Celebrating What Is Best In Science Fiction: Foundation

Over the past month we here in the Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party Ministry of Truth have received a number of questions about which classic works of SF do and don't exemplify the goals of the Party. While our cohort John Z. Upjohn has done a fantastic job identifying SJW-infused works, we do not wish to present ourselves as wholly negative, so today we're going to talk about one of the all time great works of SF, a classic of yesteryear which could never win a Hugo today.

Yes, Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

This is of course a story about a group of intellectually superior men -- and only men -- who set about to seize the galaxy from the effete and liberal Galactic Empire. It's a daring plan that requires subtle ground work and will take centuries to realize, not unlike our current project to wrest control of fandom from the Nielsen Hayden clique.

The parallel is made clear in the opening chapter, set on the city-planet of Trantor, capital of the empire. The Trantorians are all elitist snobs who see themselves as superior to the provincials who populate the rest of the galaxy, even though it's clear that Trantor wouldn't be able to survive without constant food shipments from agrarian worlds. It would be anachronistic to impose modern controversies on the story, but no doubt Trantorians see the rest of the galaxy as a bunch of inbred, racist hicks whose opinions should be ignored. Certainly that's the case for Hari Seldon, a brilliant scientist who has proven mathematically that the Empire has become too soft and liberal to survive -- that the vast welfare state the Imperial government has built up will soon go bankrupt, thus proving how misguided liberal policies are. The hardiest outlying regions will quickly secede and attempt to save their economies, but the suckling class the Empire has fostered with their welfare programs will put demands on the new governments which they'll be unable to meet, and things will dissolve into ten-thousand years of anarchy.

But Seldon has a plan. By placing a colony on a small, uninhabited planet way out on the edge of the galaxy (AKA, flyover country), he will plant a seed that will grow into a new and better Empire. His mathematically proven outline for this is known as the Seldon Plan, but it's clearly Manifest Destiny. The new Empire will spread forth, conquering the backwards, liberal planets that have fallen on hard times, and lift them into a new enlightenment.

Where modern SJW authors would call this "colonialism" and be appalled by the Foundation's manipulation of primitive and backwards cultures, Asimov celebrates it as the natural course of things which can never be questioned. He doesn't diddle around, lamenting how the Foundation crushes the local cultures and remakes them in a manner convenient to their expansion. No, he recognizes that the superior culture should be able to impose upon less developed ones, raising them up over many years but receiving economic benefits in the meantime. This is a fine, noble relationship of the sort Kipling celebrated in "The White Man's Burden," but which SJWs today repudiate. Instead they claim that this sort of imperialism is shameful and exploitative. They refuse to see that it's in the long-term benefit of everyone involved. They're more concerned with the primitive cultures being destroyed than the economic benefits that will eventually accrue to the people.

Reading Foundation, one cannot help but realize that if Isaac Asimov were alive today, he'd be a proud supporter of the Sad Puppies movement. He wouldn't shy away from the necessity of America helping countries like Iraq and Afghanistan escape barbarism, and he wouldn't condemn the books that acknowledge and celebrate those noble endeavors.

When SJWs turn their backs on one of the greatest SF authors to ever live, you know their vision for the genre is not one that will be embraced by the rest of fandom.