Foundation's Dark Future

In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov wrote a series of stories that became the Foundation trilogy. This later became one of the most beloved series of novels in science fiction, America’s most successful contribution to literature. He was the first American writer to promise his readers that they could control the future and his predictions about robots especially made him an attractive author. His influence as a futurist, however, had much less to do with predictions than with helping to educate an elite, and even public opinion, to think like a manipulative benevolent mastermind, as his protagonists do.

It took decades, but Asimov’s stories ended up winning prestigious science fiction prizes and, more importantly, captured the imaginations of millions of young Americans. When Asimov eventually returned to writing Foundation stories in the 1980s, Americans had changed so much that they were making him a fortune, landing him on the New York Times Bestseller lists. Why did this futurism appeal to so many Americans? America is a land without history, to judge by the young who know very little about her past. Americans know even less, however, about the rest of the world, being too busy or restless to allow for such education. Besides, history is mostly the pre-American past: America is about the future, and accordingly deals in science instead.

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