“Freud and Asimov”

To the Editor,

The special issue on “Freud and Asimov: Two Very Different ‘Psychohistories’” (June, 1998) was certainly interesting, filled with insights into how another discipline looks at Science Fiction, which is always informative, and ironies, such as the title of Lloyd deMause’s book, Foundations of Psychohistory, which, I assume, was not influenced by the Foundation Trilogy. I particularly enjoyed your article, even though my interpretation of Asimov’s character and behavior differs in places.

One of my reactions was a kind of surprise that Asimov’s Foundation Series and his psychohistory were taken by some as serious concepts rather than fascinating fictional speculations. Isaac (and, I think, the vast majority of his readers) looked upon psychohistory as a thought experiment—that is, what would be the human consequences of the ability to predict mass

Page 115

behavior and, thus, the general historical trends of the future—and not an exercise in extrapolation or wish fulfillment. I don’t think Isaac ever thought his psychohistory was possible, and I’m not sure he was even interested in its realizability. Like all of the early Science Fiction writers, Isaac avoided writing about the disciplines with which he was professionally familiar, in order to deal with such theoretical concepts as robots and psychohistory. He never dealt with the practical aspects of robotics (even though later roboticists, such as Marvin Minsky, credited his ideas with helping their efforts); rather, he only dealt with the “idea” of robots. So with psychohistory.

In addition, Isaac was interested in writing an entertaining story that John Campbell would be willing to publish in Astounding. Psychohistory and the Foundations provided the background for a series of stories that Isaac could count on to sell to Campbell, something Isaac confided to the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin in 1967 in “There’s Nothing Like a Good Foundation”—reprinted in Damon Knight’s Turning Points (1977). Outside of the first two stories, the others were written as Isaac felt the need and the inspiration, the next in the series tacked on to the previous one like a tinker toy, an exercise in craft and ingenuity. But anything that came out of the whole was only unified by the authorship, not by prior planning and philosophical considerations, and critics should be cautious about assigning significance to ideas that developed over a period of ten years for the Trilogy and a return to the ideas 30 years later.

Jim Gunn

Page 116