Upon finally reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy
“Hurry Seldom tells me you just finished reading Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Is this true?”
“Yes. In fact Seldom knew this would happen because of his
expertise in psychohistory, the principles of which I will proceed to explain
to you even though everyone in the Galaxy is aware of them.”
“You fool! The Seldom Plan does not predict the behavior of
individuals. And may I ask, why are you reading this classic series only now,
instead of doing so at the age of 15, when you should have?”
“Precisely because I did not read it then, First Speaker.
And here I am in my 50s, having taught two large classes in science fiction,
preparing to teach a third, and I have been feeling like the Shakespeare
scholar who has never read King Lear.
You know well from your encephalographic research how susceptible academics are
to Imposter Syndrome. I am certainly not immune. And you also know, though I
will proceed to tell you as if you did not know, the story of how I began my
first class five years ago. I told my sixty students that I was not a
specialist in science fiction, even though I have read a good deal of it. And I
confessed to them that twenty years earlier, I was offered the science fiction
course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to my department
head, the recently-retired person who had been teaching it had set a fairly low
bar, and he assured me that anything I would do would constitute an
improvement. Furthermore, he said, it would give me the chance to teach a class
of 150 students, almost all nonmajors, which he thought would be good for me—it
would broaden my teaching experience considerably. And it might even recruit some
students to the English department.”
“You would have underpaid teaching assistants, of course.”
“Of course. And probably a podium and a microphone too.”
“And you decided not to take him up on the offer.”
“As you remember, I thought about it for a couple of days
and then came back and said, ‘I’m 32 years old. I honestly don’t have the
self-confidence to walk into a classroom in which many of the students will
know more than I do about the subject.’ I told him I imagined the class would
be nearly all male, with some students wearing Star Trek uniforms (red, of
course—it’s always the engineers) and insisting to me that I am wrong, the
quantum flux drive does not emit a telltale trail of positrons when the ship
re-emerges from hyperspace.”
“And you said all this to your students in a 100-level gen
ed class twenty years later.”
“Yes, with this closing twist: I told them that now I was 52
and that I just don’t give a shit. ‘It is absolutely going to happen, in the
course of the semester, that one or more of you is going to know more about
something in the course than I do. I can promise you that when it comes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I am one of the
leading obsessives on the planet. But sooner or later, one or more of you is
going to able to tell me something I don’t know, and you know what? That will
be a good day. That will be a day on which I learn something from you.’ And it
did happen, more than once—about the Drake Equation, about the Voyager
missions, about Clarke’s Rendezvous with
Rama—and that was great. Those were two of the most successful and
well-received courses I’ve taught.”
“So now you have been reading all this dystopian fiction for
the past couple of years, and right after finishing Octavia Butler’s Parables, you decide to plunge into the
icy bath that is the Foundation
trilogy, just so you don’t feel like a complete fraud. Is that it?”
“Yes, First Speaker, that’s pretty much it.”
“Was this wise? Was this well-considered? Did no one warn
you that the books would consist largely of dialogues between two men, one of
whom is cleverly outwitting the other until, thanks to a sudden reveal, it
turns out that the outwitter is in fact the outwittee? Did you not know that
Asimov would repeat that formula a few dozen times with a few dozen characters over
three books covering a four-hundred-year time span? And tell me, were you
adequately prepared for the pervasive misogyny, and the surprising paucity of
imagination suffusing a far-future scenario in which men smoke cigars and wear
ties and read newspapers?”
“You well know that the answer to all your questions is no,
and yet you ask anyway. I am beginning to think you are a man of the Second Foundation,
except that if you were, you would probably want to delude me into thinking
that you are a man of the Second
Foundation, so that I would speculate that the Second Foundation is on the
planet Calgon rather than on the planet Tantrum, where you would expect me to
suspect its location to be precisely because it would be the least likely place to
occur to me, who was born on Tantrum, unless of course the Second Foundation
does not exist, in which case you would not be a man of the Second Foundation
and you would not have asked me those questions in such an impertinent way, which
proves that the Second Foundation does exist and that the Galaxy is on Orion’s
belt.”
“You have learned much about the Foundation trilogy,
no-longer-young Skybérubé. And yet you have said nothing about how the one
character with disabilities, the mutant, throws a wrench into the Seldom Plan
and conquers the galaxy because he is so pissed off that he is a mutant, and
sterile.”
“Yes. Reading that, right after reading Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined and her awesome
discussion of intellectual disability in Butler’s Parables, was very much like returning to a more primitive era in a
dark corner of the Galaxy, where people are still relying on oil and coal for energy.”
“And yet, for all that, it is a classic trilogy in the genre,
winner of a one-time Hugo Award for Best Series Ever. Its influence on postwar
American science fiction cannot possibly be overstated. Why, with its Galactic
Empire and its rebels, its capital planet that consists of one massive, densely-populated
city, its wise-cracking, swashbuckling traders and its one admirable female character
… you know where I’m going with this. We couldn’t have Star Wars without Foundation.”
“Quite true. I never really liked Star Wars.”
“Apostate! You have no business reading or teaching science
fiction. I will blast you into atoms.”
“You will not, you fatally overconfident interlocutor,
because the one thing the quantum flux drive does do is render blasters inoperative. Had you taken my class, you
would have known that.”
The end.
_________
Next on the get-to list: N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series.
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