Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (110 page)

Once established, it was a small, “creative minority” that kept a new civilization running—and it was the breakdown of this minority that ultimately led to a civilization’s decline and death. While it predicted specific events within the lifespan of a civilization (such as a “time of troubles” and dark ages), his system saw these as the result of the actions taken by the people within that society. However, he also observed that these actions created similar results in one society after another and fell into predictable patterns.

Although most historians ridiculed it, Toynbee’s work seized the popular imagination. One finds, for example, a society of Toynbeean scholars playing a sizable role in Charles L. Harness’ classic SF novel,
The Paradox Men
, and he plays a key role in Ray Bradbury’s story, “The Toynbee Convector.” Whatever its value as an actual theory of metahistory, Toynbee’s work defined the way in which many people viewed the past for the better part of a century. While his theories may not always match those of the fictional Hari Seldon, the resemblance is strong enough to suspect that, as he was for a great many others, Toynbee may have been one of Asimov’s more important inspirations.

While not as widely known as either Spengler or Toynbee, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin offered a third similar theory best remembered for the categories he divided civilizations into: the
ideational
, in which the spiritual dominated society, and the
sensate
, which was concerned with purely material things. At rare intervals, a combination of these two impulses in society resulted in the
integral
or
idealistic
stage, which was a perfectly balanced combination of the two: He claimed this could be found in both Classical Greece and the High Middle Ages.

However, unlike Spengler and Toynbee, Sorokin saw the shift from one stage to other as something that could happen at any time. While he identified patterns and trends in history, he hoped that with proper guidance from those aware of the nature of human civilizations, it would be possible to guide mankind to its next ideational stage, without the horrors he had witnessed during the Russian Revolution.

After Harvard removed him from his position as the founding Chairman of the Sociology Department, he went on to found the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism in 1949, which had as its goal the elimination of future wars by using his historical insights to promote love and understanding. It sounds suspiciously like a real-world Seldon Institute—although the first of Asimov’s
Foundation
short stories actually appeared seven years earlier.

Even with this widely-varied collection of theories, none of them match the most distinctive characteristic of Seldon’s theories: They do not make any mathematical predictions.

For that, one has to move from history to modern economics, which insists that it is a mathematical science, capable of making precise predictions. The Nobel Prize in Economics routinely goes to the creators of sophisticated mathematical models of human behavior.

Unfortunately the parallel ends there, as no one expects these models to predict actual economic behavior.

While no economist would ever put it quite that way, they will blame any failure of real behavior to match their predictions on factors which are not part of their model. Human behavior is enormously complex, so there can be no shortage of possible explanations for any deviation from their predictions. Free market economics deliberately simplifies human behavior, focusing only on a few things which they argue are the main factors driving our economic interactions.

Ironically, the Austrian School of Economics, while it still believes in the laws of free market economics, has rejected this precision, and refuses to make mathematical predictions. Instead, they claim that the results predicted by their theory always take place, even if the actual results—warped by things not covered by their theories—are radically different from their predictions, or even their exact opposite.

In fact, some—like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, borrowing a page from Immanuel Kant—go so far as to argue that their conclusions can not be disproven by any awkward failure of reality to match their predictions. They are a logical conclusion of a logical system, and thus are true, whether they actually describe what happens or not. Hoppe goes so far as to argue that the same is true of socialism, and that both systems are immune from any empirical attempts to disprove them.

Which is about as far from the mathematical certainties of psychohistory as it is possible to get.

Looking closely at all these theories, one finds that they are controversial at best and bear little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s work.

By the early part of the 20th century, for example, an important Marxist theorist like Antonio Gramsci could reject the notion that history led inevitably to the proletarian state. By then, it was obvious that capitalism wasn’t about to turn into socialism anytime soon. So, following Gramsci’s lead, Marxists became far more interested in cultural issues. One noted socialist scholar, Theodor Adorno, actually tried to fuse Marxism with some of Spengler’s insights, shorn of most of their determinism. It seems at best an unlikely combination, one that Marx would never have approved.

It should also be noted that, despite the many similarities between the three cyclic theories, they are also enormously different, enough so that they can’t be seen as different approaches to the same basic “laws” of history. While it was inevitable that Spengler’s amateur status would lead other historians to reject his work, even Toynbee, who was a professor of modern Greek and Byzantine history, encountered a great deal of opposition from his fellow historians. All three men routinely faced accusations of poor scholarship, dubious conclusions, and even twisting the facts to fit neatly into their preconceived categories. Nor has time been kind to their reputations. All three have been largely forgotten, their work rarely cited by other historians, and the entire idea of comparative history ignored except by a few modern scholars like Harold Adams Innis and Samuel Huntington.

There is even a real-world discipline that calls itself psychohistory, although it bears little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s version.

In the real world, psychohistory is an attempt to apply psychology to history, to gain a greater understanding of what caused past events. It tends to focus on issues related to childhood—and most notably, questions of incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Some psychohistorians hope that by perfecting our methods of rearing children, we might eliminate war and international hatreds. This is about as close to Asimov as it gets.

Psychohistory has never quite emerged from its academic shantytown and remains controversial. There are no departments of psychohistory, even if a few colleges do have courses in it. Many of their fellow historians have questioned their vast grab-bag of assorted methods and think that their reconstructions of past historical figures involve a lot of guesswork. Others question whether it should be considered a separate discipline at all, as mainstream historians have long attempted to explore psychological motivations.

One aspect of the real psychohistory, however, points in a very different direction—towards a forgotten understanding of history that might have more bearing on Hari Seldon’s story than Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, or Sorokin. For it does not always look at mass psychology, and cultural analysis, but it also attempts to understand the psychological motivations of historic individuals.

While the image of history as an ever upward, evolutionary process may have been the orthodox belief at the time of Spengler, it had itself replaced an even older view. Rather than seeing history in terms of sweeping trends, this older view held that it was the choices made by individuals which have shaped history. It is a view which has never quite died, finding support at the time from a number of mostly Catholic scholars, notably Christopher Dawson, Hilaire Belloc, and Sir Herbert Butterfield.

Despite all of Hari Seldon’s talk of grand historical trends and mathematical predictions, the irony is that the new future he crafts is ultimately the result of the actions of a single man: Hari Seldon.

It is his refinement of the science of psychohistory, his predictions, his establishment of the Seldon institute, and the shadowy Second Institute that reshape history. Even though he may have made his choices based on mathematical models, they are still his choices. Without them, the history of the galaxy would have looked quite different.

Whether or not Isaac Asimov believed that psychohistory was possible, the story of Hari Seldon is not of one of randomness and blind forces, determinism, and the laws of science, but of a single remarkable man whose actions reshape the history of the galaxy.

One does have to wonder, however, if Dr. Asimov ever noticed this.

About the Author

Mark Cole
hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at
Flash Fiction Online
(”Reverse Engineering”) and
Abyss And Apex
(”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

The Art of Brutal Prose: An Interview with Mark Lawrence

Peter Hodges

Mark Lawrence is the author of the recent fantasy series The Broken Empire. There are two books in the series to date:
Prince of Thorns
and
King of Thorns.
Written in the same literary vein as Joe Abercrombie and George R. R. Martin, the story is a bleak portrayal of Prince Honorious Jorg Ancrath, scion of a noble family who has vowed to once again unite a group of disparate kingdoms into an Empire.

The prose is like a punch in the gut—visceral, simple, and evocative. He eschews the traditional wordiness of fantasists before him, instead letting the simple language convey harsh reality without mincing words. This style lends itself to fast pacing that draws the reader headlong through a world of brutality and evil, where goodness is a flickering shadow in the light of ambition and revenge. The construction of the story’s history has a number of truly excellent surprises, especially as the reader gradually comes to grasp the setting and the underlying rules of the universe.

As a scientist involved in researching artificial intelligence problems, what made you choose a fantasy setting over a science-fictional setting?

Ah! My most asked question, and one that prompted my most viewed blog post.

I have to say I don’t really get it. Should a policeman write crime fiction, a lawyer pen about law firm shenanigans, a nurse put out medical dramas? Should we boffins get our dirty science boots off your fantasy carpet? I guess the easiest answer is that my love of fantasy pre-dates my love of science—my mother read me Lord of the Rings when I was seven—I cried when [spoiler] Gandalf died [/spoiler].

Writing is more about people than setting in any event. I’m sure I could write science fiction and I’d probably enjoy it a lot. I just feel that I enjoy writing fantasy that little bit more.

Does working on problems related to artificial intelligence give you any insight into the nature and/or definition of consciousness? Have you had any (declassified) “aha!” moments, where you linked something in your research to human or animal cognition?

Short answer, “no.”

Artificial Intelligence is a fairly misleading umbrella term that I employ because the media popularised it and people feel they know what it means . . . a little. In truth very few scientists involved in the area will ever talk about their work in those terms. What we do is (as far as we know) a long way from issues of consciousness and revolves around rather dry and abstract Bayesian mathematics aimed at calculating inference from data in order to support decisions. Under controlled conditions these techniques are powerful and useful, but there’s a huge disconnect between those controlled conditions and the general messiness of the real world where only the tiniest of steps have been taken toward intelligent autonomous behaviour.

What was your “elevator pitch” for
A Prince of Thorns?
Did you sell the manuscript first, or did it go through an agency?

I don’t think I had an elevator pitch. When I finally got “bullied” into sending it out, years after writing it, I emailed four agents off a list. I noticed later that the agency that accepted me had on their submissions page instructions to include in the cover letter a paragraph describing the book. I must have missed that bit first time around. I just said, something along the lines of “hi, I’ve attached the first three chapters of my book” and mentioned a few places I’d had short stories published.