Intriguing analysis of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and its central flaw.
From M. Keith Booker’s Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (2001) #scifi#sciencefiction#Marxism#history
“In short, Asimov, via Seldon, seems unable to envision any real historical change: one reason why Seldon can presumably predict the future is that people in the future are no different from people in the present. Indeed, the one time Seldon’s predictions fail is when the Mule, whose mind does work differently, comes along…
…Ultimately, then, Asimov’s psychohistory is neither an extension of Marxism to greater scientific validity, per Wollheim, nor reversion to the vulgar Marxism of the 1930s, per Elkins. It is, instead, a simplistic, essentially ahistorical mod that has nevertheless been influenced by grand historical meta narratives of the sort proposed by Marx…
…Somw is this ahistorical simplicity might be attributed to Asimov’s own lack of sophistication. After all, he began writing the tales of the trilogy in his early twenties. By the time the volumes of the trilogy were published in book form, he had a doctorate in chemistry, but that is hardly the kind of education designed to give him a sophisticated understanding of the historical process.”
Certainly, SF is a play with "what if?", not what will be. In service to this question, it might even stretch theory a bit - it makes you think. It does not need to be true in the strictest sense.
Second, I am also not sure that "historical process" as mentioned in the critique is as clear cut as it's made out to be. We are still learning about variants from the past which would not fit models of, say, twenty years ago.
@kiwi2002 he imagines a future in a perpetual state of stasis in which people have identical psychological makeups regardless of the era in which they live. Not sure how that’s explained by “what if.”
I am a historian who, while not terribly obsessed with Asimov, IS interested in studying SF takes on “how history works.”
@kiwi2002 As I explained to someone else, the scholar's argument is a bit different than the blurb represents -- he is partly responding to other scholars. He is trying to make an argument that Asimov departs from Marx in some substantial ways, and one way is to remove real historical change from the analysis of the future.
@kiwi2002 there’s a PDF of the book online — this is one small paragraph of a much larger argument. I posted this one because I got a laugh from the snark….
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