Having read the Foundation trilogy before many of you were born :eek: , I happily continued through many further Foundation books which included appearances by robots Daneel and Giskard, with references to Elijah Baley (and so on).
Now my advanced age means that details are escaping me. :o
I’ve just reread ‘Robots and Empire’, in which Giskard ‘freezes’ after teaching Daneel how to detect and control emotions. Yet I can’t remember how it all fits together.
Could some wise soul please tie up the entire plot (robots, Baley, Hari Seldon, Foundation, Gaia etc)?
Oooh, a chance to use my amazingly trivial knowledge of Asimovania for the public good!
Okay. Sometime around the 30th century Elijah Baley, a mid-ranking plainclothes officer in the New York City dome’s civil service, is assigned to investigate the murder of an important Spacer scientist visiting Earth, along with a Spacer Robot partner that looks exactly like a human - R Daneel Olivaw. Initially furious with the robot teammate, (and under strict orders to make sure that Daneel doesn’t “get the collar” or all human policemen might get replaced with robots,) Baley solves the case with chutzpah despite attempts to get him taken off duty, and comes to think of Daneel as a friend.
He starts to get a rep in Spacer circles for this, and is requested by the bizarre planet of Solaria, who have almost no crime of their own and no law enforcement, to solve a murder there. Daneel comes along too, and they are succesful again. This case is made into a hyperwave drama (with the usual innacuracies of ‘real murder cases’ becoming entertainment media,) to the annoyance of both Baley and his superiors in the service. Baley is growing increasingly committed to the movement of Earth emigration to found new colony planets, despite the fact that the powerful existing Spacer worlds are unlikely to tolerate this.
Baley is called out from Earth once again, to solve the destruction of another robot of Daneel’s model, which for various complicated reasons is an important political point on the most powerful Spacer planet. Daneel figures out some very interesting things and manages to secure the political triumph of the Moderates who look fairly kindly on Earth, and the downfall of the Spacer supremacists. He also meets Giskard, an ordinary looking servitor robot, and finds out that Giskard can read and affect minds. Giskard had destroyed the robot Jander to keep the Spacer supremacists from finding out how to make human-looking robots of their own.
New earth colonies on other planets are established, one of them led by Baley’s son, and Baley himself dies. A new mystery takes Daneel and Giskard’s new owner, the spacer woman Gladia (incidentally Baley’s lover,) into the turbulent galaxy. Daneel and Giskard are getting increasingly secretive and canny by this point, talking about a number of things that they do not reveal to their mistress or any other human. Together, they found the idea of the ‘zeroth law’ - that protecting humanity as a whole from harm must take priority over even guarding individual humans, and confront the architects of a plot to destroy Earth in waves of radioactivity, without trace of who did the deed. Giskard has a chance to save the earth, but allows it to be killed slowly, so that most of the population could be evacuated - because he believes that the cultlike ‘Earth mother worship’ that the colonies have developed would do them harm. That dubious decision is his death sentence, and he passes his mental talents on to Baley, with warnings, before dying.
Fast forward, erm, twenty thousand years or so.
Daneel has established himself in a cover identity as the Emperor Cleon’s trusted first minister, Demerzel. He’s convinced that the Empire is about to crumble, and not sure what he can do to help minimize the harm to the trillions of human beings in the galaxy as a result. He has already been working to found Gaia, a hidden world where all the people, animals, plants, and even rocks have become a single conscious entity, but is uncertain whether Gaia expanded - Galaxia, is the destiny of the galaxy or even feasible. The emperor mentions that some young mathematics student has caused a stir at a convention for presenting a paper that indicated that the future of human populations could be predicted statistically.
Daneel swings into furious action around this naive outworlder, Hari Seldon - bringing him in for a formal audience with the emperor and listening closely as Hari explains how his theory is a mathematical curiosity and has no practical value. He lets Hari go, but knowing that enemies of the Empire might use him as a tool even without practical development of Psychohistory, (and wanting the real thing badly to solve his own problems surrounding the empire’s troubles,) Daneel assumes another identity, Chetter Hummin, the idealistic, well-connected journalist, and sends Hari off on a Flight around the Imperial planet of Trantor, invoking the feared name of Demerzel to keep him working on the puzzle of making Psychohistory plausible. At the end of the Flight, Seldon is in fact captured by the Mayor of Wye, who want to use false predictions from him to help overthrow Cleon, but Daneel stops the plan, and the Mayor’s daughter ‘outs’ Chetter as being Demerzel in front of Hari. Hari guesses that Demerzel is Daneel (who he heard rumors about during the flight,) and Daneel confirms the guess. Hari starts working on psychohistory on Daneel’s behalf.
Daneel steps down as first minister after a plot to have him replaced forcibly is foiled, and nominates Hari as his replacement. Hari does his best, but in the middle of a convoluted plot targeting Hari himself, Cleon is killed by a gardener who was furious with being promoted above the job that he loved. Hari helps bring down a military junta who ruled the Empire for a short time after the assasination, and then his plans to found two Foundations to ensure the future after the fall of the Empire start to come together, though he has to struggle to find enough financial resources to see the plan through.
The first foundation, on the remote planet of Terminus, grows from a tiny state-supported encyclopedia compilation institute to the seat of a massive and flourishing trade empire, growing large enough that corruption starts to set in there as well. The mule, a genetic mutant who could control people’s emotions, rises to power in a series of leapfrog steps, conquers the first Foundation and a huge swath of the galaxy including what is left of the heart of the Empire, and nearly finds the mysterious, mind-affecting psychohistorians of the second foundation, but he is defeated and controlled by the second foundationers, and after his death, the first foundation is re-established. The first foundation starts to fear the second foundation as a mysterious ‘bogeyman’ controlling their lives, so the second foundationers create a hoax of their own discovery and capture by the first, hoping to drop off the radar that way.
Halfway through the thousand-year seldon plan, Golan Trevize, an eccentric foundation councilman who has come to believe that the second foundation still exists, is arrested by the foundation mayor and sent off into exile to search for it. (The mayor believes that the second foundation is real too, but is trying to work as secretly as she can against it.) Trevize instead is drawn to the planet Gaia, with the mayor and the leader of the second foundation following him, for a staged three-way mexican standoff. Gaia wants Trevize, because they believe that he can be intuitively ‘right’ about a decision with little evidence, to choose who will rule the galaxy out of the two foundations and themselves. Trevize chooses Gaia-Galaxia, but then challenges the elder of Gaia and says that his decision will not stand unless he can find the lost homeworld of humanity, Earth, which is being kept hidden from everybody, including Gaia itself.
Trevize and a small party, (a Foundation scholar, and a Gaian woman who the scholar has fallen in love with,) set out for earth, retracing some of the steps that Gladia and her robots took so many thousands of years before. On their way through some of the forgotten Spacer worlds, they rescue a Solarian child, who has unusual powers and would have been killed if left to the care of the Solarian guard robots. They find Earth, a devastated, radioactive planet, but don’t leave the area entirely before finding Daneel’s secret hideout on the moon. Daneel tells Trevize that he supports his choice, and asks if Trevize’s decision to support Galaxia has changed now that Trevize knows about him. Trevize re-affirms his decision, largely because he’s worried that our galaxy might get invaded by others, and only Galaxia can repel invaders in a unified way. Daneel mentions at this point that he’s so ancient that he’s at death’s door, and cannot repair himself in any conventional way. The only way he can last long enough to see Galaxia started is to join his circuits with the solarian child’s mind. And that’s pretty much the end of it.
Thanks also for that. I quite enjoyed the later books but I find the earlier material to be such awful prose I have a hard time reading it. Someday I will get around to reading the Robot stuff, I robot was so awful I havent followed up with the other yet.
I must note that in Foundation and Earth, a plot hook is dangled in the last paragraph where Trevize considers the profound 'alieness" of the young Solarian and has misgivings about her as a receptacle for Daneel’s consciousness. Guess we will never find out where that goes.
A few minor points chrisk missed: There was one other time at which Bailey was called on to help the Spacers in a mystery, when Daneel is on a space liner which is host to a couple of brilliant mathematicians, each of whom claims the other stole his major discovery. Daneel suggests enlisting the help of Bailey, since they’re passing near Earth anyway. Bailey, being a Dirty Earther, is only allowed to interview the personal servant robots of the two mathematicians, and that only by video, but is still able to solve the case. I think that this takes place between The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire.
Also, in the long span between Robots and Empire and the proper Foundation novels, Daneel is also active, often in positions of power, and is working to do the best he can for humanity. He was involved behind-the-scenes in the events of The Stars Like Dust and Pebble in the Sky, acting as a nucleus for rumors and a general catalyst in the former, and working from a position of power in the latter to attempt to clean up the radioactivity on Earth. I believe he also masterminded the eventual complete evacuation of Earth. I don’t know whether he had any role in The Currents of Space, though.
Having got things clear in my mind, I have a follow-up.
When Trevise is offered the choice between First Foundation ‘science’ / Second Foundation ‘mentalics’ / Gaia ‘gaia’ :eek: , he turns down First Foundation because it will need military suppression. OK
He turns down Second Foundation because it will lead to stagnation. OK, sort of.
He goes for Gaia partly because it allows the other two approaches to exist. OK, but why doesn’t Gaia lead to stagnation?
You can’t waste materials, because they are part of Gaia. The planet ‘knows’ what equilibrium it likes, so doesn’t change much.
Hmm… I don’t really remember the original stagnation argument. Maybe I should go and revisit ‘foundation’s edge.’
One definite point is that I think Trevize found all three alternatives fundamentally unpleasant. He didn’t want to see his Foundation homeland achieve ultimate power if that would turn it into a millitaristic Empire, uncaring of the resentment of the rest of the Galaxy because it knew it was secure in its technological might. He had long been afraid of the mind-masters of the ‘Second foundation’ controlling his every move, adjusting even his emotions if they saw fit. And he was equally uncomfortable with the idea of becoming part of a ‘greater organism’ in Galaxia, or even it happening to the galaxy after he was gone.
However, in addition to the fact that Gaia would leave the other two factions essentially unharmed if it won, (and would even be open to the possibility of later surrender if Trevize changed his mind and told them so,) there are a few bits mentioned that show why he might have chosen Galaxia. One was Pelorat’s simple comment, “Didn’t the galaxy look like it was a living thing already, when you sped it up?” Trevize had a sympathetic reaction to that, though it’s really no more than an emotional argument.
The other distinction that I can see between his attitudes to Galaxia and the Second Foundation was that he didn’t trust the leaders of the Second Foundation. Both would use mentalics and new ideas to bind the galaxy into a kind of society fundamentally different from any that had come before, but only the Second Foundation would be directed by a necessarily small minority, who might not respect the wishes of the majority, but would use Psychohistory to guide the galaxy into conditions that THEY thought were ‘stable’ and ‘desirable.’ Galaxia on the other hand, seemed fundamentally more, erm, democratic, in a sense. Everybody’s a cell equally, so everybody has a nearly equal say in how the organism grows, even though some people have more influential or prominent roles.
Actually, the first foundation wasn’t the only one that might come up with a breakthrough that would upset the balance of power and overwhelm the other two factions. Possibly the danger was even greater with the second foundation - if they could clearly see the menaces of Gaia and developing mentalic shields, and use full-gestalt of their mental powers against them, they would probably have reigned supreme, without needing more R&D time like the first foundation did.
Only the fact that Gaia was able to lure one influential second foundationer near, cut him off from reinforcements, and then send him back to lure all his fellows off the trial enabled them to head off that possibility.
As far as the equality of Galaxia thing… that’s a good point, but what’s the alternative? Do you really want to force conformity to the point that everybody is not just equal, but identical? As long as people (and other creatures) have different aptitudes and potentialities, there’s an opening for perceived unfairness. That’s where you need checks and balances I guess… to make sure that the ‘prominent’ don’t get more than their share just because they’re noticeable, and that excessive influence from certain individuals is curbed as much as feasible.
In my personal opinion, by the way, good checks and balances could probably have worked in the second empire too, as long as there were social constraints on the psychohistorians that they couldn’t freely manipulate. (hrm.) Interestingly, I’ve been delving into the Bartimaeus trilogy recently, which also deals with a self-proclaimed ‘elite’ who have taken control over a society due to their posessing powers that the common rabble don’t, flagrantly ignoring any real principles of justice, creating the society that they like without any concern for the workers whose back it is constructed from, etcetera etcetera. Really doesn’t look very flattering over there.
