV Foundation series.

In terms of the entire Foundation story arc, at the end of Season One, Apple TV's Foundation series is basically where Isaac Asimov was after the first two Seldon Crises

Will he join the Church
of the Galactic Spirit?
 Towards Season 2. Terminus and the nearby planets of the galactic rim can now form the core of a new civilization based on advanced technology while the old Galactic Empire continues to crumble. However, Apple TV's Foundation series has shown that Seldon's plans for the future were quickly derailed by Gaal's unexpected mentalic powers. In Asimov's original story, The Plan™ was still on track at this point. As a fan of Asimov's Foundation Saga, this divergence by Apple TV's Foundation series does not offend me. I've always felt that psychohistory was used as a ruse by Daneel to hide the true means by which the future could be foreseen. It is interesting that Apple TV's Foundation series has introduced an alternative way to see the future: Gaal and Sal can perceive "visions" that even allow Sal to predict the outcome of a coin flip. However, Apple TV's Foundation series is science fiction then they show runner should explain to viewers how the strange visions of Salvor are based on some future technology.

New in Season Two: who is Yanna Seldon?

I want to know how this type of "mentailic ability" will be developed in coming episodes of the show. However, I don't like all the blood and violence in Apple TV's Foundation series and I doubt if the show runner even cares if there is a science-based explanation for Salvor's unique abilities. It is much easier for Goyer to simply make mindless comicbook fantasy rather than good science fiction in the Asimov style.

Let me out!
 Major Disapointment. Apple TV's Foundation series does not match my tastes in science fiction (I prefer hard science fiction). Every episode of this TV show abandons its opportunities to exploit reason and logic and instead glorifies comicbook-style fantasy adventure. It is painful for me to watch this show; the number one annoyance is the way people like Gaal are magically moved around the galaxy.

Will I watch Season Two? I doubt it. I wonder if Apple TV will hire someone to do a novel based on the series; I'd prefer to read the story and avoid the visual depiction of blood, death and violence that is in the TV series. Of course, I'd also need to find a way to protect my mind from Apple TV's mind-sapping "null field" of unexplained technobabble such as...

DNA repair nanobots

 Nanoparticle Regimen. When is a clone not a clone? In episode 10, the emperor announces that the rebels hid the secret message inside a droid un-cloned Brother Dawn by "corrupting his nanoparticle regimen". In this disjointed comicbook plot, if you don't want to explain something to the audience then just drop some technobabble into the simmering pot of nonsense. As a nerdy Sci Fi fan, I must take the flying technobabble as a challenge; is there some way to make sense of this? Maybe there are DNA detecting medical scanners that are able to look into the bodies of the clones and find random somatic mutations. Then the medical repair nanobots of the Galactic Empire can venture into cells and repair the altered DNA sequences. How the rebels could interfere in this "genetic cleansing" process remains a mystery.

the end of Terminus
 Can't Let Go. My guess is that the producers of Apple TV's Foundation were hoping that after Season One the viewers might have stuck in their mind some bit of eye candy from the show that would make it likely for them to return and pay to see Season Two. In my case, the lingering mental image is that of computer-generated extras, the population of Terminus, standing around in the volcanic tundra of Iceland watching Hari's reincarnation. The scene is so absurdly contrived that is seems like a joke. The risen Hari explains how the rebels of the Foundation can hide from the Evil™ Empire: "Take the Invictus to the far side of your star, activate the quantum drive, but maintain your position in subspace… the energy signature would read as a mega-flare." Sure, that'll work. 😏

Viewers are also explicitly told: "The Empire comprises tens of thousands of worlds." Never mind that in Asimov's imagined Galactic Empire there were 25,000,000 inhabited worlds and Asimov worried even that many would be too few for psychohistory to work. Hollywood story tellers can't deal with big distances, long time spans or a saga that sprawls across millions of worlds, so rather than tell Asimov's story, Apple TV's Foundation goes in another direction. For fans of Asimov, this is a source of annoyance.

Nullifying the Foundation.

 One Pill Makes you Reincarnate. Hari also "explains" the magical Vault™: "I swallowed a pill containing millions of self-replicating molecular machines. Those machines began breaking down my body tissue into all its constituent elements. Then those machines recycled those elements, scooping up more material, ice, micrometeoroids, et cetera, assembling the Vault..." ...while also crafting the magical null field which allows the story writers and viewers to turn off their brains and not question all the comicbook nonsense in Apple TV's Foundation. Science fiction is not about turning off your brain, but Hollywood is the land of the dumb blonde.

Related Reading: "The Problem with Apple TV's Foundation" by James Guild

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