Review of The End of Eternity (1955)
Isaac Asimov (writer).
Read in 2017.
I was skeptical at first. Asimov was laying on the usual ploys of suspense too thickly. The ontological gambit of positioning Cooper as Mallansohn was immediately obvious to me from the foreshadowing discussion of his facial hair, and this undermines the novel when it is viewed, correctly, as a stand-alone original.
Asimov would position The End of Eternity as a spin-off of his Foundation or Greater Foundation series. Its stated premise is that changes—even big ones—have gradually smaller effects over time. This is compatible with psychohistory as a fictional premise of the larger series, but it is so implausible that it nullifies much of the fun that could be had with an extratemporal corps of social engineers. The near-total lack of philosophical interest within this corps fortunately turns out to be a plot point in the final twist, which is a good one. I expected the Eternals to be manipulated by a more deeply nested Eternity, and I was wrong, sort of. The end result at once relocates the reader in relation to the narrative and replaces the dystopian corps with an equally scary-sounding human “empire” (that of the larger series) that crowds out its competition. That’s a job well done of burning the motherhood statement. It’s almost nihilistic, with the Samson-inspired hero/antihero fuming and pouting throughout.
Psychohistory, enabled by the metaphysics of this novel, implements bad ideas from the real world. The German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond once speculated that, under Pierre-Simon Laplace’s deterministic physics, it would be possible to predict exactly when “England burns its last lump of coal”. In a funny coincidence, one faction in the Foundation series ends up running its spaceships on coal. Bois-Reymond concluded that even if physics did work as Laplace had concluded, certain things would remain unknowable (“Ignorabimus”). Psychologist John B. Watson got his PhD at precisely the time when Planck and Einstein were wrecking Laplace with a new probabilistic fundamental physics, but Watson kept working according to Bois-Reymond’s limits to knowledge. He excluded human intention and consciousness from the study of psychology. Under those strictures, it appeared to Watson that even human behaviour was determinisic and mechanistic. This meant that all of history was predictable, given only the perfect knowledge of the present that Laplace had attributed to his “demon” in 1814. Asimov’s premise of diminishing effects in this novel is a kludge to save John B. Watson’s concept of historical determinism at every scale, specifically including the psyche, hence “psychohistory”: A concept that physicists had already shown to be invalid in the real world before Asimov was born.
The treatment of computers, which Asimov here calls “computerplexes” since he is still using the term “computers” for people, is prescient for the time. On the other hand, the final twist doesn’t drive home the obvious feminist objection to all-male Eternity, beyond Noÿs’s role. It’s doubly Platonic: a Republic-inspired society of noble liars with a clear emotion-reason dichotomy. It seems tremendously unlikely that so many human cultures would be happy to trade with each other through a near-omnipotent, politically opaque, ostensibly unemotional bureaucracy that treats its “liaisons” so poorly and squanders female talent. If reproduction is a concern, just sterilize everybody. That would have prevented Twissell’s problem too.
Like the absence of chaos theory and other objections to Watson, the gender aspect is antiquated beyond basic credibility. I like the names though: Laban Twissell, Noÿs Lambent and Hobbe Finge, supposed to represent a wide, albeit manipulated variety of human cultures, and doing an amusingly poor job of it. I can accept that Eternity kept real cultural variation limited, but each century is too homogeneous and environmental aspects go almost unmentioned.
References here: “Assignment: Earth” (1968), Hyperion (1989), Rick and Morty (2013), 12 Monkeys (2015).