(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

Foundation and Chaos (1998) is one of the few successes of sharecrop. ‘Sharecropping’, referring originally to the practice whereby a peasant farmer worked another’s land in exchange for part of the harvest, has come in the SF genre to mean an author producing books set in another writer’s previously devised imaginary universe. We have seen this many times: Gregory Benford has expanded and sequelled an Arthur C. Clarke novella, and Robert Silverberg has transformed major Isaac Asimov stories into novels, to name only two major examples. There is an air of mercenary cynicism in this, highly creative writers abandoning their ethic of originality for lucrative hire; critical mutterings about genre decadence become audible. And indeed, sharecrop texts are generally jadedly derivative. But the Second Foundation Trilogy, of which Foundation and Chaos is Volume Two, is a fascinating exception.

When Isaac Asimov died in 1992, he left his ‘Foundation’ future history incomplete. He had laboured over his last decade to join his Robot and Foundation stories into a single whole, but six long interlinking and continuing novels were not enough. And so the argument began: shouldn’t the enterprise be concluded by other hands? And as Asimov had strongly influenced subsequent Hard SF writers, would their participation not be a proper homage to him, a carrying forward by them of philosophical notions he initiated and they have long embodied in their own original work? Following this logic, Foundation novels by three prominent authors were commissioned: Foundation’s Fear (1997), by Gregory Benford; Bear’s Foundation and Chaos; and the forthcoming Secret Foundation, by David Brin. The three B’s are faithfully adhering to the stated details of Asimov’s universe, while adding to them; but they are simultaneously enjoying great freedom as to how they render – and revise – the spirit of the thing.

Foundation and Chaos is thus both a tribute and a subversion. It expands, and fills in events surrounding, ‘The Psychohistorians’, Part One of Foundation (1951), the original kernel of Asimov’s extended series. Bear’s text incorporates many paragraphs from Asimov verbatim. The story remains that of how Hari Seldon, originator of predictive Psychohistory, is tried by the authorities on Trantor, capital world of the Galactic Empire, for his treasonable thesis that the Empire will soon fall and that measures must be taken to allow some subsequent restoration of order. The Psychohistorians are exiled to the remote planet Terminus, and the Seldon Plan, which requires that two Foundations be set up to guide galactic history back to stability, is set in train. But Bear, building on modifications Asimov himself made in his later Foundation novels, makes this only a surface narrative, a misleading veneer, beneath which conspiracies of robots and Imperial bureaucrats contend to shape reality. While achieving much of the literary texture of authentic Asimov, Bear rejects Asimovian determinism, suggesting finally that Psychohistory, one of SF’s famous concepts, is of limited scope, simply a transitional arrangement before humankind’s evolutionary apotheosis into new, free, and co-operative forms. Bear’s systematic re-orientation of Asimov’s familiar props and techniques, constituting his respectful yet penetrating interrogation of the old master, begins to redeem the sharecrop phenomenon.

ORBIT (UK). 1998. HARDCOVER.