Krishna
Just a reminder that we have reviewed Asimov’s Prelude To Foundation earlier here.
It is astonishing to find that Asimov’s greatest series, Foundation, was initially published in an obscure magazine and languished in the book form with not much sales or fame! No, I am not kidding, he declares it himself in the prologue. Only when a tenacious publisher wanted him to write a sequel – and went and bought the rights to the original and republished it – and he complied, was it become as famous as it is now. To think that one of the most delightful series from Asimov could sink unnoticed in the literary heap is to ponder the part chance plays in the success/ failure of an author’s work. Fascinating. Now onto the story.
Golan Tevize arrived in Gaia. He was with the ancient of Gaia, Dom, and asked him what made him, Golan, choose Gaia as his abode for the future. Gaia is a Super Planet and Dom’s conscience is connected not only to all other beings in Gaia but to the planet Gaia itself. Golan is convinced that he needs to find the elusive ‘Earth’ whence all their ancestors came, in order to convince himself that he made the right choice in Gaia as his future abode.
Golan and his friend Pelorat came to Gaia but Pelorat fell in love with Bliss, a young girl of Gaia. When Golan decides to pursue his investigation to Earth alone, he finds out that they both want to come with him.
He also learns that due to the collective memory of the planet, not just stored in all living humans but also in plants, animals and non sentient things like rocks, they do not keep official record. Golan finds it odd that with this extensive knowledge, they did not preserve the original written records (which were brought by humans when they colonized Gaia judging from the timeline) and what is more, there are no references to where Earth should be in any of their records. He is still determined to go and find out.
There are interesting discussions about what happens when an ‘outside’ plant that is not part of
Gaia is eaten by Bliss – as the said plant does not have ‘memories’ yet and what happens to the waste that is expelled when Bliss is outside Gaia, as she is now with Golan and Pelorat. Not directly relevant to the topic, but still interesting.
They go to Comporellan, where there is expected to be some information on where the earth is. Even before landing they realize that it is a very cold planet (covered by ice everywhere) but habitable.
When Bliss is disallowed entry by a new sentry, Trevize (yes, Golan) talks him into looking the other way. His scan, earlier, shows an astonishing complete absence of any harmful pathogen in the body of Bliss, which puzzles him no end.
We learn later that he is under orders to not let the spacecraft go under any circumstances. When Trevize takes a cab, he realizes that he is not in an ordinary taxi but a government car disguised as a taxi. They are under arrest and taken to a large security building in which, to Trevie’s and Pelorat’s fury, they are frisked.
Trevize and the company are taken to the private quarters by the commander of the forces, the middle aged Minister of Transportation, Mitza Lazolar. She tries hard to persuade Trevize to give up the plane for Comporellan. When he refuses to give in to threats and in return threatens to blow up the ship, she takes him to her private residence to discuss and then is seduced by him.
She agrees to let him proceed if he agrees to leave the other two as hostages, and then, at the end of the quest, returns the ship to Comporellan’s custody.
He finally manages to persuade her partly through her sexual attraction to him, which he finds was engineered by Bliss. He then goes in search of Earth after giving both Pel and Bliss the option of dropping out (which they refused and wanted to stay with him)
They get three coordinates from Comporellan sources, a skeptic. He programs for the first of the three coordinates. There is a discussion about how the computer automatically adjusts for the movement of the galaxies and planets in the universe to arrive at where those three coordinates would point to today. Interesting. They approach the planet, and Bliss senses that there is no intelligent life there – she could not sense any thought patterns – but definitely lower forms of life abound. This was also confirmed by her senses. Trevize is puzzled by the visible constructions that suggest earlier existence of humans or creatures similar to humans in intellect.
When they land, and Bliss and Pelorat go off to see if they can find an inscription, Trevize finds himself cornered by a pack of wild dogs and climbs up a tree to survive.
They escape with the help of Bliss to the spaceship. When Pelorat reports finding a robot, they are excited but Bliss realizes that it is a robot that was not sentient but crumbling remains of something very old.
When they decide to check out the next coordinate – planet, Bliss senses that it is full of semi sentient beings – a flood of robots. They are still orbiting the planet at that time. When Bliss senses a few glimpses of human intelligence, they land and are in the power of Brandon, who is neither male nor female and who is the master of the robots. He explains how the humans have evolved to use sun’s energy to build their ideal world where there is no sexual differences, enough land for the twelve hundred people in that world and everything they would ever want. That world is called Solaria.
After facing certain death in the hands of Bander (a hermaphrodite so neither a he or a she) Bliss rescues them and they realize that they are trapped underground with no means of finding the way to the surface and also realizing that other Solarians will notice the massive power outage (as Bander is killed and the source of power over the biggest form in Solaris is gone) and come to investigate.
Bliss finds a child, terrified and alone, and they guess that this is probably the heir to the estate, not yet big enough to assume responsibilities. (Solarians self reproduce when necessary to groom a successor in time for a takeover).
They go back, with the child’s help, to their ship, only to find that many robots, who are the Empire guardians, try to hold them in. Again, Bliss manages to disable them and they escape. This has the flavour of an updated Gulliver’s Travels, where they visit different worlds to find different realities there. Interesting.
When the go to the final coordinates, Treviz is bitterly disappointed to find a gas giant with rings in the middle distance from the star because it really means that an inhabitable world is improbable between the gas giant and the star around which it revolves. The computer also tells him that the planets in between are all uninhabited. Now what? He has exhausted all possibilities. But he is determined that, in case a closer look reveals that these coordinates also are not of the earth that he seeks, he will spend the rest of his life, if necessary, in going from world to world (spacer worlds at least, where humanity settled first) seeking his answer.
The final world they came to is not Earth but another one called Melpomenia. They find an invasive species of moss growing but do not find anything interesting. They decide to leave and ensure that the moss, which now started clinging to the faceplate of their suits and even the hinges of the spaceship are all eradicated before they venture in.
When all they have are about 20 apparently meaningless coordinates they collected from Melpomenia and the ‘brilliant’ Treviz is puzzling over what to do next, Pelorat quietly tells him how these coordinates collected is a way to find Earth! Treviz is speechless both for not thinking of it on his own and for his unstated assumption that Pelorat was not his intellectual equal. In fact, Treviz seems an egotistic, cantankerous boor of a man, albeit brilliant – not just in this moment but throughout the book. The arguments he has with Bliss are brilliant and thought provoking, which is why I guess Asimov chose to make him argumentative, but you frequently get irritated about his attitude and intolerance to other ways of thinking.
Finally, based on Pelorat’s brilliant deduction, they find a planet that looks likely and the computer calls it Alpha. When he goes closer, he is disappointed to find that the planetary system revolves around a twin sun – one smaller than the other and orbiting the larger sun – and realizes that this cannot be earth. He then realizes that it anyway could not have been earth because the computer – and so the knowledge system known to the galactic empire, called it Alpha, whereas earth is by definition not known at all.
They decide to first explore Alpha and then look in the vicinity for an unidentified star. To me at least Trevize is as crude and rude as always. It grates. He comes across as an (interstellar) racist.
Anyway, moving on. They come to the planet and first they think it is fully submerged in water but going round it, they find a patch of land and disembark. There is a young woman who is watching them and even speaks in a classic Galactic (I guess like Shakespeare to us). Other inhabitants come to gawk at them, and all of them seem to be unarmed and also without any fear of these strangers. The girl, Hiroko, takes Trevize and, with his full consent, has sex with him in privacy. Trevize seems to have mellowed and seems to consider this planet totally harmless, much to the amusement of Bliss and Pelorat.
In addition, they go to a musical festival where ‘ancient’ instruments reminiscent of those outdated instruments from earth (analog, no less!) were used. They listen to the music which seems to have been done through flutes and other string instruments like the violin and the cello – though these names were not used in the story (‘flute’ was mentioned by name).
That night, they are met by Hiroko and warned to leave before the men come back as they were all to be murdered to preserve the secret and abundance of Alpha from outworlders. The courtesy they were shown was just to lull them into complacency. She did not reveal this due to her love for Trevize but the music that Fallom produced out of the flute that enchanted them all. She will pretend to be as surprised as the others when they were discovered missing.
They leave under the cover of the night. They then aim for the star that is not in any charts but which they can see exists by help of the starship’s computer. They are comforted by the presence of a gas giant with rings around it as the myths foretold, as well as the presence of a large satellite around the third planet, also as the myths foretold of ‘a moon’.
They find that the earth is indeed radioactive but Treviz has an idea that the earth’s population can be hiding underground in the moon.
On the moon when they land, they meet a very sophisticated robot called Daneel Olivaw, unlike any the travelers had ever seen! He further astonishes them by claiming that it is he, through Bliss, the Comporellan’s female guard and also manipulated the mind of Alpha’s female, not to mention taking care of Solaria’s Bander, let alone the female in Alpha. He in fact created the whole of Gaia and its systems! He is 24000 years old but now he is dying. He needs a new one to merge his mind into to carry on the task and he chooses Fallom to remain. Fallom, who realizes that is is one of the robots like Jemby in Solaria, is happy to stay over.
The book ends with Trevize’s explanation of what sort of world he envisages and why. It is an amazing ending, and the explanation of Trevize touches upon how even our galaxy is just one galaxy in the billions of such galaxies that exist, and how it is not even the biggest one. The Andromeda galaxy is much bigger. That is not what he sets out to say, and I will leave the ending unsaid, but it is well constructed.
I am still not happy about the peevish nature of all the folks in the story – especially Trevize, but you can overlook it for the coherence of the story.
6/10
== Krishna