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Moments before leaving for a meeting in Barbados with my colleagues Anil Madhavapeddy Mark Elvers Arthur C. Clarke The Fountains of Paradise Asimov Foundation in 2022 — but I must admit that I am struggling with the limitations of this genre.
The cover of The Fountains of Paradise In her 2013 interview with The Paris Review Ursula Le Guin
The “hard”–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.
There is a good point here, and Le Guin’s attention to social sciences and anthropology and history was indeed a strength, but Asimov Foundation . So what is the difference, aside from the fact that Foundation was written by a man? Well, it cannot be unrelated to Asimov Mid-Century Man .
The Mid-Century Man has no time for the usual literary rules governing the development of characters and their arc of growth. He is interested in science and humanity, yes, but through the lens of his own avatar whom he transplants directly from our world of his time into the futuristic world of his story. This hapless transplant finds himself, with no volition, speaking the author’s words through his own lips… He hears his own voice prattle on about “the last refuge of the incompetent” and can do absolutely nothing about it.
The inclination of the Mid-Century Man to spill no ink that might distract from his speculations (flavoured with thematic orientalism, as in the case of Fountains Dune , which I adore, but he is saved by his mastery of the tragedy-form: indeed, we are already weeping with Paul over Chani’s fate a quarter of the way through Dune Messiah .
In contrast, there is little that is compelling about the characters of The Fountains of Paradise 2001: A Space Odyssey , and the same holds for Asimov Foundation . The mostly one-dimensional characters of these works are foils for the authors’ speculative ideas about technology or “future history”, and a shorter work could have been written that omits the ventriloquy act entirely and just directly makes the point the author so strongly wished to make.
Will Fountains