Prelude to Foundation

cover: Don Punchatz

In this blog post I explore the idea that Isaac Asimov's novel Prelude to Foundation can be viewed as the culmination of his long flirtation with cyberpunk themes in his science fiction stories about robots with artificial human-like intelligence.

the Second Foundation confronts the Mule
cover by Hubert Rogers

Punkish Origins
I discovered Asimov's Foundation saga when it was available as a trilogy of paperback novels published by Avon Books. I still own the 1971 edition of Second Foundation which I first read when I was in my personal Golden Age of science fiction. The copyright information for that edition enigmatically says, "...based upon published material originally copyrighted by Street & Smith Publications, 1948, 1949." Only much later did I understand that the Foundation Trilogy was cobbled together, mostly from stories that were originally published in Astounding.

cover art by Robert Schulz

Robots
Through the 1940s, Asimov published his science fiction stories in pulp science fiction magazines. Many of his stories included robotic characters. Asimov was the first person to use the term "robotics" in print (1942, Runaround). Only in 1950 did he first publish a novel-length story that had not first been published in a science fiction magazine.

Asimov was often at his best when writing shorter fiction and his early robot-themed novel-length works were compiled from short stories (I, Robot) or first published as a serialized set of chunks in magazines. Asimov's "The Caves of Steel" was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine and "The Naked Sun" first appeared in Astounding. Asimov's vision of future Earthlings living in their caves of steel and afraid to go outside, let alone venture forth into the Galaxy, has always struck me as a horrible dystopia.

 cover by Frank Freas

At about the same time that I discovered Foundation, I was introduced to some of Asimov's compiled short stories through the collection Nine Tomorrows. One of those short stories was 'Profession', which involves a future Earth where human brains are routinely programmed for abilities such as reading and the skills needed to perform specialized jobs within a profession.

I recently suggested that Asimov can be viewed as having long ago written stories that hinted at the spirit of the solarpunk sub-genre.

cyberpunk: the dystopian now

In the same way, we can step back and observe that Asimov helped to provide a foundation for the cyberpunk sub-genre with his stories such as 'Profession' (text of the story). In viewing 'Profession' as part of the foundation of cyberpunk, the first thing I must note is that Asimov placed the events of this "proto-cyberpunk" story in an imagined future that is thousands of years in our future. This is in stark contrast to the preferences of many cyperpunk fans (example) who believe that cyberpunk is now. 

1921 The Mechanical Man

If your product marketing is centered on fear, then your story will most profitably be set in the present. We've gone through several decades of breathless cyberpunk marketing campaign$ to promote the $ale of cyberpunk-themed game$, book$ and movie$. Often cyberpunk is $old by intentionally stoking people's fear of computers and artificial intelligence.

Full Circle

I wanted to call this blog post "Full Circle", but that name was already taken. Another possible title was "The Pendulum of Doom". When Asimov began writing his robot stories, he reacted against the murderous clanking robots that were featured in some early science fiction stories. 

Blissenobiarella

Asimov tried to swing the Sci Fi pendulum away from stupid killer-robot stories towards a more thoughtful exploration of how humans and robots might co-exist, but his vision of future robots was not all rainbows and ponies.

Profession
Asimov's 1950's proto-cyberpunk version of a "subversive and gritty rebel" is quite tame by modern standards. Still, Asimov's vision is rather chilling: the entire population of the galaxy is subjected to an insidious form of "mind control". Sadly, R. Daneel Olivaw did not appear in the original stories about Asimov's "all human galaxy", but it is fun to imagine that Daneel was there, carefully working behind the scenes to control the rate of human technological advance and the spread of Humanity outwards from Earth towards the 25,000,000 habitable exoplanets of the galaxy. In 'Profession' there are only a few thousand special humans who remain free to create and it is they who are responsible for making new technological advances. All the billions of other people are just programmed for their jobs by computerized devices that insert specific skill sets into their brains. In 'Profession', the protagonist rebels against this system, but in the end he is assimilated just like everyone else. Resistance was futile.

"a La-Z-Boy-recliner experience of the future"

Asimov seemed to believe that robots were the future. Of course, he was "optimistic" in that he depicted the artificial intelligences of the future as being "under control" and as having been programmed to be working for the betterment of humans. Still, Asimov included in his future an almost instinctive resistance among most humans against sharing the world with robots. Thus, in his imagined "future history" the robot masters of Humanity had to work in secret and allow humans to believe that they were free. Which is actually more terrifying, Asimov's vision of a future with the genetically-engineered group-mind composed of creatures like Bliss or the absurd cyberpunk dystopias crafted in Hollywood?

headjack

Myopia Matrix
With the advent of the cyberpunk sub-genre, Hollywood and game makers needed a dramatic and visual equivalent of Frankenstein's Monster. Thus, the headjack.

Myths of Science Fiction
I've previously complained about the myth that portrays science fiction as being about predicting the future. Another popular myth is that science fiction is about us, here and now, and that it must "force writers to look at the present moment and decipher its implication".

hierion tubes

As a newly-recognized sub-genre in the 1980s, I don't think cyberpunk saved science fiction, rather it subverted science fiction by pushing the pendulum of stories about computers and artificial intelligence back in the direction of the murderous clanking robots that Asimov had reacted against as early as 1939. I'm a fan of Asimov-style proto-cyberpunk and I can't help but view attempts to make science fiction hip and relevant, in tune with now, as misguided.

Science fiction should be about taking a step (or two, or twenty) beyond the myopia of concern for the present. The authors of many early science fiction stories were obsessed with "tubes" and "rays". They told stories about a near future in which new technologies were powered by newfangled tubes and soldiers used magical death rays rather than guns. In contrast to such myopic near-future stories, Asimov took a step beyond the present and invented positronic brains, imaginary technology that carried his story telling far beyond the soon-to-be-obsolete "tubes" of his present world in the 1940s.

Not Reading Science Fiction

Bliss and Pel

I suspect that Anders has never read the entire Foundation saga. We really don't need to take the "science" of psychohistory seriously. By the time that Asimov wrote his last words about the Foundation, he knew that the Cult of Seldon had been created by Daneel in order to give a false sense of confidence to the First Foundation. Psychohistory was a "cover story" for a hidden cadre robots who were controlling human minds and behavior and guiding human civilization into the future.

I like to think that Golan Trevize is a personification of Asimov, reborn after his death from a heart attack in 1977 and having been asked to write another novel in the Foundation series. Simultaneously, Janov Pelorat can be viewed as the ghost of the "old Asimov", the man who wrote the original Foundation saga back in the 1940s. While writing Foundation's Edge, Asimov began a search for the unquestioned assumptions that were hidden behind the mysterious success of Seldon's Plan for the galaxy, success that even the Mule had been unable to derail. Trevize and Pelorat went along for the ride on Asimov's investigative journey through the galaxy. What they found was the even more mysterious hidden world of Gaia, a planet with a vast telepathic group mind.

cover art by Stephen Youll

Foundation and Robots
After the success of Foundation's Edge, Asimov next wrote another story about R. Daneel Olivaw: a novel set early in Humanity's exploration of the galaxy. Police detective Elijah Baley discovers that the spread of Humanity, outwards from Earth into the galaxy, is being secretly guided by a telepathic robot, Giskard. Giskard and Daneel, working to guide Earthlings towards further exploration of the galaxy, are The Robots of Dawn. Giskard tells Baley that someday a future science of psychohistory will be needed. Baley wonders if in addition to his telepathic abilities, Giskard can somehow "see" into the future.

original cover art by Jim Burns

After Giskard passed the secret of positronic brain telepathy to Daneel, a small cadre of robots spent 20,000 years controlling Humanity and moving the human population of the galaxy towards the formation of a vast group mind: Galaxia. Asimov imagined the Foundation saga unfolding in an "all human galaxy" with no alien beings on the stage. As told in Foundation and Earth, Asimov ended his Foundation saga with a question: might alien life forms with advanced technology exist beyond our own galaxy?

Daneel

Written in the 1980s, I think the end of the Foundation saga can constructively be viewed as Asimov-style cyberpunk. Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, with their depiction of the decline of Trantor, can be fit conceptually into the cyberpunk genre. Sadly, Asimov died while writing Forward the Foundation and he never had the chance to continue adding on more stories to the saga after the events that he described in Foundation and Earth. It is our task to continue the story that Asimov began.

robotic master

In the Exode Trilogy, Daneel is himself just a puppet and there have always been technologically-advanced aliens lurking in the background of the "all human galaxy". I have fun thinking of Hari Seldon and Golan Trevize as examples of Asimov's type of neo-cyberpunk heroes who each discovered that humans are just puppets of the positronic robots that had been controlling human minds and the course of Humanity for 20,000 years.

Seldon on the surface of Trantor by Peter Elson

Prelude to Foundation is rather long-winded and self-indulgent. Many parts, like Seldon's near death when he gets lost on the surface of Trantor, are hard to swallow. Maybe someday Asimov's estate will release a condensed version.

Next: investigating the first science fiction

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Deep Links of Science Fiction

cover art and cover blurb

This blog post includes a non-review of Veronica Sicoe's novel The Deep Link.

Background
I follow Sicoe on Twitter and I've had occasion to visit her blog. Recently I followed one of her tweets to a book promotion webpage where I performed an experiment, testing my skill at judging 54 fantasy and science fiction books by their covers.

When I was done playing that game, I had to admit that it was Sicoe's novel that most intrigued me... first contact, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, merging minds... all science fiction themes that I enjoy.

Interview of Sicoe

Science
I'm a science nerd and I'm much more likely to appreciate someone's science fiction story if they have an understanding of science. Apparently Sicoe works in IT ("software quality consultant"), but I started reading her novel wondering if she qualifies as a science nerd.

Deep Science Fiction
The science fiction genre began with authors such as Smith and Asimov imagining how people would use computers to help us explore the universe. Later, "cyberpunk" arrived and we've been subjected to endless horror-laden dystopian stories about how computers and robots will turn

Veronica Sicoe

into monsters, or turn humans into monstrous zombies, or something. Where does The Deep Link fall on this spectrum?

The Deep Link

Don't hack me, Dave!

Sicoe introduces us to a talking AI on page 4 of The Deep Link. Mr. "AI" is apparently a fairly sophisticated artificial intelligence embedded in a spaceship. Then on page 11 the protagonist ravishes poor little AI, hacking its systems so as to take control of the spaceship. Stop, Dave!
Then the ship's "emergency computer" pulls its trump card and takes back control of the spaceship. Later we meet C.R.I.S., some sort of super-AI.

If you read The Deep Link brace yourself for layers of artificial intelligences, ubiquitous bionics and be ready to plug-in for yet another cyberpunkian treatment of human brain neural networks as if they were computer circuits.

Original Amazing Stories cover art
by L. Raymond Jones (1942)

Lingo Star
"AI" is just one of the abbreviations that grace the pages of The Deep Link. I suppose in the future many words will transform in sets of initials. So we get FTL, R&D, TMC. MDs, VR, DNA, RNA, HEM and CIS not to mention assorted nacoms, com lines, oxys, synets, jumps and Ticks along with various alien terms like Phylra, samyth, klaar and, of course, deeplinked. I couldn't help thinking: this reads a bit like a computing manual. As they say: write what you know. The slang term "Tick" gets used 77 times in the story, which is not bad, but distant second to the 104 fucks in the story. I guess it is a space opera truism that "talk like a sailor" will apply to spaceship crews in the future.

So, brace for hundreds of pages of fucking cyberpunkish xeno-military-political ... example:

Horror
Apparently Sicoe enjoys horror movies and psychological thrillers, so in The Deep Link we get:

 

must ... kill ... humans...

I went into this story wondering to what extent The Deep Link is a horror story that just happens to have had a science fictiony setting grafted onto it. I'm not a fan of biologically implausible aliens that are designed to shock or just be different for the sake of being different. But I guess we humans need a hack-master alien to come and squeeze brains out of skulls and save us from our self-created dystopian cyberpunkish future. Right?

Sicoe on Humanoid Aliens

source

I've never watched Star Gate. I've tried. Based on what I've read about the "Star Gate Fictional Universe", I like the basic premise, but we really have to wonder: why did the first technological civilization first arise a few million years ago rather than billions of years ago?

Many plot elements of Star Gate revolve around familiar features of life on Earth such as plagues and war. The whole franchise strikes me as typical Hollywood sausage meat and I've never been able to watch more than about 5 minutes of it.

I just can't accept the idea that a species advanced enough to be able to travel between the stars is going to use their fantastic technological power to act out all of the stupidity of human history across vast intergalactic distances. Star Gate always struck me as an example of anti-science fiction where even the most fantastic future technology ultimately changes nothing about the human condition. It is another black mark against Hollywood (the bastion of science fiction myopia) if the deficiencies of Star Gate are what makes people shy away from stories about very ancient astronauts.

In Media Res
I'm a fan of stories that start in mid-stride, but I'm old-school and I like a reliable narrator who can get me oriented. I was only about half a page into The Deep Link before I started wondering if some elements of the story would ever get explained. Three examples:

body part humor: making three points

1) "Unregistered frequency" - we're out on a First Contact mission. Cool. And our AI has to ask if it should listen to a message on an "Unregistered frequency"? In the The Deep Link, the various AIs can be either idiotic or brilliant depending on which page of the story we are currently reading.

2) "mandible pendant" - our protagonist grew up among insectoid hive-dwelling aliens and this relic pendant ends up being the tool that allows a deep link to form between a human and a cyberhackmaster alien.

3) "fugue" - I don't know who first came up with the idea that hyperspace jumps would cause side-effects. Asimov included this aspect of imaginary human physiology in some of his stories. On Page 125 we finally get this "explanation":

Biology
I'm a biologist, so I'm always intrigued whenever a biology-related topic pops up in a science fiction story. As a science nerd, I can't stop myself from asking: why does FTL travel cause brains to go haywire?

Einstein made us think of gravity as a property of space-time, so I guess by the rules of fictional future science extrapolation, readers should not be surprised if asked to believe that FTL travel will involve converting brain matter into a "property of space-time".

Sadly, in the Ascendancy Fictional Universe, when our brains complete an FTL journey and again become matter, they are unable to function normally.

... OK. But what is "normal"?

It Takes A Village

telepathy machines! minds in space!

I love the idea of forms of matter that are as yet unknown to human science. So what are Phylra particles? In The Deep Link we also have "Phylra glands", Phylra cells and "ultra-sensitive Phylra particles". Maybe it takes an entire trilogy to finally explain the science of Phylra, but I suspect there is no future science there, waiting to be explained.

In cyberpunk stories we must be able to link computers to minds and minds to computers and alien minds to human minds, even across interstellar distances, so we need to submit to handwavium and Phylra and we should probably not ask too many questions.

Nanotechnology
I love stories about imagined futures with nifty technologies like advanced nanotechnology. In The Deep Link we have chunks of human brains replaced by nano-tech, nano-synthetic fiber, nanites, nano meshes and:

and:

I suppose we are supposed to either ignore all the techno-babble or absorb its meaning by osmosis. The jargon avalanche reminds me of 2001 where an endless stream of capitalized letter triplets parades across the data screens ... ATM DMG NAV .....

Sci Fi in the 20th century

Here's my best guess: quantum-entangled RNA in the synapses of two people allows for mind-melding: a deep link. Samyth is a "neuro-responsive material", so does that mean that it is in telepathic contact with people? I don't know. The word "telepathic" is not used in The Deep Link. Maybe telepathy is on the cliché blacklist that is used by the gatekeepers of science fiction publishing and aspiring authors are wise to avoid it.

Politics
For me, there is nothing more mind-numbing and story-killing than fictional politics. In The Deep Link we go into hyperdrive and get xeno-politics which requires the support of Drs. of Xenology working in their xenology labs and xeno-specialists, xeno-linguists and xeno-diplomats arrayed in xeno-investigative departments where they consult xeno-databases before deploying their xeno-genic weapons and xeno-morphed ships.

in the previous millennium

In a xenopsychocyberthriller of 2015, I guess we need something like quantum-entangled synaptic RNA.

It was so much easier in the previous millennium when authors like Asimov could just insert a synapsifier or a telepathic positronic robot into a story and then move on.

Twisted Relationships

sicko?

In The Deep Link we see Sicoe's interest in creating a psychological thriller take precedence over the science. Hard science fiction fans take note. I found myself wondering if "Sicoe" is a nom de plume selected by an author who wants to write about psychological issues and twisted relationships.

which is more fun?
Hell or Hades?

Cyans on Hades
One more biology bit... a type of alien brain-invading creature that was inserted into the story is called a Cyan. This sets the stage for when the protagonist of The Deep Link gets to visit Hades where all would be lost for the TMC if the Ticks had to contend with invading Cyans. But they don't. But we do get to amp up the xeno-phobia.

Quality control

Ascendancy Trilogy

I'm not a good editor. I can't spell and I read right through many misspellings. I didn't notice a misspelling until page 15, so The Deep Link seems to have been fairly well edited.

Full disclosure: I have not read all of The Deep Link. I already had my fill of cyberpunk themes by about 1982, even before the sub-genre was named. I do wish I knew more about the imaginary science of Phylra so that I could compare that intriguing bit of future science to my own imaginary telastids. Maybe there will be more Phylra science in the remaining books of the Ascendancy Trilogy (not this one).

Next: Star Trek fan fiction for the 2017 reboot.

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