Barrington J. Bayley, actually.

H. Bruce Franklin. However, you neglect to mention that the Heinlein wrote that story entirely, and fairly strictly, from an outline given to him by John W. Campbell, who had intended to write it himself, but couldn’t after the publishers of Street & Smith told the editor of Astounding that he could no longer publish fiction while he held the job. Heinlein struggled considerably to eliminate the deeply racist foundation that Campbell laid down, but being constricted by the mandate to not deviate strongly from the outline, was limited in how much he could do. The issue as regards people thinking for themselves was one that bothered Heinlein a lot, and when he got a second pass at the story, outside of Campbell’s control and strictures, even though he believed strongly in “not rewriting” a story once it had been sold, he rewrote that part.

Among my sources on this, aside from decades of closely following such information, is my recent reading of a couple of thousand pages of the manuscript of Heinlein’s authorized biography (I have a number of different interpretations from the author of some aspects of Heinlein’s life, but not about these particular details).

“It’s also been dog’s years since I read Foundation, but I do seem to recall an interview or essay in which Asimov said that he hadn’t planned Foundation as a trilogy”

Well, of course not. There wasn’t even a book until many years after the stories were published in Astounding. They’re a bunch of novellas, written over years. The “trilogy” was purely assembled years later, for convenience.

“Swarthmore’s SF society has the Cordwainer Bird Memorial Library on campus, as partial homage …”

I think Matt Schneck was one of the founders in the early Seventies, though I could be wrong.

“…although Paul M. A. Linebarger’s more well-known pseudonym certainly may have been one of Ellison’s inspirations.”

Of course it was.

“David Brin’s Forward the Foundation”

Was one of Asimov’s last sequels; Brin had nothing to do with it. I assume you’re thinking of Brin’s “Foundation’s Triumph,” which I’ve not read.

“I wonder if we got that burst because that’s what Campbell was buying”

That’s a good part of it, certainly.

“The argument was that the future history went hand-in-hand with the archetype, and that other authors of the time, notably Heinlein, were also searching for an ideal man as part of the future history. Was it all that common?”

It was if you wanted to sell to Campbell: who was the leading genre market, that paid the best.

“Smith didn’t do any such thing, but he’s such an outlier.”

And didn’t sell to Campbell: H. L. Gold bought his stuff at Galaxy, after Campbell’s peak. Although Scanners Live In Vain (which synchronicitly enough, I just made a reference to an hour ago) was published as early as 1950, almost all of “Smith”‘s stories appeared between late 1958 and February 1966. Campbell was still editing Analog, but hadn’t been leading the field since the late Forties.

“Other thoughts and examples?”

I think you’re muddling the concepts of a created universe in which stories take place, and a “future history,” a bit, but it’s not as if there are strict definitions, to be sure.

Heinlein created the original “Future History” (though sort of partially on Campbell’s command/influence/patronage), and it more or less literally drew a line, when he created the original chart with timelines for Campbell, between then contemporary times, and points in the future. Relatively few others have ever done something like that, which is much more specific than simply having a bunch of stories set hundreds of years in the future sharing characters and technology and references.

But, as I said, it’s not as if there are rules about this, after all.

Claude Degler, and an occasional 13-year-old, aside, that was almost always said ironically, and with humor, you know, going back to its start. No fan who ever dealt with other fans could use it any other way (but I speak from comprehensive knowledge of the fanzines of the Forties and Fifties, not from deduction).

Smith didn’t do any such thing, but he’s such an outlier. And certainly by the time you get to Known Space, the protagonists’ flaws are structural elements of the stories, so searching for a role model is not part of the meta-narrative.

(Has anyone here read Lost Pages by Paul di Filippo? Little snippets of alternative history without the zeppelins and with SF personalities in many of them. In one story, it’s not John Campbell who takes over at Astounding, but Joseph Campbell in full power-of-myth mode, and who tweaks history here and there through the power of SF.)

Anyway, Asimov and Smith are about steering history, whereas I remember Piper’s history as not having anyone trying to do the guiding. Maybe a bit in Federation, but I think his contention is that it can’t be done, that certain cycles are inevitable. (I’d say this is pop Gibbon or Spengler, but I haven’t read either to know for sure.) Anderson I haven’t read; likewise the Dorsai series, if it’s even a future history. Known Space doesn’t address decline-and-fall, as exploration and integration take up the several centuries that Niven sketches out. In Brin’s Uplift setting, humanity is an odd backwater and not the center of all things as it was in the earlier future histories. In the setting for the game Traveller, earth is humanity’s original home, but one that’s been forgotten. (There’s still a rise-and-fall argument going there, because of the general course of galactic civilization, but one without steering.) Other thoughts and examples?

I agree that the technological stagnation schtick is most common among SF readers. And for some obvious parallels, Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic-Flandry future history, and H. Beam Piper’s Federation-Empire.

Anyway, Asimov’s “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” is IMO more recognizable from the various popular “falls of Rome” on offer. These are common. Pretty much every modern movement predicting disaster has a “this is exactly why Rome fell!” story somewhere in its arsenal. Entirely bipartisan: as true of environmentalists (Rome fell because of overcultivation led to environmental degradation) as the Christian right (Rome fell because tolerance of homosexuality led to a reduced birthrate).

The one that seems to me particularly prevalent among SF readers, with their techno-libertarian leanings, is all about technological stagnation due to the slavery/oppressive emperors/cultural aversions to technology: horse-collars, steam-engines etc. (This is based on conversations I used to have in another forum – Doug Muir knows exactly where I’m getting this from.) This idea is definitely there in Asimov.

More generally, even if you don’t know a lot about the actual history of Late Antiquity, the Foundation narrative is going to feel right from the basic underlying narrative behind all of these: the awful warning represented by Rome, seen as a state that appeared supremely powerful, but whose blindness to its hidden weaknesses destroyed it. N.B. that you are more likely to have this general impression of the topic if you *don’t* know much about it.

The Mule = Charlemagne (or Napoleon-as-Charlemagne), surely?

Now that you mention Brin, his Uplift Series also has commentary on the Gaia-Galaxia idea.

Gavin: how much does the average SF reader now know about the fall of Rome? Insert generic gloomy comments about historical knowledge nowadays–with the specific thought that SF readers in 1940 might have been a lot more familiar with their Gibbon and their Roman history than SF readers nowadays. I know there are TV shows and movies about Rome, but how many of them lately actually cover its decline? *Gladiator* only got us as far as Commodus.

And it *has* to be Rome. We’re prepped to accept that the fall of the Roman Empire can be used as a predictive model for the fall of a Galactic Empire because it gets used rhetorically that way all the time as a “dire warning of what will happen if we don’t do X.” Few other historical events have this much rhetorical power.

This connects with one of the posts that hooked me on this blog – the one about the BBC/HBO’s “Rome” and the fact that no-one “owns” ancient Rome.