Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy in Speculative Fiction Part 1

By G.R. Nanda

These days, I find that one of the best ways to spend my time is reading. As a writer, it’s important to verse myself in prose and storytelling in order to become better at my craft. As a lover of storytelling, it’s just plain old fun to immerse myself in the world of a science fiction book.

Since the Coronavirus pandemic started, it’s just been fun to lose myself in a completely different world. It’s a great way to exist during today’s pandemic when it seems like COVID has a stranglehold on our own world.

Science fiction and fantasy are in many ways sibling genres in the broader umbrella genre of speculative fiction. Science fiction is a genre that has inherited quite a bit from fantasy works such as The Lord of the Rings. Science fiction has always explored the cerebral and the expansive when it comes to human beings, history, science and technology. Sometimes, it’s dark and dystopian. Other times, it is hopeful and romantic, borrowing from fantasy the way George Lucas did with Star Wars. As I said in a previous post, writers can inherit ideas and themes without even knowing where they originate from. Books and writing styles are accumulative throughout generations and their artists. To view and appreciate the evolution of science fiction, it’s very useful to look at its roots. I find that while content and ideas are explored in much of the same ways throughout time periods, it’s the aesthetic that’s distinct in writers from different time periods.

In order to learn about the roots of science fiction, look no further than the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov.

After Verne, Wells and Shelley, science fiction was reinvigorated and made more respectable again by writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov. Many saw science fiction as part of a pulp genre of extravagant adventure stories that was nothing more than that– campy adventure stories that appealed to mostly male fantasies.

Asimov was one of the science fiction writers who helped changed the perception of sci-fi in the mainstream. He alongside the like of writers such as Heinlein and Clarke wrote concept oriented stories that used real scientific concepts and knowledge to explore and extrapolate upon the potential of scientific, political and technological developments in a narrative prose format.

The people who saw sci-fi as campy lumped science fiction in an umbrella of campy adventure and fantasy stories. It is fair to say that they saw fantasy as campy as well. To generalize this mass of thoughts and attitude in mainstream culture, this group saw speculative fiction– fiction involving elements that are not real in our own world, as silly day dreams for what this group probably perceived to be an adolescent, childish audience.

It is not hard to imagine a large middle aged father sitting in front of a boxed television set, watching a Philly’s game and yelling at his geeky teenage son to,

“Grow the hell up! There’re no spaceships or Eagles from Middle-Earth waiting for you. Get your head out of the clouds and get to work! Go play ball with the boys and make yer old man proud!”

This is a stereotypical sentiment, but stereotypes are based in truth. Fantasy and science fiction books are not assigned as often a lot of realistic fiction books in school. In all fairness, science fiction and fantasy as we know it has not had the same amount of time to establish itself as prominent genres as say, realistic literary fiction which has been around forever, always taking on the realistic contexts of its own time.

As a little kid, reading Harry Potter was slightly taboo, which made it even more fun to check out a Harry Potter book from the library and read it. It was seen as too mature for anyone who hadn’t yet left middle school or at least reached the age of 11. As a result of this common idea among my schoolteachers, the books I was assigned to read for school were almost never as interesting as all the thick action packed middle-grade fantasy books I read on my own. This changed in 7th grade when I was, I think for the first time, even assigned a science fiction book, The Giver by Lois Lowry. This was also when I started to read classics for school, starting with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Both are lovely books that really went there in terms of edginess and scope for the times in which they came out. The Giver is a dark Brave New Worldesque look at utopia starring children while A Christmas Carol is a stark look at elite selfishness and Victorian poverty with a dash of the fantastical.

Not all school systems in America follow similar curriculums, however, based on my own experiences, I wonder if schoolteachers and administrators are afraid of students reading the edgy and out there until they have reached a maturity when they are decidedly ready for it. Fantasy and science fiction is most definitely out there.

Again, this is not always the case as many schools have included and are including science fiction and fantasy as a part of reading curriculums. I completely understand the priority for teaching the classics and in all fairness, science fiction and fantasy as we know it today, has not had as much time to become prominent as say Shakespeare or Dickens, even though Shakespeare and Dickens both use elements of fantasy in certain stories.

Many of the great figures in science fiction history, such as Asimov, have no doubt been aware of their genre’s appearance in the public eye. Some figures, including Asimov, have been dismissal of fantasy’s logistical grounded frameworks and capabilities. While not downright bashing the genre of fantasy, they have stated what they perceive to be inadequacies or limitations in the fantasy genre, where in those same areas, science fiction triumphs.

“The major distinction between fantasy and science fiction is, simply, that science fiction uses one, or a very, very few new postulates, and develops the rigidly consistent logical consequences of these limited postulates. Fantasy makes its rules as it goes along . . . The basic nature of fantasy is ‘The only rule is, make up a new rule any time you need one!’ The basic rule of science fiction is ‘Set up a basic proposition—then develop its consistent, logical consequences,’ ” wrote John W. Campbell, the famous science fiction editor.

While Asimov wrote many essays on fantasy and fairy tale tropes and edited a science fiction and fantasy magazine called Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy, he did express reservations about fantasy in certain instances. In an essay, Asimov wrote that he believed that sword and sorcery tales usually value brawn over brains, unlike science fiction.

Campbell and Asimov both assert that fantasy does not adhere to concrete logistics, with it’s fantastical elements, which might have been true with some early fantasy works, but is clearly not the case today when you can look at all of the different complex magic systems to be found for the worlds of fantasy fiction since the days of Lewis and Tolkien. Campbell and Asimov both assert that science fiction is more grounded than fantasy, which inevitably implies that it is more meditative on reality.

I strongly disagree with this.

It’s possible that folks like Asimov and Campbell in the early sci-fi community wanted to make sure that their genre, despite sharing tales of alien worlds with fantasy, were not lumped into the same perception of fantasy that many had, perceiving it as campy, silly, nonsensical and useless in the face of real life.

To be continued in Part 2

SOURCES

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/fantasy.html

Brandon Sanderson’s “First Law of Magic Systems” https://www.brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/