"Foundation's Fear" by Gregory Benford--A rant

First, let me fill you in on what today’s rant will be about. While at the library recently, I decided it was time that I read the Second Foudation trilogy. This is a set of books by three different authors, writing in the universe made famous by Isaac Asimov about 50 years ago. The Good Doctor’s widow and the executor of his estate approved of the project.

Also, before I continue, let me say that I’ve just finished Benford’s book, and have barely begun the next one “Foundation and Chaos” by Greg Bear. I’ll also apologize to those of you not familiar with Asimov’s writings. I’m not going to take up space here explaning what Isaac did; I’ll just be fuming about what Benford did with it.

Alrightythen, I know I’m an SF geek, and so I sometimes expect too much from authors. But I think that anyone writing in this universe should be held to the highest of standards. I know a lot of people don’t agree (I’m not sure I do), but fans have been calling the original Foundation trilogy the best series in SF for a long time. When something is this well established and this well liked, you should write with care.

But no, Mr. Benford has some new ideas, along with a few old ones, and he decides to shoehorn them into this book. As best I can figure, he took advantage of the fact that he’d been asked to write for this new trilogy to do some things he’d wanted to do, even though they are not apt to the setting.

First and largest, he introduces cyberspace to the Galactic Empire by having simulated human inteligences living in the Trantorian computer net. This, in itself, wouldn’t be bad. We know that there were computers all over the place. It is no great leap to think they would be networked. However, the simulations are staggeringly poorly chosen. These AI’s are computerized versions of Voltaire and Joan of Arc.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? It did to me. There is a shortlived shared-universe anthology series called Time Gate. The principle behind all the short stories was computer simulations of historical figures. It takes place in the 22nd century. In the two volumes I have (I think there were only two), Benford wrote about a story for each. Both were about Voltaire and Joan of Arc simulations. In the first one in particular (a story called “The Rose and the Scalpel”) these two historical figures are recreated so that they can debate the existance of the human soul. The programmers working on them get competitive, and add lots of knowledge and abilities the originals would not have. The result is that they fall in love, end up having sex during the globally-broadcast debate, and they have enough saavy to transfer their programs onto the world net. This prevents them from being deleted, and they become fugitives, using whatever processors and memory space they can find.

This exact scenario plays out in “Foundation’s Fear”. Apparently, Benford thought his short story didn’t go deep enough, so he wanted to write a novel about these sims. That would have been fine, except that he was supposed to be writing about Hari Seldon and the development of psychohistory. There are large sections of the book where Seldon is not even mentioned.

Let us also not forget that the Galactic Empire has existed for at least 12,000 years and that R. Daneel Olivaw is 20,000 years old. In this far future, Olivaw is the only being that is supposed to remember Earth (this takes place a couple hundred years before Trevize and Pelorat rediscover humanity’s homeworld). Benford has to really wrangle with the past to make having simulations from Earth exist on Trantor to make any sense whatsoever.

Next, he has robots. They are called ‘tiktoks’, but they are robots. One of the things that Asimov said over and over was that the Galactic Empire, being formed by the Settler culture and guided by R. Daneel, has no robots or anything even a little like robots (excepting Daneel and his helpers, of course). Apparently, Benford wanted to write a robot novel as well, which could be a good idea, but it should not be set in the Galactic Empire.

I could probably go on, but I’m tired of typing. If anyone can show that I’ve missed some point, I’ll be grateful. It would be great if I could look it over again and feel that this isn’t a betrayal of SF tradition. I used to think fairly well of Gregory Benford, but this one just wasn’t worthy to carry on Asimov’s universe. Even if you aren’t a devotee of Asimov, think of it as if it was one of your favorite SF settings. Have I overreacted?

I would feel outraged… Except that this isn’t, in fact, a Foundation novel. A Foundation novel is, by definition, written by Asimov, or at least approved by Isaac himself (not his widow, or his fans, or his editors). This is some other guy’s novel, claiming to be a Foundation novel. If you forget that it even exists, the real Foundation books will in no way suffer for the loss. I recommend that you do exactly that.

I just thought of another thing: He had Hari Seldon study a small group of chimpanzees to help refine psychohistory. He even says that Seldon was able to make predictions about the chimp’s society by incorporating them into his model.

Everyone knows that psychohistory is completely useless when directed at small populations. That’s why the Galactic Empire had to contain 100 quadrillion people before the science could be developed.

Chronos: Thanks. I’ll try to forget it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do so soon. I certainly won’t allow this book to detract from Asimov’s work. Now if only I could believe that every other reader will do the same.

“Foundation’s Fear” also includes Seldon knowing that Dors is a robot, which, IIRC, the Good Doctor didn’t intend for Seldon to know until the end of Seldon’s life.

I just have to add that I’ve had Foundation’s Fear on my nightstand for over 6 months now. The book seems to be going nowhere fast. I agree that the whole “Joan of Arc/Voltaire” segues are distracting and don’t add much to the plot.

The only thing keeping me going is the hope that the next 2 books in the trilogy (written by different authors) are better.

I know what you mean. I’m pretty persistant when it comes to novels, so I rarely put one down half-read, even if it isn’t good. I probably would have dropped this one after the first 80-100 pages, though.

Except that it’s part of a trilogy I really want to read.

By the way, “Foundation and Chaos” is much better, so far. I think Greg Bear is more of an Asimov fan, since he’s even got some of Isaac’s style.