Of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Saga and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come: The Figure of Hari Seldon

In a prior post I discussed some of the parallels and the differences between Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come--not least both tales envisioning the restoration of civilization by a science- and engineering-minded elite, with a significant difference Asimov's reimagining the Medieval Church as the Empire-restoring Foundation, whereas Wells' more radical book discarded religious pretenses, and emphasized a new World State which would move past the weaknesses of the pre-Fall order.

Another significant difference would seem to be the sheer elitism of the conception, with the Foundation the mover of galactic events, and above and in back of it the psychohistorian Hari Seldon who saw and planned it all out mathematically in a manner that can seem more divine than human, the more so for his odd technological deification--with the opening of the Vault containing his recorded messages in moments of crisis having the quality of religious revelation intended to speed the fulfillment of a "Divine Plan." (Indeed, in the second book, Foundation and Empire, Asimov has a character remark the fact of "a whole culture brought up to a blind, blubbering belief that a folk hero of the past has everything all planned out and is taking care of every little pieces of their . . . lives," a "thought-pattern [that] evoked religious characteristics . . . strong faith reactions.")

I can think of nothing comparable to Seldon in Wells, and certainly not The Shape of Things to Come. Certainly Wells is not without respect for individual achievement, and the movement establishing the World State in his saga certainly has its leaders, among whom one can find personal greatness. (Indeed, he is not without his elitist tendencies--it was, in fact, a significant element in his complex and increasingly unfriendly attitude toward Marxism and its reliance on the working class, of which he did not think much, a fact which is a significant theme of his Experiment in Autobiography.) Yet the protagonists of Shape, taken as individuals, are in the end humans--more intelligent than others, better educated, more responsible, but still, just humans and not gods--who faced facts that had been increasingly apparent to a great many people for a very long time, and acted accordingly. Unsurprisingly the trend of history, and within it the collective efforts of the Control, tower above any one figure. (Indeed, writing this post I easily enough recalled the Air and Sea Control, but I had to look up the names of specific characters in the book in order to recall them.)

Altogether I suspect that the conception of Seldon owes far less to Wells than to American science fiction's taste for scientific supermen who can singlehandedly bend the course of history, exceedingly evident in the Edisonades of the nineteenth century (in the American-style "invasion stories," for example), with which idea John Campbell seemed obsessed--not merely as a teller and editor of stories, but in actual life, as he went from one movement to another in pursuit of something that would render the vision real (Scientology, psi, etc.).

Today, looking at the worship of "tech billionaires" as saviors, and the way tales of superheroes fill our screens, it would seem that this particular legacy of older American science fiction remains very much with us now.