Imperial Universes
Isaac Asimov and the Golden Age of Science Fiction versus the revolt led by Frank Herbert
“Foundation history, which is to say the human function, is manipulated for larger ends and for the greater good as determined by a scientific aristocracy. It is assumed, then, that the scientist-shamans know best which course humankind should take. This is a dominant attitude in today’s science establishment all around the world.” - Frank Herbert, “Men on Other Planets”, 1976
The Golden Age of science fiction is associated with writers whose stories appeared in the anthology magazine that began life as Astounding Stories of Super-Science in 1930, and which published the space opera adventures of E.E. Doc Smith soon after having shed its ‘Super-Science’ hyperbole. In 1937, John W. Campbell Jr became editor and renamed it Astounding Science Fiction, and during his editorship it published the first sci-fi stories of A.E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein. The Golden Age of detective stories corresponds almost directly to this interval, for both are tied to the pulp era, where imaginative fiction was distributed in cheap magazines published on low-cost wood pulp paper.
These are the writers who sent science fiction far away from the terrestrial focus of the ‘scientific romances’, and projected it deep into outer space. E.E. Doc Smith’s space opera Lensman (that later inspired Star Wars), Asimov’s Foundation and Galactic Empire series, and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers all take for granted the idea of humanity spreading out into space. This has become so familiar to us we do not even pause to recognise just how strange and unlikely the premises are behind these tales of imperial universes. It is Wells inventive ‘what if’ that triumphs over Verne’s approach of remaining ‘grounded in engineering’. With scientific wonder escalated to magical extremes, the stars are humanity’s to conquer!
In the 1960s, Astounding rebranded as Analog: Science Fact/Science Fiction, and published a story that was a direct challenge to the assumptions of Asimov’s Foundation: “Dune World”, the first appearance of what would become Herbert’s phenomenal novel Dune. Herbert was enormously influenced by Asimov’s work, and recognised his debt to him - but he became acutely aware of the unstated assumptions Asimov had relied upon in writing the Foundation series. In Herbert’s view, science fiction was a medium tailormade to challenge such background assumptions, and any combination of these implicit beliefs “could serve as the jumping-off point for an entirely new series of stories”. In creating Dune as a rebuttal to Asimov’s behaviourist empire of Foundation, Herbert continued the tradition of Shelley, Verne and Wells.
But Dune is no triumphalist imperial universe. Foundation concerns a well-oiled society disrupted by a mutant ‘mule’ who lies outside its pre-suppositions. In Herbert’s inversion for Dune and its sequel, the ‘Mule’ - Paul Atriedes - is our hero, and a tragic hero at that. Far from the mythology of ‘super-science’ that animated the Golden Age, Herbert sees the corrupting influence of power upon the truth, manifested throughout all the factions of his imaginary universe. Whether its the political power of the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the religious manipulation of the Bene Gesserit, or the technological prowess of the Bene Tleilax, Herbert’s oligarchy is as corrupt and corrupting as our own, with the machinations surrounding the oil industry transposed onto that of Dune’s spice melange. The tragedy of Paul’s story is that he can see the doom that will befall both him and humanity, and his attempts to create a new path to escape from this costs him nearly everything he holds dear.
Dune marks a turning point in science fiction. Through the pulp magazines the genre grew in popularity, but it also grew in arrogance. Herbert’s revolt against Asimov is simultaneously a tribute to his tremendous influence, yet also a blunt rejection of his premises. The imperial universes do not die with Herbert’s Dune saga, but they can never again be taken seriously as anything but cliché or an avenue for merchandising. Then, in the latter half of the twentieth century, the adoration of ‘super-science’ that had brought the Golden Age of Science Fiction into its galaxy-sized life was to be inverted and subverted by the coming of the New Wave - and it too sprang from the pages of a magazine: Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. As Dune stands as in opposition to Foundation, the New Wave comes to reject the imperial universes for something far more down-to-earth: the human.