The First Foundation, Part 3

In the fall of 1941, John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction found himself in an enviable position. Two of his writers—Jack Williamson and Isaac Asimov—had come to him independently with the idea of a series of stories based on the rise and fall of a Galactic Empire, which would provide the perfect background for one of the editor’s pet notions, the development of a true science of history. At first, he seemed happy to let the two of them work on the problem simultaneously. Asimov had once asked him: “How can you bear not to write?” Campbell replied enthusiastically: “I discovered something better, Asimov. I’m an editor…When I was a writer, I could only write one story at a time. Now I can write fifty stories at a time. There are fifty writers out there writing stories they’ve talked with me about. There are fifty stories I’m working on.” As Asimov recalled years later:

That was the way he saw us all. We were extensions of himself; we were his literary clones; each of us doing, in his or her own way, things Campbell felt needed doing; things that he could do but not quite the way we could; things that got done in fifty different varieties of ways.

On another occasion, Campbell clarified his position: “When I give an idea to a writer and it comes back to me exactly the way I gave it to him, I don’t give that writer any more ideas. I don’t want it my way; I can do that myself. I want my idea his way.” And when he set both Asimov and Williamson to work on the theme of the cycles of galactic civilizations, he may have been hoping that each writer would deliver a different take on a premise that could go in any number of directions.

Campbell often farmed out the same idea to multiple writers, both to get a variety of stories and as a kind of insurance policy to increase the odds that at least one author would follow through, and in this case, it turned out to be a shrewd decision. After writing “Breakdown,” which had been conceived as the first installment of a series, Williamson became stuck. As he recounts in his memoir Wonder’s Child:

Encouraged by the way [“Breakdown”] went, I planned a sequel. I called that Star of Empire. It was to carry the same historic theme to a larger scale, picturing the fall of a vast interstellar civilization. By early fall, with pages enough—certainly with content enough—I could see that it was going badly wrong, though the reasons baffled me.

Williamson shared his concerns with Campbell, who responded in an important letter dated October 7, 1941. Noting that the genre was changing rapidly, Campbell advised Williamson—one of the few writers of the old guard to make the transition—to think about rebranding himself, perhaps with the use of a pen name:

If you gave yourself a clean-cut break, became a wholly new personality—your own, present, fully developed personality—your whole psychology of approach would be entirely different…When you write as a different person, you half-consciously throw out elements of your old style…You’re starting now on a completely new type of material…Start a new—your own present—personality to tell it.

Williamson responded that the idea of a pseudonym was “worth thinking over,” and he confessed that he was still having trouble with Star of Empire. Campbell advised him to set it aside for now: “You’ll probably get more and better work done when things begin to stick.” It proved to be good advice. But when you read between the lines, you can see that Campbell was also gently nudging Williamson away from the series that they had discussed. By then, Asimov had already written “Foundation,” which was submitted on September 8 and accepted almost immediately. Asimov had intuitively attacked the theme from a different angle, and in many ways, his approach was more promising. Instead of starting on earth in the near future, as Williamson had done in “Breakdown,” “Foundation” was set tens of thousands of years from now, in an empire with a population in the quadrillions, which provided the necessary mass of humanity for the statistical equations of psychohistory. (It was also an all-human galaxy, with no aliens, which Asimov later attributed to a desire to avoid Campbell’s racially charged attempts to demonstrate mankind’s superiority over extraterrestrials. But it’s equally true that it allowed him to deal only with human psychology, and that adding intelligent aliens to the mix might have made psychohistory, already a tenuous conceit, totally unworkable.) Asimov’s love of puzzles was more suited to the spirit of psychohistory, which was about posing a problem and revealing a solution, while Williamson still thought in the old, vigorous pulp terms. Most of all, Williamson was thirty-three years old, set in his ways, and living in New Mexico, while Asimov was a decade younger, compliant, and conveniently nearby in Brooklyn. If Campbell wanted to affect the course of the series, it was obvious which of these two writers would be the better vehicle.

A decade later, Williamson reworked the sequel to “Breakdown” as The Star Bridge with James Gunn, but the whole incident stands as a notable example of Campbell steering writers in one direction or another, based on where their strengths seemed to lie. (He and Williamson ended up working on three stories about antimatter, with the author writing under the pen name Will Stewart—a nod to Campbell’s old pseudonym Don A. Stuart—and the editor providing the technical background. Unlike the Foundation series, it was a collaboration that could be conducted by mail.) Asimov, in turn, was the best choice imaginable to explore psychohistory, and the stakes were about to become very high. Campbell believed that technology had introduced a new factor into history, as L. Sprague de Camp wrote in the article “The Science of Whithering”:

Societies may have behaved in a cyclic fashion until the Machine introduced such a powerful new linear factor as to start us off on a new course of historical development…There are reasons for believing that machine technology has broken whatever cyclical series existed, largely because people seem to remember and profit by experience in technical development much more than they do in political and social development.

The notion that mankind was entering a new era, characterized by an accelerating rate of change, was central to Campbell’s vision of science fiction, and psychohistory was one way of dealing with the challenges that it presented. Asimov’s motivations were far more personal, and they go a long way toward explaining why he was the right man for the job, even if he never shared his true feelings with Campbell. In an interview with Gunn in 1979, Asimov said: “I’d been living through the Hitler era in the 1930s, where no matter what anyone did, Hitler kept winning victories, and the only way that I could possibly find life bearable at the time was to convince myself that no matter what he did, he was doomed to defeat in the end. That he couldn’t win.” Gunn said: “Psychohistory is against it.” And Asimov responded: “That’s right.”

The First Foundation, Part 1

On April 16, 1941, a highly regarded science fiction author wrote a letter to the editor John W. Campbell. “Besides some shorter material, I should like to do another serial for Astounding,” the writer said, and he described what he had in mind in considerable detail:

I’m interested in theories of the growth and decay of cultures…It would be interesting, I think, to show the logical culmination of that process in an interstellar civilization. Super-perfect transportation enables the human race to concentrate in a single megalopolis—“The Ultimate City,” or “N.” It is a tremendous artificial structure, larger than a planet. Its rulers enjoy sophistication and splendor…The story would deal with a group of characters during the fall of N. Reflections of Salammbô, the fall of Rome, the Reformation, the French and American Revolutions. The battle of a few individuals to find independence, to found a new world…I don’t know as much as I would like of the philosophy of culture-cycles. Perhaps I’ll dip a little further into Spengler—if the available libraries turn out to have Decline of the West.

You might reasonably think that this writer was Isaac Asimov, whose story “Foundation” appeared in the magazine the following May—but it wasn’t. It was Jack Williamson, whose letter crossed Campbell’s desk months before Asimov made his own pitch. Williamson’s interest in “the growth and decay of cultures” led to a pair of stories, “Backlash” and “Breakdown,” that anticipated the Foundation series, but which have been almost totally forgotten. And question of why we’re still talking about Asimov’s version, while Williamson’s efforts quickly fell into relative obscurity, amounts to one of the most intriguing problems from the whole history of the golden age.

We can begin by observing that the concept of psychohistory—or a psychological science that can accurately predict future events on a mass scale—was one that Campbell had been developing for a long time. The year before, he had published an article by L. Sprague de Camp titled “The Science of Whithering,” which ran in two parts starting in the July 1940 issue of Astounding. De Camp provided an overview of such philosophers of history as Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee, and he also outlined the ideal attributes of such a science:

If there were such a science, what would it be like? It would have a body of observable facts, and would overlap with history, anthropology, sociology, economics, vital statistics, and perhaps one or two other sciences. Students of the science should be able to observe uniformities among these facts, deduce laws from these uniformities, and from the laws make predictions that are later borne out by observation.

De Camp concluded: “Let us encourage the fascinating study of whithering, in the hope that it will grow up from its present embryonic state into a big, healthy science.” A few months earlier, Heinlein had proposed a science of propaganda in his landmark novella “If This Goes On—,” which, combined with Asimov’s “Homo Sol,” prompted a fan named Lynn Bridges to presciently identify a trend toward “sociological science fiction.” Campbell and his authors were also taking an interest in “mathematical psychology,” which applied such methods on an individual scale. Asimov described the use of elaborate equations to predict behavior in the short story “The Imaginary,” which Campbell rejected, and he wrote in a letter to the magazine: “If we can understand Einstein and Hitler down to the mathematical whys and wherefores, we might try to boost along a few Einsteins and cut down on a few Hitlers, and progress might really get going.” And Campbell responded: “Psychology isn’t an exact science—but it can be.”

Fusing these two concepts together into a single story was the next logical step, and while Williamson wasn’t the earliest writer to allude to such ideas, he may have been the first to explicitly pitch a serial around it. He said in an interview years later:

I had read Spengler’s Decline of the West and several volumes of Toynbee’s study of history. Toynbee appealed to me because of his “challenge and response” notion, derived from the stimulus response theory of psychology, which enabled him to make his cultures or civilizations into entities that had regular, predictable lifetimes. This was plausible to him and to a lot of people studying history at the time. It created the possibility that one might be able to get a kind of handle on the future—an idea I could see could be applied as a means of forecasting a future history. So I based “Breakdown” on Spengler and Toynbee, and I wrote a drama of the decline and fall of a future civilization. It seemed obvious that since people seem so endlessly fascinated with the eclipse of Greece and the fall of Rome, the notion of our own civilization falling into ruin would naturally have a similarly strong emotional appeal.

Before “Breakdown,” Williamson wrote and sold “Backlash,” a routine time travel story that reveals traces of the same train of thought. As one character says: “Years ago, when we saw the totalitarian storm sweeping the world, we planned the Pantechnicon to protect one seed of civilization…It’s hidden here. A scientific Shangri-La, to be a lamp of culture through the dark age ahead.” This sounds a lot like Asimov’s Foundation. In his autobiography Wonder’s Child, Williamson dismisses the story as “undistinguished,” and its familiar notion of changing the present by targeting a “node” in the past—which Williamson himself had explored in “The Legion of Time”—is far less interesting than the idea of forecasting the future. But it was still on newsstands on August 1, 1941, when Asimov came to Campbell with his proposal for a story about the decline and fall of a Galactic Empire, and it’s hard not to believe that it was on both men’s minds.

Williamson’s novelette “Breakdown,” which appeared at the end of the year in the January 1942 issue, is even more noteworthy. As the earth is consumed by the flames of revolution, a character named Melkart, a more sinister Hari Seldon, grimly tells the ruler of all mankind: “You have made the solar system into a laboratory for the test of my politicotechnic theories.” And when asked if he understands what is taking place, Melkart responds:

I’ve known for thirty years…Old Giovanni Vico had a glimmer of it, with his “law of cycles,” back in the seventeen hundreds. Spengler and Toynbee glimpsed it. Sprague, later, saw farther. But it remained to me to reduce the laws of the rise and fall of human cultures to the exact science that I call destiny.

Melkart, notably, is unable to change the course of history—he can only predict it. “Breakdown” ends with the ruler escaping the planet to found “a tiny seed of civilization” among the stars, of which Williamson writes in Wonder’s Child:

The story sprang from my fascination that Arnold Toynbee’s notion that civilizations are super-organisms with lifespans of centuries. As I adapted the idea, the life of every culture is its own historic purpose…In my story, that vitalizing purpose had been the human conquest of the solar system; with the conquest complete, its destiny fulfilled, the space empire breaks down. I felt a sense of truth in that, and enjoyed the sense of tragic drama. Encouraged by the way it went, I planned a sequel.

But the sequel was never published, at least not in Astounding, and in the meantime, Asimov’s “Foundation” had appeared. Tomorrow, I’ll delve further into the issue of why one man’s vision was eclipsed by the other, and the surprising light that this sheds on the tangled origins of psychohistory.