This is a sort of side dev diary for Empire and Legacy. I don’t know if it’ll be of interest, but this is my blog now so I can write what I like.
It’s no secret that the main reference point for Empire and Legacy (although far from the only influence) is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. It’s got a similar premise of trying to salvage something from a terminally declining Galactic Empire, and my Galactopedia excerpts are meant to evoke Foundation‘s Encyclopedia Galactica excerpts and have the same artistic purpose.
So over the last month, in order to get creatively unstuck while working on E&L, I decided to re-read all the Foundation books, most of which I hadn’t read since I was a teenager. Yes, the entire series, including both the classic trilogy and the much maligned 1980s sequels and prequels.
The Classic Trilogy
Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953) tell story of the collapse of a Galactic Empire and the rise of the Foundation, which was set up by visionary mathematician Hari Seldon to save the galaxy from millennia of anarchy by rapidly forming a second Empire. The story is told in a series of short episodes (originally published as short stories in the 1940s), set decades or centuries apart. The later books feature the Mule, a psychic mutant whom Seldon could not have predicted, who derails the Plan, leaving the secretive Second Foundation to put it back on track.
Revisiting these works as an adult, I can absolutely see why they’re regarded as classics. The telling of a historical story through vignettes set decades apart works really well. I simultaneously feel for the characters’ immediate problems while also knowing that they’re just minor players in a very long game.
I’m also picking up on the worldview underpinning the series. These are books for people who think that everything would be better if only smart people were put in charge. The Foundation succeeds because it cleverly manipulates its superstitious and scientifically backwards neighbours; the individual heroes win because they outsmart their opponents.
The implicit message of the Foundation series is that there must be a strong, all-encompassing central state to prevent anarchy. Ideally that state would be run by a cabal of benevolent intellectuals and/or psychic superhumans, but failing that, any centralized state is better than none. The Galactic Empire is depicted as imperfect but basically decent, and its collapse would leave only small warring kingdoms and technological backsliding.
On top of that base worldview, though, the series is enjoyably morally ambiguous, sometimes even cynical. It’s written so we’re rooting for the Foundation, but it’s also written with a historical perspective, with an awareness that history doesn’t have good guys and bad guys. Far from being a technocratic utopia, the Foundation is a somewhat unequal and unjust society, albeit less so than its monarchist neighbours. There’s also a recurring theme that democracies inevitably degenerate into monarchies: over the first two books we see the Mayor of Terminus go from an elected position, to one that’s controlled by the wealthiest families, to one that’s formally hereditary.
The first book of the series also has almost no female characters, which is sexist even for the 1940s. Things get better in the second and third books, each of which have a female main character, although there’s still a feeling that they’re exceptions to a male default.
Overall, despite the elitism and sexism, the Foundation trilogy is very effective and deserves its status as a classic of science fiction.
Side-Note: The Galactic Empire Series
Since I was an Asimov completionism kick I also read the three Galactic Empire novels, which I’d had sitting on my shelf for years but had never got round to reading.
Pebble in the Sky (1950), The Stars, Like Dust (1951) and The Currents of Space (1952) are self-contained novels set in the same universe as the Foundation series, but otherwise unrelated to either that series or one another.
These novels are set at different points during the rise of the Galactic Empire whose fall we see in Foundation, but this historical development is just a backdrop for some pulpy space adventures in which our heroes stumble on an interstellar conspiracy and foil it in the nick of time. They don’t have the depth of the Foundation series, but they’re fun! If you want an example of what separates a decent but forgettable novel from an enduring classic, you could do worse than to compare the Empire novels to the Foundation trilogy.
Female characters: yes, but mostly only as the hero’s love interest.
The Sequels
Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986) tell the story of two guys from the Foundation who, for contrived reasons, go on a quest to find the mythical lost planet Earth.
These books are over-long and consist mostly of info-dumps. What plot there is is mostly concerned with linking the Foundation series with Asimov’s previous Robot stories and novels, in ways that (in my opinion) diminish the Foundation books rather than enhance them. In the introduction to Edge, Asimov was quite honest that he didn’t want to write more Foundation books, and only did so because his publisher offered him a staggeringly large advance. If you want an example of what separates a decent but forgettable novel from one that’s actively, infuriatingly bad, compare the Galactic Empire books to the 1980s Foundation sequels.
There are more female characters now, even some in positions of authority, but they’re written in such a leering male-gazey way that it made me miss the all-male galaxy of the first book. (It’s worth noting that, by the 1980s, Asimov was a serial sexual harasser who probably contributed to making the science fiction community unwelcoming to women. I had to do a fair amount of separating the art from the artist in order to enjoy the books, and the weird way he wrote female characters in Edge and Earth did not make that easy.)
Besides the weird male gaze stuff, I think what most annoyed me about Edge and Earth was the thought of the sequels that Asimov could have written but didn’t: episodic novels in the style of the classic trilogy that step forward through the rest of the historic period until the promised establishment of the Second Empire. As it is, the classic trilogy covers about 380 years, and the sequels advance the timeline to year 500, but the rest of the thousand-year story is never told and the series feels unfinished.
The Prequels
Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993) tell the story of Hari Seldon as he develops the science of phychohistory and creates the Foundations.
I approached these books with trepidation because I had assumed that they would be similar to Edge and Earth, but actually they’re much better.
Prelude is a fun story about naive young mathematician Hari Seldon being thrust into galactic politics and going on the run. It’s perhaps longer than it needs to be, but it’s better written than the sequels, and is an interesting dive into what the planet-wide city of Trantor might actually be like. There’s a lot of stuff that connects the Foundation books to the Robot books, but here the connections are more satisfying.
Forward the Foundation, Asimov’s last book…is actually really good. It uses the same episodic format as the classic trilogy, this time stepping decade by decade through the life of Hari Seldon as he develops psychohistory and creates the Foundations, while the capital of the Empire decays around him. It’s also surprisingly moving, as we watch Seldon get older and the people he cares about vanish from his life one by one. Asimov’s writing normally works on an intellectual rather than an emotional level, but very occasionally he writes something that gets you.
Female characters: yes, several, and in general he’s finally being normal about them.
After the missteps of the sequels, this is a satisfying conclusion to the Foundation saga.
My Takeaways
The Foundation books were a big influence on me as a kid (one of my earliest stories was about daring space traders, based about 50% on Foundation and 50% on playing Elite on the Commodore 64) and so re-reading them was eye-opening. But as well as revisiting some of my childhood influences, the point of this re-read was to get me creatively unstuck as I worked on my Empire game, so what have I learned?
Firstly, the device used in the classic trilogy and in Forward, of telling a long-term story through a series of widely spaced vignettes, is very effective. This is what prompted me to re-structure the game into a series of distinct chapters, as I mentioned in my last dev diary. I’m also going to put more work into strongly developed individual characters.
Secondly, one of the themes of the books is how powerless individuals are to change the course of history, and especially how constrained rulers can be by the necessities of politics and court intrigue. The only way an individual can have an effect on history in the Foundation books is if a) they’re an exceptional psychic mutant, or b) they find themselves in a pivotal historical moment and can make just the right nudge. The player character in E&L is a ruler who’s constrained by court politics and whose power is less in practice than in theory, and they’re not a psychic mutant (sorry, maybe another game), but they might find themselves in the position of being able to make the right historical nudge. In any case, this isn’t a grand strategy game in which you control every aspect of an empire, it’s an interactive story about being the emperor.
Thirdly, looking at the underlying values of the Foundation books has led me to think more clearly about what values I want to put into my game. In contrast to Foundation, I want to tell an anti-imperialist story about empire. I don’t believe that any strong central authority is necessarily better than none, and I don’t believe that democracy will necessarily descend into monarchy over long time periods. I also want to write something that grapples with (or at least mentions) the historical atrocities that I think would inevitably be part of the rise of such an empire.
I think this has been a helpful exercise. Now I just need to get back to work and put these new insights into practice. I should have a normal dev blog for you at the end of the month.
Also, although Foundation is the single largest literary influence on E&L, I want to stress that it’s not the only influence. Maybe I’ll re-read Dune next…