There I was, stuck in bed healing from an arm broken in five places, and the only audiobook I could find while drugged out was Foundation and Empire. After disliking Foundation, I was not excited for this book—I sat on it without reading it for four years. Then, I tried to pump myself up to it by reminding myself how good of a short story writer Asimov is—this book is a collection of two novellas—and how much I liked two of the three novellas in The Gods Themselves. And after I turned on Foundation and Empire, I found out that I enjoyed it. These notes are trying to figure out why.
It’s certainly not that he has vastly improved as a writer. He’s not deplorable here, there’s no massive intro-info dump to drag the whole book down. But he still uses simple verbs too much and doesn’t explore the dictionary or sentence structures enough to keep me interested in his writing. His sentences are often redundant: he still insults and patronizes the reader’s intelligence by explaining too much. For instance, an Asimov tendency is to physically describe his characters—who are futuristic humans who have different fashion cues than we do—then take two more sentences or paragraphs to describe how that physical description should be interpreted by the reader. He tells some things poorly. Things like this annoy, especially when the storytelling is good and these descriptions distract.
And that is exactly where Asimov starts to shine here, the story pacing and scope. The first tale, “The General”, tells the story of the Empire’s last effort to seize The Foundation. The story apparently loosely follows the lines of Byzantine history regarding Belisarius (the General is named Bel Riose) and Justinian. The story is told from the perspective of two captives of Bel Riose: one a double agent, another an old politician who is forced to help the general because his family is hostage.
As a sequel to the earlier five short stories, this story retains a Foundation trader as a main character. Yet, here Asimov uses the switch of narrative focus to military science fiction as a springboard to start to explore themes other than economic or political ones with his series. Political themes still exist here, but the focus is on military intrigue. This variety is much needed, and it contributes to my enjoyment of the story. Where Asimov already created a vibrant, complex world, this story finally starts to use that complexity to explore other paths, and its narrative benefits from this exploration by being engaging for its own sake. I’m not saying that writing stories with easy to grasp risks—like military science fiction—is better, I’m just saying that Asimov does it well here, and he had already trod the economic and political whodunnit in the other five stories.
The second story is “The Mule”, where I really started to enjoy the storytelling. “The General” was a good foray into new territory. This is a good short story, full stop. Another military and political drama, this time two Foundation citizens save a clown from his master, an ambitious mutant known as The Mule, who has it out for the Foundation. They end up being entirely unable to stop him from conquering the Foundation, and when Seldon’s Crisis Speech is about a different crisis, the power goes out on Terminus and The Mule takes over. His power comes from mental powers to affect the brains of others. The first Foundation is helpless because they are physical scientists. However, the four heroes attempt to find the mythical Second Foundation—full of psychologists and psychohistorians—to seek help or warn them. One of the heroes dies while trying to share that he found the Second Foundation, killed by one of the other four, because another of the other four has been The Mule all along.
Typically, Asimov would just end it there. Instead, he spends a few pages actually marching back through the story and laying out the inconsistent and uncharacteristic choices the characters made that led this one to realize who The Mule was—portrayed as an interview between The Mule and the murderer. And then the friendship shown overpowers the villain’s sense of revenge and he lets his two friends go alive, so that he can then go continue his search for the Second Foundation, the unknown threat. This backtracking and resolution is a vast improvement over all six short stories that have come before in this series. I certainly had noticed that some choices seemed uncharacteristic, but honestly, based on Asimov’s usual writing skill, I thought it was just a lack of clarity. To have Asimov take me back through where his characters erred in hiding their identities is brilliant, and provides a nice cap on the story. Yet even the Mule’s reasons for letting the Darell’s go seems inconsistent with the tale of woe that led him to try and take over the galaxy.
The other thing so strong about this story is the length. The length allows some complexity and allows the content to have impact on the story itself. Instead of trying to do too much with too little, Asimov writes a longer tale, probably a novella more than a short story, so that he can discuss more of the implications of what he’s talking about. This allows things that happen early on to come back with power at the end, allowing the reader to feel that time has passed and the story is coming full circle, helping things make sense without more info dumping. Asimov doesn’t abandon concise narrative though. One thing he’s always done is allow the reader to figure some of the narrative out, to reflect on earlier parts and gain insight through hints dropped by Asimov. Though he often spends a lot of time spelling things out too far, it’s usually only description or character based.
This story also gets away from retelling Roman history in the Foundation series. Though the Mule can be analogous to charismatic figures from history, his specific superpowers do not line up with any known figure from history. This is more of a supervillain story, from the pages of comic books, and less of a historical narrative. But there still exists one obvious example from history: the Herodotus conclusion that soft times create soft men. After a number of Seldon Crises have passed, like the one in “The General”, and the Foundation realizes that none of their efforts were actually needed to survive some of the crises, they start to trust in the Seldon Plan more and more, becoming almost religious about it, yet also becoming complacent, losing some of their drive. The independent traders complain about the central government’s complacency and plan a revolution, a rebellion, yet are utterly derailed by The Mule.
I think this tenor and depth of writing suits Asimov, and the length is perfect for his voice. I quite like “The Mule” as a novella, and may go back and read it again soon. And this encouraged me to give the first book another try. Much improved, still bad writing, but the storytelling carries the writing well.
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