Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Another book composed of two novellas. These two are both about people searching for the Second Foundation, that of the psychologists, mentalists, and psychohistorians.

Part 1: “Search by The Mule”
The Mule returns to continue his obsessive search for the Second Foundation. Convinced they threaten his power, he has spent the five years since “The Mule” not expanding his empire much, not knowing where he can safely strike. He’s led on a merry chase by the Second Foundation that ends with his conversion to a benevolent dictator so that he can live out his days.

I’m not sure what to make of this story. I enjoyed reading it, but thinking back on my time reading the book—I couldn’t do my notes right away because of my broken arm—I recall this story dimly. It’s a cross and double cross, the final defeat of the Mule. And Asimov’s boring writing style does help keep the plot clear. But it still doesn’t thrill. It’s like somebody once said, “work on your descriptions, Isaac,” and he took that to mean, “add more boring sentences to your descriptions, Isaac.”

One thing here is that where “The Mule” talked about the soft people of the Foundation becoming too reliant upon Seldon’s Plan psychologically, Tazenda is a hard world to live on, a farming world full of snow and high winds, and it clearly creates hard people. These farmers are salt-of-the-earth folk, open with what little they have, used to isolation, and set in their ways.

The other point here is that the Mule’s downfall is precipitated on his inability to imagine people with power not wanting to use it—he can’t imagine people unlike himself. So, in his search for the Second Foundation, he’s always looking for a kingdom, a galactic power of some sort, even if he does look for a small one rather than a successful one. The Second Foundation instead hides in obscurity. This allows them to strike without warning, to plan safely, and to have time to set up their trap. In other words, because the Mule assumes other mentalists must be like himself, he falls. Similarly, because Seldon assumed that human reactions wouldn’t change, and yet the Mule was able to do just that for the ruling class of the Foundation, the Seldon Plan almost falls apart. These twin themes drive the point home well: just because you think you’re right, don’t expect others to rely on your same premises. This a great tactic too: both cause and effect in the plot are saying the same thing. The cause shows the Mule that assuming others agree with his view of reality, which both brings him to power and causes his downfall; while the effect shows the Foundation Seldon’s premise of human reactions, which both brings them to power and almost causes their downfall. Right now I can’t think of another book that pulls off this tactic, and it’s sensational.

Part 2: "Search by the Foundation"
Arkady Darell, a 14 year old girl and the granddaughter of Bayta Darell from “The Mule”, searches for the Second Foundation on behalf of the First Foundation. Some Foundationers want to eliminate the Second Foundation as a threat, they resent their influence and wish to act independently. Meanwhile, the Second Foundation struggles to figure out how to right Seldon’s Plan after the First Foundationers come to rely on their oversight for safety, sinking further into complacency and softness. The solution is to convince the Foundation that the Second Foundation exists underground on Terminus, then let them kill those Second Foundationers and think that they have won, when in reality the Second Foundation has stayed hidden and powerful behind a human shield of martyrs.

I think in one way Asimov improved as a writer here: every time I think, “huh, that’s strange”, it turns out to be intentional and part of the plot—the Second Foundation taking control of Arkady’s flight, being able to get her out of the spaceport, etc. Whereas in earlier stories there are always a number of things that are incongruous all the way through the story—the most egregious of which that I have come across is the “investigation” in Caves of Steel. In the preceding books of the Foundation Series, there are many of these incongruities, only a few of which are able to be post facto rationalized by the reader. Yet here he seems to have his writing consistent in a way that allows his storytelling to really succeed.

At the same time, the writing is still laughably bad. At one point he sets up a chase scene, and it’s getting exciting. He’s building tension well, and using quick sentences to drive the pace forward. The chase is getting more and more intense. I’m admiring that he seems to have written something a bit better than his norm. And then, this sentence, “She was running now—running wildly—searching madly for an unoccupied public booth at which one could press a button for public conveyance.” I burst into laughter and laughed for ten minutes. Asimov uses three phrases to support this tension ("running now—running wildly—searching madly", which show his typical tendency to redundantly insult the reader’s intelligence) yet subverts all of that tension by allowing himself an aside about the uses of a public booth (”at which one could press a button for public conveyance”). This disappointing lack of followthrough with the tone and scene—here even in a single sentence—shows why I read Asimov in spite of the writing. As Asimov puts it himself, “I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be 'clear'. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize.”

Yet, and this is something I need to think about more, something I need to discover more about, Asimov tells a story well. Yes, he has his “public booth” moments, but those are fairly rare—mostly because there’s often little in the way of chasing or fighting. Asimov writes dialogue and monologue, interspersed with sparsely narrated action. And he punctuates those typical scenes in his stories with action, but often has a hard time convincing the reader of the import of the action. It’s as if he thinks two or three phrases alone will set the reader on a new track, “What? I said ‘he was being followed now.’ After 30 pages of languid reflection, why isn’t me writing, ‘he is being followed’ enough to skyrocket the tension?” Tension is something to build, something to create and nurture. And Asimov isn’t great at it in any of the first three Foundation books. Yet I will still state that he tells a story well.

I’m trying to figure out why I think he tells a good story. The science fiction I like the best is that which explores characters and ideas. His dialogue explains the stories, and this helps focus his narratives on exploring ideas. So, I am finding that I personally tend to not mind Asimov’s poor writing because the ideas often carry his stories. His clear plots tend to ruminate on ideas more than human psychology. His characters are often two dimensional analogies for aspects or interpretations of the ideas. His window dressing, the worlds he creates, tend to act like his characters in being sketchy analogies of aspects of ideas. So, I think that’s probably why I find he tells good stories: the rigid focus on ideas. His dialogue, plots, characters, and worldbuilding all stay rigidly focused on the overall idea of the story. Everything is in service to the story—even to a fault in Asimov’s writing: there’s often a lack of applicable conclusions to draw from the stories because they are so farfetched that applying the Mule’s superpowers to day-to-day life or history is a stretch; the dialogue seems forced and doesn’t explain the samey-sounding characters so much as the story; the characters are typically caricatures and lack interest; and the worldbuilding leaves much to the imagination of the reader. But those are all the flipsides of the specific ways Asimov succeeds at telling stories.

There are only two memorable characters in the entire first three Foundation books: Arkady Darell and the Mule. The Mule, though driven by revenge for his mutated appearance forcing an outsider nature, is slightly inconsistent. He’s still a great example of treating the villain like a human character because all people are heroes to themselves. But Arkady seems consistent, strong, and a well-written character. She is headstrong, intelligent, curious, and trying to find her place in the world. She knows what she wants and Asimov allows that to enter the story. It’s refreshing to finally see characters in Asimov’s writing, and I hope there are more characters in his future stories.

The themes here center around paranoia and the already-mentioned Herodotus conclusion about softness. The whole narrative tries to resolve the softness problem, but the resolution comes about because a few people still retain their drive, despite the soft times of the Foundation at large. And instead of subverting the trope, the efforts of the Second Foundation reinforce the trope, hinting that Asimov believes Herodotus’ conclusion to be inescapable, but short-circuitable. These few hard people of the Foundation are hard because of their paranoia. Scared of the power of the Second Foundation, their cadre of pseudo-revolutionaries sparks this whole adventure tale. It’s difficult to determine what Asimov is trying to say about paranoia though—useful, but not to be trusted too far? Useful only when paired with accurate, intellectual analysis of reality?

Conclusion
“The Mule” and “Search by the Foundation” are the strongest stories of this series so far. Strong enough that I now want to go back and re-read the earlier tales and see if I missed something. “Search by the Mule” is a good tale, but aspects seem inconsequential to the story—why a frozen farming world? I think Asimov is a bad writer, and in my research have realized that he only ever did one draft, essentially, after imagining the ending, then the beginning, and exploring how to connect the two. His work could’ve really been improved by more revisions, but his storytelling can be superb. Having now read the Foundation Trilogy, or the first three books of the seven that Asimov wrote about the Foundation, I can’t really see the reasons for the one-off “Best Series of All Time” Hugo award, but it’s not a bad series. Maybe the later four books in the series will help me enjoy them because they come when Asimov is much more experienced as a writer. He has to be better later. He can’t be worse, can he?

Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein

A lot of Heinlein’s earlier work was tied up in Juvenile novels for Putnam, and this was one of those. I’m fine with that though. Starship Troopers was one that Putnam didn’t want to publish, breaking the relationship between author and publisher; and that’s a good book, whoever the intended audience was.

However, this one seemed juvenile in the way it engaged meaningful themes: namely, it didn’t. For instance, almost two thirds of the population of Ganymede died at one point, at least 24,000 of 37,000 people. Heinlein dropped that ball like a hot potato:

Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds—but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn't actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity's books have got to balance.

The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we'd all be a little hungry by and by.

They dumped us back at the Receiving Station and a second group of parties got ready to leave. I looked for a quiet spot to try to get some sleep.

That’s how the whole situation was dealt with. Heinlein allowed a bit more about the main characters’ sister and his neighbors, but the whole episode happened out of nowhere, and went nowhere.

It’s indicative of what I hated about this novel: it read like it was initially serialized in the Boy Scouts of America magazine. Which it was. That’s not inherently a bad thing. But it affected the novel in two ways: first, each chapter had a reference to scouting in it—usually well integrated, but sometimes a little awkwardly shoehorned in there. Second, it also meant that every chapter was its own self-contained thing: this book read like a comic book that slavishly adhered to the twenty-four page pacing. I didn’t know it was serialized when I was going into it, but I guessed it by the time I was done reading it.

Let me go through a couple of examples of placed where Heinlein should have expanded:

1. Two-thirds of the population dies.
2. Evidence of extraterrestrial life is discovered and saves the main characters’ life.
3. The spaceship Mayflower gets a hole in it.
4. The dead woman Anne.
5. The shotgun wedding of George and Molly.
6. The weird way that George and Bill interact.
7. Bill’s offer to go back to earth with his step sister.

As annoying as the pacing and depth was, I finished reading this novel, and even enjoyed parts of it. Primarily, the whole is organized around the nuts and bolts of terraforming: politically, ecologically, physically, the engineering behind it, and the human side of it. What most attracted me was this human side of it. The trip from Earth to Ganymede had some pretty memorable, Heinlein lines.

But then things quieted down and I was almost happy in a miserable sort of way.

+++

And there I got my first view of Earth from space. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I expected. There it was, looking just like it does in the geography books, or maybe more the way it does in the station announcements of Super-New-York TV station. And yet it was different. I guess I would say it was like the difference between being told about a good hard kick in the rear and actually being kicked. Not a transcription. Alive.

+++

The people from the Daedalus and the Icarus were supposed to be stowed away by the time we got there, but they weren't and the passageways were traffic jams. A traffic jam when everybody is floating, and you don't know which end is up, is about eight times as confusing as an ordinary one.

So, despite everything that made this a bad novel—it didn’t have a plot so much as episodes, it didn’t have characters because it examined colonization from one sixteen year old boy's point of view instead, and it didn’t have much relatable to a reader who isn’t colonizing Ganymede—the small amount of human interest sections were very welcome. Most of them were also dropped balls but hey, it was a short book and I finished it.

Not his best, not by a long shot. But it was fascinating for me to look back at some of his early stuff and see how it differed with his later stuff.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

For Morgan

1. It's always difficult to discern tactics and writers' lessons from a series of short stories like this. I've read some of these before and had been curious if there were any others. The continuity of this fix-up novel is in the continuity of location: it's plot concerns human colonization, abandonment, and re-colonization of Mars. The theme of each story differs and only a broad theme can be sketched of human attitudes towards home, archaeological and natural resources, and the unfamiliar. Perhaps the theme is best distilled in the story "—And the Moon be Still as Bright", in which an introverted idealist decides to sabotage the fourth expedition in order to preserve Mars's natural and archaeological resources, all because of his dissatisfaction with what his companions reveal about aspects of earth culture, home. As each crew member reacts differently in the face of the unknown, this story best sums up what is my best guess at the overarching theme. The whole conglomeration of short stories works for me, and the frame of progressing time, specifically stated in the titles, helps keep it legible and moving. It's effective that the novel also reaches a sort of height in plot action when the world goes to war.

2. The shifting of perspective from earth to Mars and back a few times really shows context well. By referring back to earth's events through onscreen earth stories, the themes are shown affecting all humanity, not only the Martian pioneers. This is effective to help give context and relatable, relative import to the Mars based chronology.

3. A few characters are well developed: Ylla, Spender, Captain Wilder, Parkhill, the old man who converses with Thomas at the gas station, Father Peregrin, and the father in "The Million-Year Picnic." These are all well written because they exist in enough different situations that give them opportunities to show their complexity. Being a series of short stories, many characters are not allowed enough time to breathe and define themselves as the point and scope of some stories does not require more than a two dimensional representation of characters. However, even in that two-dimensional aspect, Bradbury is trying to draw out something about us as humans that relates today.

4. The book comes off like a writer's playground: Bradbury keeps returning to the settings and themes as if worrying at a piece of popcorn stuck between his teeth. It's as if the setting is familiar enough to Bradbury to allow these very different stories to exist together, to allow him to experiment with a new idea, a new character, or a new situation in this safe zone where the conglomeration of all the stories is better than them alone and separate. This is because together each idea discussed adds another dimension to the themes, another layer of importance, and a fresh point of reference in the chronology. Therefore, these stories seem like a deck of cards where a new one can be shuffled in to support the whole, though it maybe be very different. [This appears to be how his publishers have treated these stories as well with seemingly every publishing of this fix-up containing a unique set of stories. I sort of wish all his Martian stories were collected in all the versions.]

5. The writing is efficient and communicative, but I don't think it ever obtains greatness. The plodding of some of the stories is solid, allowing the theme a slow reveal of importance that kept me thinking after I was finished reading. But the writing did not. I don't remember a phrase or description of particular beauty, but the ideas came across loud and clear. Wait, that's not quite true, as I just now remember that passage describing the silhouettes in paint of a family caught in an atomic blast in California, and that's a beautifully poignant passage that is well written. But it's the only one that I can remember.

"Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer. The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light."

6. Where Foundation fails for lack of driving theme, this succeeds by having one. But it plays with that theme, examining it from this way and that like a three dimensional kaleidoscope. Bradbury doesn't overdo it though—some characters are allowed actions outside of that theme that provide a mental break for the reader, which helps make the themes more palatable, but also adds some context. And some stories support the chronology more than they support the theme. This is a strong tactic, allowing these situations together to have more believability through variety than they do separate from each other.

Collected Sonnets by Edna Saint Vincent Millay

1. Her early sonnets are often emotionally descriptive of those emotional outbursts we can come to regret. But rationality and long-term context often intercede in the volta to frame the emotions. Because of the emotion in the first part, this can create relief in the second, a wry reflection on the moment and thoughts explained in the first. It comes off somewhat like my emo juvenalia that I have burned ages ago.

2. Many of the poems in the first half of the book concern lovers and ex-lovers—always separated by the death of one of the people, or the death of love itself. This becomes a bit repetitive because it is hard for me to stay on such a keyed up emotional plane for that long.  In the second half she seems to start using sonnets rather than being used by them, and I think it's generally an improvement.

3. It is hard to stay on this heightened emotional plane, especially when the language is often wooden, ridiculous, and overwrought. Reading just the first lines in the back of the book makes me burst out laughing: "Count them unclean, these tears that turn no mill," "A wagon stopped before the house; she heard," "Gazing upon him now, severe and dead," "That Love at length should find me out and bring," "Night is my sister, and how deep in love."

4. But there are still times when a poem or two really works—in this weird, stilted and archaic language that she often uses. For instance, on page 170, she uses the volta to shift time, not the focus of the poem: a tiger prowls around the house at night, but then, when the sky begins to lighten, the tone shifts from forthcoming doom to hope as the volta moves the plot along in time. This is fantastic!

5. Her narrative sonnets and narrative sonnet sequences are good. I think an interesting part was the closing sonnet sequence, "Epitaph for the Race of Man". Is this some sort of Arthur Clarke science fiction sonnet sequence? Most of the poems in this sequence were poor, but I was intrigued by the attempt. In her sonnet sequences she often uses the volta to progress the plot, meaning that many of these poems have two plot points, two actions within each poem. This shows something that I never suspected—the sonnet can encourage narrative poetry. This is something that I will use because it's engaging as all get out. It allows the poet a couple of opportunities per sonnet to shift the speed of the action.

6. Her end-stopped end-rhymes are often annoying. But when she uses enjambed end-rhymes, it works better. I think it might partially be her choice of rhyming words, but it's probably my own fatigue at end-rhymed poems, which isn't fair to her. She is willing to experiment syllabically, but not with end-rhymes. And that's disappointing, because when she does experiment it stands out, and I wanted more experimentation and less end-rhyming.

7. I most enjoyed the poems on page 60, 100, 101, 112, 140, 154, and 170.