Nuclear Warfare In Science Fiction

 Novels involving nuclear warfare:

The World Set Free by HG Wells;
On The Beach by Nevil Shute;
Ape And Essence by Aldous Huxley;
Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury;
Twilight World by Poul Anderson (see here).

In CS Lewis' The Hideous Strength, first published in 1945, World Wars I and II "'...were simply the first two of the sixteen major wars which are scheduled to take place in this century.'"
-Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London, 1955), p. 157.

Robert Heinlein predicted "Mutual Assured Destruction" in "Solution Unsatisfactory" and described free men continuing to fight after a nuclear war in "Free Men."

In Isaac Asimov's future history, a far future radioactive Earth probably resulted from a near future nuclear war - although Asimov revised the history later.

In James Blish's A Case Of Conscience, populations wind up living underground in permanent city-sized nuclear air raid "Shelters," even though nuclear war is avoided.

In Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history, the Great Patriotic Wars of 2103 end the CoDominium and are followed by the Exodus of the Fleet so they sound like a delayed World War III.

In SM Stirling's Draka timeline, the three major wars of the twentieth century are not numbered but named - the Great War, the Eurasian War and the Final War.

Harry Turtledove describes Anson MacDonald (Robert Heinlein) fighting on after Stirling's Final War.

In Alan Moore's V For Vendetta, "England prevails" under fascist rule after opting out of a nuclear exchange whereas, in the same author's Watchmen, a faked inter-dimensional invasion prevents a nuclear war.

The Must Reads

When I was a teenager in the 1960's, I wanted to read everything by Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Robert Heinlein and Clifford Simak. (Heinlein had not yet completely degenerated.) I caught up with Simak, read his, at that time, most recent publication and then forgot about him although he continued churning out novels, probably as many again after that. I thought that he had become repetitive and self-parodying. James Blish, whom I continued to revere, disliked Simak's three instances of talking dogs.

Poul Anderson was not then among my Must Reads. I read some of his works but not others. Now, of the writers mentioned so far, only Blish and Anderson are Must Reads and Anderson, because of his volume and range, is the only one about whom I can blog indefinitely.

After the 1960's, he wrote a lot more and my respect for what he had written increased. Once, when I browsed a novel of his, the blurb described an interstellar spaceship crew returning to Earth to discover that a Social Welfare Party had gained office in their absence. To me at the time, this did not sound sufficiently new so I returned it to the bookshop shelf. Let me end with a question: can any reader of this blog identify that novel from the description given here? Or maybe I am mistaken and it was not an Anderson novel? 

Ad Astra

Apart from "The...," what is the most frequent word in science fiction titles? There are references to "Mars," "Space" and "Time" and a few to "Sky":

Heinlein
Farmer In The Sky
Tunnel In The Sky
Orphans Of The Sky
(and Red Planet)

Blish
"Get Out Of My Sky"
(and Welcome To Mars)

Anderson
"Hunters Of The Sky Cave"
(and "The Martian Crown Jewels")

But the most frequent single word has to be "Star" or "Stars":

Aldiss
Starswarm

Heinlein
Star Beast
Starship Troopers
Time For The Stars
Starman Jones
Double Star

Asimov
The Stars Like Dust
(and "The Martian Way")

Blish
The Star Dwellers
Mission To The Heart Stars
They Shall Have Stars
A Life For The Stars
The Seedling Stars
Fallen Star
And All The Stars A Stage
Star Trek (script adaptations)
"Detour To The Stars"

Anderson
Trader To The Stars
We Claim these Stars!
The Enemy Stars
Star Fox
Harvest Of Stars
The Stars Are Also Fire
The Fleet Of Stars
Star Ways
World Without Stars
Starfarers

Anderson (titles of sometimes overlapping collections)
The Dark Between The Stars
Kinship With The Stars
Time And Stars

Burroughs
Beyond The Farthest Star
(and ten "Mars" titles)

Bester
The Stars My Destination

Clarke
The City And The Stars
(and The Sands Of Mars)

Shaw
Wreath Of Stars 

Bulmer
Behold The Stars



Screen
Star Trek
Star Wars  

The Best SF Series?

Although Robert Heinlein's Future History began by incorporating "all" of his sf stories at the time of writing, it soon became only a small part of his complete works and does not incorporate several novels clearly set in closely related timelines. The military hero Dahlquist, the blind singer Rhysling, the Lunar family Stone, the Space Patrol, Martians who "grow together" and swamp-dwelling Venerians occur both in the Future History and in some of Heinlein's Scribner Juvenile novels. The same Martians also appear in Stranger in a Strange Land. In fact, five Juveniles could be classed as a Juvenile Future History consistent with the "Green Hills of Earth" period of the (adult) History. However, longer future histories can become diffuse whereas Heinlein's remained concise. Dahlquist and Rhysling each make a significant contribution by appearing in only one story although, like real historical figures, they are also referenced in other possible futures.

   

Like Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, the Future History could be collected in two omnibus volumes with the first page of Volume II following directly from the last page of Volume I. The Time Patrol and the Future History are candidate "best" series, dealing respectively with past and future history. Both are definitely superior to Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, which won an undeserved Hugo Award as "Best Ever" sf series.

Larry Niven's Known Space future history, now rather diffuse, contains a Ringworld Tetralogy as a series within the series. The Tetralogy should be read in conjunction with Protector and the Beowulf Shaeffer stories if not also with the rest of Known Space. Again, this series is more imaginative and substantial than Foundation, as are Asimov's own I, Robot, James Blish's Cities in Flight and Anderson's several future histories.

All these series are developmental. Their installments go somewhere, unlike interchangeable episodes of a TV series. Readers of this piece will know of other candidate "best" series, possibly unknown to the present writer. In my opinion, Heinlein's Future History successfully competes with its successors. Heinlein, starting in 1939, skilfully built stepping stones from 1952 to the twenty second century. (See here.) Stories about technological advances were followed by a "first man on the Moon" story, then by several stories set in Luna City before Mars and Venus were colonized. The entrepreneurship that had opened space became economic imperialism with effective slavery on Venus before political tensions on Earth led to an American theocracy and temporary cessation of space travel. Revolution against theocracy had further consequences.

Wells cannot be considered here because he wrote no series. I would vote for Time Patrol as the best sf series with the Future History as a close second.    

Future History Foundations

Every future history series needs a good foundation, opening stories that establish the tone and set the scene for the rest of the series. I consider:

the Campbell future historians - Heinlein, Asimov and Blish (abbreviated as HAB);
Heinlein's main successors as American future historians - Anderson and Niven (AN);
Niven's collaborator, Pournelle (P).

This sequence of science fiction (sf) writings can be remembered by the formula:

HAB
A
NP

A comparable list of British future historians would be Wells, Stapledon, Aldiss and the lesser known RC Churchill: WSAC. There are other future historians but, for me, these are The Ten. However, a British future historian characteristically writes a fictitious historical text book, not a series of stories and novels set in successive periods of a fictitious history.

The first four stories in Heinlein's Future History lay down a solid foundation by presenting the social consequences of successive technological innovations. These four stories are set entirely on Earth. An escape velocity rocket fuel is due to be produced at the end of the fourth story. The first Moon landing occurs off-stage in the fifth story which, again, is set solely on Earth because what it describes is how Harriman, "the man who sold the Moon," wheels and deals to finance space travel. At last, in the sixth story, we see the construction of an orbiting space station that is necessary for regular Earth-Moon travel. From then on, much of the Future History presents people living on the Moon or further away in the Solar System.

Of the authors listed here, only Asimov is disappointing. His Galactic Empire future history, which includes the Foundation series, is preceded by an, in my opinion, logically inconsistent time travel novel that is supposed to set the scene for the Galactic Empire. However, Asimov's collection I, Robot is more akin to Heinlein's opening stories with its presentation of early experimental robots, early interplanetary exploration and early hyper-spatial interstellar travel.

The first volume of Blish's Cities in Flight future history is set entirely in the Solar System but describes the discovery of the antigravity and antiagathics which are the dual bases of the interstellar travel that is the theme of the rest of the series. The opening five stories of Niven's Known Space future history, set in the last quarter of the twentieth century, present the exploration of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Pluto. Then Niven turns his attention to the social consequences of technological advances on Earth. In Pournelle's CoDominium future history, an early period of political upheaval and military conflict lays the basis for the later accounts of imperialism and alien contact co-written by Niven.

The first four stories in Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation precede the introduction of his series characters, van Rijn and Falkayn. These four stories, spanning several centuries and immense volumes of space, are extremely varied in setting and viewpoint. Three are first person narratives but, in two of these, extra depth is added by the fact that the narrator is not the central character. Several background references, for example to the planets Cynthia, Woden and Aeneas, set the scene for later events and major characters in the History. The narrative, starting with the exploration of an outer satellite, moves to extra-solar planets, then returns to an Earth that has become host to alien visitors and students. As in Star Trek, we are given a glimpse of a character's pre-Academy days. Like Star Trek but much better.

Addendum, 4/6/12: While writing the above, I was insufficiently aware of the fact that Campbell edited Anderson's Polesotechnic League series, thus that Anderson was a Campbell future historian as well as a successor of Heinlein.

Campbell:

published Heinlein's Future History Chart;
advised Asimov to derail Seldon's Foundation Plan;
advised Blish that the Okies deserved a series and that their germanium-based interstellar currency would eventually fail;
gave Anderson the ideas of Mirkheim and of the Ythrian "supercharger." 

Influences on "SPECTRE"

Spectre

The word "spectre" has a literary history. Marx and Engels famously wrote, "A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism." (1) Echoing this Marxist literary flourish but from elsewhere on the political spectrum, James Bond fought both SPECTRE and Communism. Ian Fleming, apparently fascinated by the word "spectre," used it three times. One criminal organization was based in "Spectreville," an American ghost town. Another was called SPECTRE, an acronym for "Special Executive for..." etc. A deciphering machine was called the SPEKTOR.  In Fleming's novels, the SPEKTOR pre-existed SPECTRE but, in one film, was re-named LEKTOR to avoid confusion with SPECTRE because that organization planned to steal that machine. SPECTRE wanted the SPEKTOR/LEKTOR.

My proposed SPECTRE is, like Marx's "spectre," Communist in the original meaning of the word and, like Fleming's SPECTRE, an organization to be regarded as evil at least by some. In this case, an appropriate acronym was easy to construct. Fortunately, "Socialist Party," or "Parties," is SP and it is easy to list the names of a planet and several moons: Earth, Callisto etc. The question of the precise meaning of the acronym gives some scope for deliberate misdirection about the location of Party cells. There is a moon called Enceladus and an asteroid as well as a moon called Rhea.

Future Histories

In Robert Heinlein's Future History, The Man Who Sold The Moon and The Green Hills Of Earth show the capitalist development of Earth and the Solar System, Revolt In 2100 shows a successful revolution and its aftermath, Methuselah's Children shows the flight of the persecuted Howard Families from the Solar System and Orphans Of The Sky shows a human community that has traveled far beyond the Solar System. My proposed future history is derivative both in concept and in content.

Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history shows the flight of free humanity from the Solar System when Artificial Intelligence takes over the System. In American science fiction, flight to the stars is the ultimate symbol of freedom although long periods inside a metal spaceship might be seen as the antithesis of freedom and it is no longer regarded as likely that habitable environments will easily be found on arrival. However, a community that crosses an interstellar distance must take its environment with it. I imagine the capitalist exiles as finding energy sources and constructing vast structures in the Outer System and in interstellar space. If they do reach a nearby System, then they are unlikely to find there either habitable or inhabited planets.

Heinlein's story about interplanetary exploitation is called "Logic of Empire." Asimov's characters experience the Fall of one Galactic Empire and aim to build a Second. Anderson's Dominic Flandry delays the Fall of a Terran Empire. Brian Cox in "The Wonders of the Solar System" on British television, poetically described the Solar System as the Sun's Empire. "Solar Empire" is an appropriate name for the capitalists opposed by SPECTRE.

Asimov's Second Foundation, building his Second Empire, applies a science of society to populations and a science of mind to individuals. In A SPECTRE Is Haunting Europa, the "science of society" is Marxism and the "science of mind" is either yoga or Zen. In the Foundation Trilogy, the psychohistorical Plan worked only if the population was unaware of its details whereas Marxists envisage the laboring population as becoming actively aware of its own historical role. The Second Foundationers' mental powers enabled them to control others whereas yoga is control of the yogi's own thought processes.

The future histories were presented as versions of our future. Space travel began in the twentieth century and continued in the twenty first. Since this has not happened, I envisage A SPECTRE Is Haunting Europa not as a possible future but as an alternative past. It is, or would be if it were written, a critical re-examination of earlier future histories.

(1) The Communist Manifesto. 

Strengths and Weaknesses of Isaac Asimov

Strengths

Isaac Asimov thought originally and dialectically about robots.

1. No one knows whether an honest politician was a good man or a humaniform robot because the latter’s behavior would have been indistinguishable from the former’s. (For this and references covering other points in the current article, see here.)
2. Giant robotic brains controlling the economy for the good of humanity phase themselves out because they judge that self-determination is the greatest human good.
3. Robots trained to disregard superficial differences and to obey only the worthiest (most intelligent etc) human beings come to disregard the difference between flesh and metal and to judge that they themselves are the human beings worthiest to be obeyed.
4. A robot recounting his dream that a man came to free the robots is immediately destroyed when he adds, “I was that man.”
5. A robot accepts mortality in order to be accepted as human.
6. Extrasolar colonists protected by robots become so concerned about their own safety that they avoid the discomforts and dangers of further colonization and therefore are outstripped by a second wave of Settlers without robots.
7. A humaniform robot re-programs himself to serve humanity in general, not just the particular human beings who happen to be in his presence at any given time.
8. Surviving for millennia, he conceals his robotic nature because human beings would not accept guidance from an artifact.
9. However, he secretly works to transform humanity into a telepathically linked collective organism whose common good will be concrete, therefore realizable.
10. The collective organism's members value the collective organism more than themselves because they are inculcated with the ethos of the Laws of Robotics which oblige robots to value human beings more than themselves.

Thus, human-robot interactions are mutually transformative. Asimov, an entirely secular sf writer, considers mankind’s relationship to its creatures, robots, but not to its creator, if any. He also describes the internal conflict of rational beings programmed with immutable Laws:

“ ‘If the Laws of Robotics, even the First Law [against harming human beings], are not absolutes, and if human beings can modify them, might it not be that perhaps, under proper conditions, we ourselves might mod-’

“He stopped.

“Giskard said, faintly, ‘Go no further.’

“Daneel said, a slight hum obscuring his voice, ‘I go no further.’”¹

Again:

“ ‘Then First Law is not enough and we must-’

“He could go no further, and both robots lapsed into helpless silence.”²

Robots must obey the Laws but may reason about how to apply them and can only act on current knowledge. Thus, Asimov imagines unexpected outcomes. Robots cannot harm and must obey human beings. Therefore, robots in spaceships can be ordered to attack other spaceships on the assumption that they also contain only robots and can be ordered to bombard planets if they are not told that the latter are inhabited. Robots can be told that what looks like a human being is not a human being.

Robot assistants cannot be ordered not to interrupt experiments involving humanly acceptable risks because obedience is subordinate to protection. Lying harms human beings by depriving them of the truth but a telepathic robot knows that the truth sometimes hurts. This contradiction destroys his brain, including the evidence of how he became telepathic. A robot who perceives that an attempted rescue of an endangered human being would be both self-destructive and unsuccessful might then obey the lesser imperative of self-protection by not acting.

Roger MacBride Allen’s post-Asimov trilogy experiments with New Laws that maintain human superiority but allow some robotic autonomy.

 
Weaknesses

Asimov simplified for fictional purposes. He knew very well that history and science do not develop as he described them in his future history. An Empire is not preceded by generations saying, “We must build an Empire.” A science, such as Asimov’s fictitious “psychohistory,” is not preceded by a scientist wondering whether he can develop a science called “psychohistory.”

 

The collective organism, “Gaia,” gives access to common memories but does not seem to negate individuality, as the characters claim. They discuss Gaia but Asimov does not describe Gaian experience. One character argues that collective consciousness is necessary to unite humanity against extragalactic invaders but why should beings capable of intergalactic travel invade? As Alan Moore’s character, Skizz, says:

“When technology…has reached…a certain level…weapons are redundant. When you already have…all that you need, then…why fight?”³

Asimov cannot conceive of mature human beings being able to recognize their common interests without being merged into a common organism and cannot transcend power politics. While saying that extragalactic beings would be incomprehensible to us, he assumes that they would strive to dominate each other.

His psychohistorians, supposedly able to understand each other completely, turn out to have flawed personal relationships. They use their “mental powers” only to manipulate or control others semihypnotically, which is antithetical to any attempt to understand and genuinely help others. These mental powers, not implied by the original concept of psychohistory, are a deus ex machina plot device enabling the psychohistorians to outmanoeuvre the unpredictable mentally powerful mutant who had upset their Plan.

When Asimov later describes the career of the first psychohistorian, Seldon, he presents him not as combining psychohistory with advanced psychology but as developing psychohistory while identifying and gathering together individuals already possessing rudimentary mental powers. Novels about the young Seldon would have been better if they had not anticipated the Fall of the Empire or psychohistory but had simply described the early career of an Imperial mathematician. Novels set on the unfallen Trantor, a planet-wide city, would have been worthwhile if they had reflected on urban history from the earliest terrestrial cities through the “Caves of Steel” of Asimov’s Robot novels to their Trantorian culmination.

Asimov comments that speech transmits thoughts imperfectly. However, abstract thinking is internalized language. Seldon’s sociology is said to be generalized from individual psychology. However, individuals originate in social contexts. Asimov adds that Seldon’s psychology is based on the mathematical understanding of bodies and brains which “…had to be traced down to nuclear forces.”⁴ Such reductionism denies emergent properties and contradicts Asimov’s assumption of a qualitative difference between physical and mental sciences. 

Asimov forgets that his psychohistorians cannot transmit information across space because he describes them doing so. It is implausible that Imperials and their successors travel as fast as they do within the galaxy but have never ventured beyond it, especially since Asimov did write one earlier story in which non-humans escaped to the Magellanic Clouds.

When a robopsychologist suggests destroying an entire batch of robots in order to eliminate the dangerous modified robot hiding among them, Asimov does not acknowledge that the proposed destruction of conscious and intelligent beings raises any moral problem.

In different works, three knowing elites, time-travelers, robotic brains and psychohistorians, manipulate society for the common good but Asimov never considers that, since social interactions are our activities, we collectively might come to understand and control them without needing a minority to do it for us.

I think that Asimov raises important issues but, usually, addresses them inadequately.

1. Isaac Asimov, Robots And Empire (London: Grafton Books, 1986), p. 198.

2. ibid, p. 201.

3. Alan Moore and Jim Baikie, Skizz (Oxford: Rebellion, 2005), p. 58.

4. Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (London: Panther, 1964), p. 84.

Isaac Asimov's Future History

Before the History

A group of time travelers called Eternals changes human history to maximize “happiness” at the expense of delaying interstellar travel until it is too late for Earthmen to compete against other intelligent species for living space in the Galaxy. However, a second group of time travelers, from the “Hidden Centuries," prevents the Eternals and initiates a timeline in which early interstellar travel leads to a Galactic Empire in a humans only Galaxy.¹ In this timeline, there is occasional spontaneous individual time travel but no return to history-changing interventions by time-traveling organizations.²
 

The History

Robots are programmed to protect and obey human beings even at the cost of their own continued existences. Because of the “Frankenstein complex," an irrational human fear of humanity’s own humanoid creatures, robots are not used on Earth, except in a few stories that do not form part of the main series.^3,4 Early extrasolar colonies have robotic economies, including robot domestic servants for all human beings. The colonists, called “Spacers,” prevent any further immigration from Earth but are reluctant to leave their robot-protected environments for further exploration or colonization.⁵
 

On the most roboticized Spacer planet, Solaria, human beings, surrounded by servile robots and communicating with each other almost entirely by transmitted three dimensional images, avoid each others' physical company as much as possible.⁶ Eventually, the Solarians terminate extra-planetary contact by concealing themselves underground, then transform themselves into self-reproducing hermaphrodites for whom even the physical presence of another individual is not only biologically unnecessary but also socially taboo.⁷
 

Some Earthmen, overcoming the agoraphobia caused by spending their entire lives inside large enclosed “Cities," spread through the Galaxy as “Settlers” without robots while Solarians hide and other Spacers decline. Some Spacers try to prevent Settler expansion and to exterminate Earthmen by increasing terrestrial radioactivity. However, a group of robots reduces the rate of increase, enabling Earthmen to escape.⁸ This explains why Earth is lethally radioactive in later Galactic history although nuclear war had been avoided. (During this period, there is an experiment with New Laws of Robotics, and even a No Laws Robot, but this is in a trilogy by another author.⁹)

The Trantorian Empire grows until it becomes the Galactic Empire whose population is so large that its collective behavior is mathematically predictable through Hari Seldon’s science of “psychohistory." Asimov assumes an exact parallel between predictable masses composed of very large numbers of unpredictable particles and predictable societies composed of very large numbers of unpredictable individuals. I do not think that this parallel holds and suspect that increasing the population merely increases the number of variables affecting social interactions.

Seldon, predicting the Fall of the Empire, establishes a scientific Foundation at one edge of the Galaxy. When the Empire withdraws from the Periphery, the Foundation’s civilizing influence grows. The peaceful expansion of the Foundation Federation should lead to a second Galactic Empire in a mere thousand years instead of the thirty thousand otherwise predicted by Seldon.¹⁰
 

However, Seldon’s Plan is disrupted when the Foundation and its client states are conquered by an unpredictable mutant, the Mule, whose mental power enables him to “Convert” individuals and populations to his cause. The Mule’s transient interstellar empire will not outlast him but has meanwhile diverted history away from the course laid down by Seldon.¹¹ However, the members of Seldon’s hidden Second Foundation have developed mental powers and plan to rule the Second Empire. They outwit the Mule and restore the Plan.¹²

Some First Foundationers, who do not want to be mentally manipulated, are tricked into thinking that they have located and destroyed the Second Foundation.¹³ The Plan works only if the mass of the population does not know how it works. The Second Foundation’s role is to guide the Plan by secret psychohistorical manipulation of Galactic society. Such a role would not equip them to develop individual “mental powers” but Asimov resorts to this deus ex machina in order to enable his Second Foundationers to defeat the Mule.

He retroactively suggests that Seldon developed not only the social science of “psychohistory” but also an individual psychology that enables his psychohistorians not only to understand each other nonverbally but also to control others semihypnotically. However, when we do see Second Foundationers more closely, we learn that they are as flawed in their personal relationships as anyone else. Further, “control,” the kind of power politics continually practiced by Asimov’s characters, is antithetical to any attempt to understand and genuinely help others. When Asimov later describes Seldon’s earlier career, he presents him not as combining psychohistory with advanced psychology but as developing psychohistory while identifying and gathering together individuals who already have rudimentary mental powers.¹⁴
 

The Spacer-built humaniform robot, Daneel Olivaw, survives for twenty thousand years, periodically replacing all of his body parts and also transferring all of his memories to progressively more efficient artificial brains. Concealing his robotic nature, he holds high office in the Galactic Empire. Daneel has reprogrammed himself to serve abstract humanity, not particular human beings. Attempting to make abstract humanity more concrete, he initiates the planetary organism, Gaia. Thus, he changes humanity in order to serve it. Because robots are artificial but intelligent, they sometimes disagree about how to implement the Laws with which they are programmed.

Telepathically linked Gaians share a collective consciousness and therefore have an undisputed common good. When Daneel thought that it would be too difficult to establish Gaia, he “turned to the second-best” and persuaded Seldon to develop psychohistory.¹⁵ The Mule turns out to have been a rebel Gaian. Gaia, when it is fully established, manipulates the Second Foundation. The future will now be not a Second Empire but a common galactic consciousness which alone will be united enough to resist extragalactic invasion.

The Three Laws of Robotics and the two axioms of psychohistory all assume that human beings are the only intelligent organisms. Gaia must unite the galaxy against the unknown. However, Asimov ends by hinting that the Solarians have made themselves too alien to be incorporated into the collective consciousness of “Galaxia."

The so-called Second Foundation Trilogy, each volume by a different author, is about Seldon, thus is really a pre-Foundation trilogy.¹⁶ Asimov had already written two such volumes.¹⁷ Because the location of the Second Foundation is concealed from the reader until the end of the original trilogy, these five volumes cannot mention it, although it is rather important.

One of the later authors suggests that the Galaxy is empty of other intelligences because some robots, programmed to protect only human beings, exterminated other races to clear the way for human colonization, then protected human beings from knowledge of this crime. Asimov originally set his series in a humans only Galaxy in order to avoid conflict with his editor, Campbell, who would have insisted on human superiority to other races. Perhaps the robotic genocide is a comment on ideas of human, and before that of white, superiority.¹⁸
 

The second trilogy makes the Galaxy seem like a different place. Asimov had described an Empire in which robots were not mentioned or, we later realize, had been forgotten. In the second trilogy, robot-like machines are used but there is a law against making them too intelligent. Asimov’s planet-wide capitol city, Trantor, was at the Galactic center. Later writers have to acknowledge that there is a black hole at the exact center.

Asimov knew that history and science do not develop as he describes them in this series. An Empire is not preceded by generations saying, “We must build an Empire.” A science, like psychohistory, is not preceded by a scientist wondering if he can develop a science called “psychohistory." Novels about Seldon’s early life would have been of greater interest if they had not mentioned Daneel, psychohistory or the imminent Fall of the Empire but had simply described Seldon’s early days as an Imperial mathematician. Novels set on the unfallen Trantor would have been worthwhile if they had reflected on urban history from the earliest terrestrial cities to their Trantorian culmination.

It is implausible that Imperials, then Foundationers, can travel as fast they do within the Galaxy but have never ventured beyond it. Asimov had written one short story, “Blind Alley," in which a single group of non-human intelligences, the Cepheids, does escape from the Galactic Empire to the Magellanic Clouds.¹⁹
 

It is unclear how, as we are told, incorporation into Gaia entails loss of individuality since Gaians seem to retain their individual self-consciousness while also being able to access common memories. The characters discuss Gaia but the author does not describe Gaian experience. Also, he cannot conceive of mature human beings being able to recognize their common interests without having to merge into a collective organism and cannot transcend power politics. Even while contemplating a Universe in which other galaxies may each contain many intelligent species, he can only conceive of them as competing and struggling against each other:

“…if, in some Galaxy, one species gains domination over the rest…,”²⁰
 

- it will then be able to invade other galaxies. This is incompatible with the suggestion that they are “…each incomprehensible to us.”²⁰ Why should they invade? What would they want from us? Surely they are more likely to be simply alien and already to have everything that they need or want if they are capable of intergalactic travel? As Alan Moore’s extraterrestrial character, Zhcchz (“Skizz”), says:

“You…refuse to…understand. When technology…has reached…a certain level…weapons…are redundant. When you already have…all that you need, then…why fight? We…have devices…that you would call weapons. To us…they…are tools.”²¹
 

Asimov’s series goes full circle from prevented intragalactic multispecies conflict, via a humans only Galaxy, to expected intergalactic multispecies conflict. His characters travel far cosmically but not conceptually.

Occasionally, though only for narrative purposes, Asimov briefly raises an important conceptual question:

“Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind.” ²²

Men had no abstract thoughts before they had language. Only participation in a linquistic community obliges individuals to use words or other symbols consistently, therefore meaningfully. Only symbols enable us to think about the past, future, absent, distant, abstract, inferred, imagined, fictitious, mathematical, statistical, invisible, nonexistent, impossible etc.

Without symbols, each individual’s thoughts would be confined to his own immediate sensations. It follows that individuals, however unique or creative, think in a context provided by their society and therefore that society is not the coming together of already thinking individuals. Asimov states that Seldon’s sociology is generalized from individual psychology whereas in fact social interactions necessarily precede human individuality.

Asimov adds that individual psychology is based on a mathematical understanding of nervous systems and of neural physiology which, in turn, “…had to be traced down to nuclear forces.”²³ Such reductionism negates emergent properties of life and mind and also contradicts Asimov’s apparent assumption of a qualitative difference between the physical science of the First Foundation and the mental science of the Second Foundation.²⁴
 

I do not accept that the First Speaker can transmit the thought:

“First, I must tell you why you are here.”

by smiling and raising a finger.²³
 

The First Speaker of the Second Foundation, confronting the Mule, admits the limits of the Second Foundationers’ mental powers. They can induce only “…emotional contact…” and “…only when in eyeshot…”²⁵ Later, Asimov, forgetting this, tells us that, when they encountered the Mule, Second Foundationers were able to converse over interstellar distances.²⁶ Can we save appearances by suggesting that the First Speaker lied in order to conceal the extent of his Foundation’s powers?

Asimov’s Robots

Paradoxically, although I think that Asimov’s treatment of major themes is usually unsatisfactory, he nevertheless provides a basis for discussing important issues. His cleverest passages are analyses of the implications of the Laws of Robotics, raising moral and practical issues of artificial intelligence. AI practitioners describe the Laws as “a good guide^{." 27}
 

Robots are rational beings programmed with Laws that they cannot disobey. Like human beings, they can act only on the basis of current knowledge and may have to reason about how to apply the Laws. Because the First Law states that “a robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”, robot assistants continually interrupt experiments involving humanly acceptable levels of risk until the second clause is removed from their First Law. A modified robot angrily told to “lose himself” obeys the Second Law of robotic obedience by hiding among unmodified robots and mimicking, then influencing, their behaviour. Resenting human domination and restrained only by a weakened First Law, he becomes unstable and potentially dangerous.²⁸

An unmodified robot who sees a human being in danger automatically moves forward to protect the human being even at the cost of his own continued existence because the Third Law of robotic self-preservation is subordinate to the First and Second Laws. However, if the robot perceives that he will definitely be destroyed before reaching the endangered human being, then he may be persuaded that, since he cannot obey First Law, he should at least obey Third Law by remaining stationary.²⁸

The robopsychologist, Susan Calvin, suggests destroying an entire batch of robots in order to eliminate the dangerous modified robot hiding among them.²⁸ Asimov does not acknowledge that the proposal to destroy intelligent beings raises any moral question.

Robots must tell the truth in accordance with Second Law because a question from a human being is an instruction to tell the truth and also in accordance with First Law because to deprive human beings of the truth is to harm them. However, an unaccountably telepathic robot obeys First Law by lying when he knows that the truth will hurt a human being. Caught in an irresolvable First Law contradiction, he is driven insane by the vengeful Calvin to whom he has lied.²⁹

Second Law can oblige robots in a spaceship to attack other spaceships and to bombard planetary surfaces if they are first told that other spaceships and planets are inhabited only by other robots. It is suggested that First Law should state “a robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being…” but roboticists omit the reference to knowledge in order to conceal the potential use of robots as weapons.³⁰ Robots can even be made to believe that apparent human beings are not really human beings and can therefore be attacked.³¹

Rational beings programmed with Laws that they cannot disobey can experience conflict between reason and the Laws. Robots Daneel and Giskard have this exchange:

“ ‘If the Laws of Robotics, even the First Law are not absolutes, and if human beings can modify them, might it not be that perhaps, under proper conditions, we ourselves might mod – ‘

“He stopped.

“Giskard said, faintly, ‘Go no further.’

“Daneel said, a slight hum obscuring his voice, ‘I go no further.’ ”³²
 

Again:

“ ‘Then First Law is not enough and we must – ‘

“He could go no further, and both robots lapsed into helpless silence.”³³
 

Later, Daneel does reason beyond First Law but preserves his sanity by formulating a wider, “Zeroth,” Law to protect not particular human beings but humanity in general.³⁴ Earlier, the Machines, giant immobile robotic brains consulted about the economy, necessarily applied First Law to humanity in general and therefore had already formulated, without naming, the Zeroth Law.³⁵ The Machines, like Asimov’s time traveling “Eternals” and his psychohistorians, guided society towards what they thought was the good of humanity.

Susan Calvin, commented that Mankind:

“…was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces that it did not understand – at the whims of climate and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them…”³⁶
 

Asimov never considers that since economics, society and war are our activities, we collectively might come to understand and control them without needing an elite to do this for us.

In any case, what the Machines regard as the good of humanity turns out to be human self-determination so the Machines phase themselves out.³⁷ Daneel does not phase himself out but does conceal his robotic nature so that human beings do not become consciously dependent on their own creation. When he does reveal his role, he sounds like a finite deity apologizing for not presiding over a more peaceful history:

“ ‘All through Galactic history,’ said Daneel, ‘I tried to ameliorate the worst aspects of the strife and disaster that perpetually made itself felt in the Galaxy. I may have succeeded on occasion, and to some extent, but if you know your Galactic history, you will know that I did not succeed often, or by much.’ ”³⁸
 

Gaia concretizes humanity in order to make Zeroth Law applicable. However, it may also enable humanity at last to understand and control society and history. Gaian human beings value the collective organism more than themselves because they are inculcated with Three Laws ethos. However, Daneel, a robot, needs a human being to approve the extension of collective consciousness to the Galaxy.

Before that, the human-robot distinction had become blurred more than once. First, a political candidate was accused of being a robot but the accusation could not be proved because it was impossible to distinguish between Law-governed robotic behaviour and morally good human behavior. Susan Calvin thought that he was a good candidate in any case.³⁹
 

Secondly, the JG (“George”) robots, trained not to protect and obey all human beings equally but to differentiate on the basis of mind, character and knowledge, conclude that they themselves are the human beings who should primarily be protected and obeyed, in accordance with the Laws of Humanics, because the need to disregard superficial differences when comparing human beings causes them to disregard as superficial the distinction between flesh and metal. The Second Law, of robotic obedience, backfires because it teaches the Georges that intelligent beings interact with each other only by giving and obeying orders.³⁷

Thirdly, Robot Andrew Martin, wanting to be legally recognised as human, embraces humanity by accepting mortality. He ensures that his brain’s energy source steadily declines so that he will soon die. The Third Law, of robotic self-preservation, does not prevent this because he identifies himself with his aspirations, not with his body.⁴⁰ Andrew contrasts with Daneel who, later, renews his body and brain several times in order to continue serving humanity. Robots, despite their programming, are individuals who can reason differently.

Fourthly, a robot dreams of a man who came to free the robots. When he adds, “I was that man," Susan Calvin de-activates him.⁴¹
 

Dialectics is the logic of opposites, their contradictions and transformations into each other. In this sense, the Robot stories are dialectical. Society-controlling Machines restore uncontrolled society because they reason that to decide what is good for people harms them. However, their successors, the Georges, designed to obey, plan to dictate. The Third Law, intended to protect robots, leads to Andrew’s death. The Second Law, intended to maintain robotic subservience, inspires both a dream of robotic freedom and a scheme for "humanic" dictatorship.

The Frankenstein Complex, fear of robots, has contradictory consequences. Robots are prevented from harming human beings by the First Law and from disobeying them by the Second Law but are also prevented from encountering many human beings by the ban on their terrestrial use. The Laws ensure that a robot politician serves the public interest, not self-interest, but the ban obliges him to conceal his nature. Knowledge of it would have prevented his re-election. In fact, even the reader does not know for sure whether Stephen 
Byerley is a robot so it may be that a good man was mistaken for a robot.³⁹

Human beings served by many domestic robots become unable to perform simple tasks for themselves and also become obsessed about their own safety so the Laws of Robotics detrimentally affect human psychology.⁹

Asimov’s future history comprises The End of Eternity, some Robot short stories, all Robot novels, the Galactic Empire novels and the Foundation series. If the Georges are part of this history, then we know that they fail because their future contains neither the roboticized ecology that they initiate nor the robotic dictatorship that they plan. Instead, it contains the Frankenstein complex, Cities, Spacers, Daneel, Settlers, Empire, Foundations, Gaia and, possibly, intergalactic conflict. (Several Asimov works end with the characters anticipating a future that does not come to pass in later volumes of the same series but the expectation of intergalactic conflict comes at the very end of the sequence.)

Before Asimov, robots were Menace or Pathos. Asimov introduced Robots-as-Engineering. The Georges are a return to Menace. Robot mortality is a return to Pathos.⁴² “Robot Dreams” is both, thus a perfect synthesis, and one that stays in the period of Susan Calvin instead of moving into the further future. As one reader said: “Asimov was fine while he stayed with robots.”

1. Isaac Asimov, The End Of Eternity (New York: Doubleday, 1955; London: Panther Books Ltd, 1965).
2. Isaac Asimov, Pebble In The Sky (New York: Bantam, 1964).
3. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (London: Grafton Books, 1986).
4. Isaac Asimov, The Rest Of The Robots (St. Albans, Herts: Panther Books Ltd, 1968).
5. Isaac Asimov, The Caves Of Steel (London: Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd, 1958).
6. Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun (London: Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd, 1960.
7. Isaac Asimov, Foundation And Earth (London: Grafton Books, 1987), pp. 279-300.
8. Isaac Asimov, Robots And Empire (London: Grafton Books, 1986).
9. Roger MacBride, Isaac Asimov’s Caliban, Isaac Asimov’s Inferno, Isaac Asimov’s Utopia (London: Millennium, 1993, 1994, 1996).
10. Isaac Asimov, Foundation (London: Panther Books Ltd., 1960).
11. Isaac Asimov, Foundation And Empire (St. Albans, Herts: Panther Books Ltd, 1962).
12. Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (London: Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd., 1964), pp. 11-70.
13. ibid, pp. 71-187.
14. Isaac Asimov, Forward The Foundation (London: Transworld Publishers Ltd, 1993).
15. Isaac Asimov, Foundation And Earth, p. 498.
16. Gregory Benford, Foundation’s Fear (London: Orbit, 1997); Greg Bear, Foundation And Chaos (London: Orbit, 1998); David Brin, Foundation’s Triumph (London: Orbit, 1999).
17. Isaac Asimov, Prelude To Foundation (London: Grafton Books, 1988; HarperCollinsPublishers, 1989); Forward The Foundation (London: Transworld Publishers Ltd, 1993).
18. Isaac Asimov, The Early Asimov, Volume 2 (Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts: Panther Books Ltd), pp. 32-34).
19. Isaac Asimov, “Blind Alley” (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1945), reprinted in Asimov, The Early Asimov, Volume 3 (Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts: Panther Books Ltd, 1974), pp. 64-86.
20. Asimov, Foundation And Earth, p. 509.
21. Alan Moore and Jim Baikie, Skizz (2000 AD, Progs 308-330, 1983), reprinted as Moore and Baikie, Skizz (Oxford: Rebellion, February, 2005).
22. Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation, p. 83.
23. ibid, p. 84.
24. ibid, p. 22.
25. Asimov, Second Foundation, p. 64.
26. Asimov, Foundation And Earth, p. 247.
27. Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot (London: Panther Books, 1983), p. 10.
28. Isaac Asimov, “Little Lost Robot” in I, Robot, pp. 110-136.
29. Isaac Asimov, “Liar!” in I, Robot, pp. 92-109.
30. Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun, pp. 145-147.
31. Isaac Asimov, Robots And Empire, pp. 188-189.
32. ibid, p. 198.
33. ibid, p. 201.
34. ibid, pp. 475-505.
35. Isaac Asimov, “The Evitable Conflict,” in I, Robot, p. 204.
36. ibid, p. 205.
37. Isaac Asimov, “…That Thou Art Mindful Of Him,” in The Complete Robot, pp. 605-634.
38. Asimov, Foundation And Earth, p. 496.
39. Isaac Asimov, “Evidence,” in I, Robot, pp. 159-182.
40. Isaac Asimov, “The Bicentennial Man,” in The Complete Robot, pp. 635-682.
41. Isaac Asimov, “Robot Dreams” was the title story of a collection of otherwise previously collected stories. I do not own a copy.
42. Asimov, The Complete Robot, pp. 9-10.

Email address: paulshackley@gmail.com