Retro Review: "Citadel of Lost Ships" by Leigh Brackett

The finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos will be announced tomorrow. But for now, I'll continue to take a look at some of the finalists for previous years of Retro Hugos. And today, I'll continue with a story that was not the best story on the ballot, neither in its respective category nor by the respective author, but that I nonetheless found extremely interesting and that I found myself thinking about a lot more than about many of the other Retro Hugo finalists of that year.

The story in question is "Citadel of Lost Ships", a space opera novelette by Leigh Brackett that was the cover story of the March 1943 issue of Planet Stories and was a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

Roy Campbell, the protagonist of "Citadel of Lost Ships", is a typical example of the outlaw heroes Leigh Brackett was so fond of. He is also explicitly described as dark-skinned, even if cover artist Jerome Rozen portrays the character as white and blonde and a deadringer for Doc Savage as portrayed by Walter Baumhofer.

At the beginning of the story, Roy has narrowly escaped the Spaceguard and found refuge with the Kraylens, a tribe of native Venusians who have taken him in before. But there is trouble brewing in this peaceful Venusian paradise, for the exhausted and injured Roy is woken by war drums in the middle of the night.

Roy finally gets the story of what is going on from his Kraylen foster father. It turns out that oil, coal and other minerals have been discovered in the Venusian swamps near the Kraylens' home. And now the Terran-Venusian Coalition government is planning to take possession of the Kraylens' land to drain the swamps, drill for oil and mine the coal and other minerals (we wonder if the appropriately named Terran Exploitations Company is involved). The Kraylens will be resettled into reservations, where tourists can gawk at their primitive lifestyle. Understandably, the Kraylens are not fans of this plan. "We will die first," Roy's foster father says.

Roy wants to help the Kraylens. After all, they gave him a home when he needed one and hid him from the authorities several times thereafter. But Roy also sympathises with the Kraylens' plight in more ways than one, for we learn that he comes from a family of farmers who had been working the same plot of land for more than three hundred years, until they were displaced by a hydroelectric dam, victims of the same idea of progress and expansion that will now claim the Kraylens and their way of life.

Luckily, Roy has an idea. The travelling space station Romany, the titular "Citadel of Lost Ships" since it has been assembled from abandoned spaceships, has been offering refuge to those displaced by the imperialist expansion of the Terran-Venusian Coalition for a long time now. And Romany just happens to be in orbit around Venus, so maybe they can be persuaded to take in the Kraylens. It is worth a try at any rate.

So Roy sets off for Romany, narrowly evading yet another patrol ship on his way there. When he reaches the space station, he isn't exactly given a warm welcome. The communications officer, a young black man from Mercury called Zard, treats him coolly and his boss, an Earthman called Tredrick, blows him off and tells Roy that Romany cannot help the Kraylens and that he shall leave. However, shortly after Tredrick has broken contact, Roy receives a message from Zard telling him to dock at one of the ships that make up Romany. Because, so the young man tells him, there are some who still consider Romany a refuge.

Roy docks as instructed and is promptly knocked out by a one-armed Martian named Marah, who mistakes him for a spy for Tredrick. Once that misunderstanding has been cleared up, Roy learns from Marah and a human telepath named Stella Moore what is going on aboard Romany.

It turns out that Romany is on the edge of a civil war between those like Stella, Marah and Zard who want to continue living according to their own code and help those in need, even if it pisses off the Coalition government, and a group led by Tredrick and the station council who want to stop interfering with the Coalition's plans in exchange for better trading rights and constant orbits. Tredrick's fraction is about to move against the rebels when Roy blunders in.

Stella promises Roy that the rebels will rescue the Kraylens. In exchange, Roy promises that he'll stick around and help the rebels – for the Kraylens' sake and because Roy sympathises with the rebels and their cause.

Romany is a fascinating setting, an assembly of spaceships whose interior not only houses members of many different races, but also mimics their natural environment, i.e. the Venusian quarter has swamp vegetation, while the Titanian quarter has ice caves. Sadly, Leigh Brackett never revisited Romany, though it's spiritual descendants still abound in science fiction, ranging from Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine to Alpha, the City of a Thousand Planets, from the Valérian and Laureline comics and the recent film adaptation by Luc Besson.

The rebels are planning to take a ship and rescue the Kraylens, but before they can get there, they find their way blocked by Tredrick and his men. Tredrick informs everybody that Romany cannot help the Kraylens, not anymore, because the Kraylens have already been imprisoned for harbouring the dangerous criminal Roy Campbell. And even though Roy used a false name, when contacting Romany, Tredrick knows that he is aboard the station and warns everybody who helps him of dire consequences.

The rebels pretend to comply with Tredrick's orders, while Stella and Marah help Roy escape. Roy manages to make his getaway just before the Spaceguard arrives, which leads to yet another chase, as the Guard ships pursue Roy and his ship. Roy's ship is fatally damaged in the resulting firefight. Roy himself is badly wounded, but nonetheless he gets into a spacesuit and steps out of the airlock. He hides among the debris of his damaged and dying ship – a manoeuvre that Roy's spiritual descendant Han Solo would use again some thirty-seven years later in The Empire Strikes Back, the original screenplay of which was also penned by Leigh Brackett – and then uses the jetpack of his spacesuit to descend to Venus. Of course, Roy would have gotten burned up upon entering the atmosphere, but pulp space operas don't care about such inconvenient scientific facts.

Back on Venus, Roy meets up with Marah, Stella and their motley crew of alien rebels, who took a ship from Romany to rescue the Kraylens. Together, they head for the Venusian city of Lhi, where the Kraylens have been imprisoned.

However, Tredrick pre-empted their move and has put the Kraylens under heavy guard. But one of the rebels, a man from the Jovian moon Callisto, uses his magical harp to put the guards to sleep. But when Roy and his friends free the Kraylens, Tredrick himself shows up with more guards. A firefight erupts and Roy and Stella find themselves face to face with Tredrick himself.

Now we briefly get Tredrick's motivation for turning on his own people. Tredrick explains that even though he was born on Romany, he was never happy there and didn't care for the freedom Romany offered, since that freedom also meant poverty. So Tredrick decided to rise through the ranks, take over Romany and make a deal with the Coalition government to ensure prosperity for all. Roy and the Kraylens as well as Stella, Marah and the rebels stand in his way, so Tredrick decided to use the Coalition forces to get rid of them.

Roy launches himself at Tredrick and the two men engage in a furious fight. But Roy is weakened from his injuries and therefore he is losing. Just as Tredrick is about to kill Roy, Stella intervenes and uses her telepathic abilities to kill Tredrick.

Roy tells Stella to lead the others to safety. He will stay behind and take the blame for the death of Tredrick and the escape of the Kraylens. Because, so Roy tells Stella, the Coalition government needs a scapegoat for what happened on Venus. And if they cannot use Roy as a scapegoat, they will go after Romany. And Romany has no chance against the combined might of the Terran-Venusian Coalition. But if Roy sacrifices himself, Romany gets to remain free.

"You're wonderful," a tearful Stella tells Roy, "I didn't realize how wonderful."

Roy promises Stella that he won't be in prison for long and that he'll escape. He also says that he hopes Romany will remember him and maybe erect a statue in his honour, because he will be back. Then he waits to be arrested, while Stella flees with the Kraylens.

"Citadel of Lost Ships" is exactly the kind of glorious and thrilling pulp space opera that Leigh Brackett excelled at. However, the story also has a strong undercurrent of social criticism. Now a lot of Leigh Brackett's early stories were critical of imperialism and capitalism and often featured marginalised protagonists. "Citadel of Lost Ships", however, features Leigh Brackett in full social justice warrior mode.

Stylistically, "Citadel of Lost Ships" is very much a story of its time. It's set in the pulp science fiction shared solar system and its full of the usual anachronisms such as finned rocket ships, people smoking in space and Roy Campbell surviving re-entry in a spacesuit. On the other hand, "Citadel of Lost Ships" is exactly the opposite of the prevalent stereotype of golden age science fiction. "Citadel of Lost Ships" couldn’t be further from the ideals of Campbellian science fiction (and John W. Campbell did not publish it – Malcom Reiss of Planet Stories did). Furthermore, the themes Leigh Brackett tackles – the impact of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the treatment of indigenous people, the sacrificing of people in the name of progress – are all themes that science fiction is still grappling with today.

The humans of the Terran-Venusian Coalition are clearly the bad guys jere and the story is very concerned with the treatment of what Roy Campbell calls “the little people”, many of whom are aliens who – in a genre tradition that would last well into modern times – stand in for various marginalised groups in the real world. The plight of the Kraylen is clearly intended to criticise the treatment of Native Americans – and let’s not forget that the Wounded Knee Massacre took place only twenty-five years before Leigh Brackett was born, while the last conflicts between Native Americans and representatives of the (white) authorities happened within Brackett’s lifetime, i.e. those events were still very much within living memory, when “Citadel of Lost Ships” was published. Romany, the name of the space station, refers to the Romani people and indeed, Stella explains at one point that the station and its inhabitants are welcomed as traders but otherwise “hated, just as gypsies [Brackett’s word choice, not mine] always are.” This is not the only time that the Romani people feature in Leigh Brackett's stories of the golden age either. "The Jewel of Bas", published a year later, also features a heroic Romani protagonist.

Roy Campbell's father losing the family farm to a hydroelectric dam project, an event which psychologically scarred Roy and set him on the path towards crime, also echoes actual events of the time the story was written. Because the 1930s and 1940s were the age of the great hydroelectric dam projects in the US like the Hoover Dam (then still known as the Boulder Dam) or the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. These hydroelectric dams displaced (and were still displacing when the story was written) farmers, families and sometimes whole towns in the name of progress. It’s very difficult to find critical voices about the Tennessee Valley Authority Act or the Boulder/Hoover Dam even today (the displaced farmers and flooded towns are usually just a footnote), so to find one in 1943 is quite remarkable.

Furthermore, people are still facing displacement due to hydroelectric dams and strip mining operations today, whether it's the historic Turkish town of Hasankeyf about to be flooded by the waters of the river Tigris due to the Ilisu Dam or the people of the Garzweiler and the Lausitz regions in Germany who have lost or are still about to lose their homes to lignite coal strip mining, even though lignite coal is extremely harmful to the environment and will be phased out in the next ten to twenty years anyway. So the issues addressed by "The Citadel of Lost Ships" are not in the distant past – they're still current today.

Roy Campbell is one of my favourite Leigh Brackett characters. In many ways, Roy Campbell feels like a prototype for Eric John Stark, who would come along six years later. Like Stark, Campbell is a man of colour, like Stark he does not fit into regular human society, like Stark he found a home with an indigenous tribe, only to lose it again, when those indigenous people were displaced and slaughtered in the name of progress. But while Eric John Stark is generally a good man, Roy Campbell is probably the noblest character Leigh Brackett ever created, even though Roy sees himself as anything but a hero. I also doubt it's an accident that this noble outlaw and hero of colour shares a surname with the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a man who would become infamous for his reactionary views regarding race, gender and politics. Was this Leigh Brackett's way of giving John W. Campbell the finger?

In many ways, it's a pity that Brackett never revisited Roy Campbell. Did he manage to escape from the prison mines of Phobos (in the pulp science fiction shared solar system, moons are inevitably prisons)? Did he even go to prison in the first place or did the Coalition authorities just shoot him, because the whole affair was too embarrassing? Did Roy get that statue and did he ever get to see Stella again? We'll never know.

Roy Campbell also sums up the point of the story on the final page, when he says:

“They’re building, Stella. When they’re finished they’ll have a big, strong, prosperous empire extending all across the System, and the people who belong to that empire will be happy.
“But before you can build you have to grade and level, destroy the things that get in your way. We’re the things – the tree-stumps and the rocks that grew in the way and can’t be changed.
“They’re building; they’re growing. You can’t stop that. In the end it’ll be a good thing, I suppose. But right now, for us…”

So much for the claim that the golden age was unpolitical and all about fun science fiction and/or that the science fiction of the time promoted the unquestioning belief in science and progress and the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism. Cause here we have a story from 1943 that is very much about social justice warriors in the most literal sense of the word fighting against human imperialism.

But don't let my analysis of the political background of the story scare you off. Because "The Citadel of Lost Ships" is a cracking good pulp space opera, whether you agree with its politics or not.

The novelette category of the 1944 Retro Hugos was uncommonly strong and so "The Citadel of Lost Ships" lost out to the excellent, if very different "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. And much as I enjoyed this story, it was not in first place on my ballot either, if only because I love Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser even more and "Thieves' House" is the best of the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories published in Unknown. And indeed, reviewing the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories is a project to tackle, once I've dealt with the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists I missed.

"The Citadel of Lost Ships" is one of the lesser known Leigh Brackett stories of this era. It has been reprinted a few times, but not nearly as frequently as many of her other stories. This is a pity, because "The Citadel of Lost Ships" is a great story that deserves to be better known.

Retro Review: "Double-Cross" by James MacCreigh a.k.a. Fredrik Pohl

"Double-Cross" by James MacCreigh is a science fiction short story, which appeared in the winter 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found here.

And in case you're wondering about the author, James MacCreigh was a pen name Frederik Pohl used several times in the 1940s for his solo stories.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

"Double-Cross" takes us once more to the fog-shrouded. swampy and permanently cloudy Venus that never was that is a familiar setting in pulp science fiction published in Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and similar magazines.

The story starts with some exposition heavy dialogue between Lowrey, Officer of the Deck aboard an Earth spaceship, and the Executive Officer who never gets a name. Lowrey remarks that everything is quiet and that he cannot even note anything in his logbook, because nothing is happening.

The Executive Officer is more sceptical, because he doesn't trust the "natives". When Lowrey points out that those "natives" are human just like them, descendants of the crew of the first starship to Venus, the Executive Officer declares that they might have been human once, four or five generations ago, but that Venus has changed them into something else. And so the Venusians have pallid white skin due to lack of sunshine and they have no hair either. That's not how evolution works, at least not that quickly, but then the Executive Officer is something of a bigot.

Lowrey, on the other hand, thinks that the natives are friendly enough. Some of them are hostile, worried that now humans know that Venus is habitable, the planet will be overrun with immigrants from Earth who will displace the original settlers. There is an underground movement as well, which Lowrey dismisses as paltry and unimportant. Though he is not bothered that settlers from Earth will displace the Venusians. After all, survival of the fittest is the basic law of evolution. We suspect that Lowrey doesn't know how evolution works either. Lowrey's musings are interrupted, when the sensors detect that a spy ray is aimed at the Earth ship.

If there was a ranking of "As you know, Bob…" scenes in golden age science fiction, Frederik Pohl's version in "Double-Cross" would rank higher than Isaac Asimov's various attempts, if only because Pohl's dialogue is less clumsy than Asimov's. On the other hand, Asimov gets points for cleverly using an "As you know, Bob…" scene as a vital clue in a mystery in "The Big and the Little" and just making fun of the convention in "Catch That Rabbit".

It's also interesting that Pohl's "As you know, Bob…" scene takes the form of a conversation between two ship officers. Idle conversations about the plot between random guards, soldiers, crewmembers, etc…, who often will never appear in the story again, are a common convention in space opera and military science fiction (and elsewhere) that predates the pulp era by centuries (you can find variations of this scene in Shakespeare plays) and one that still persists to this day. A recent example, played for laughs, was the scene with the two idiotic Stormtroopers who punched Baby Yoda (Boo, hiss) in The Mandalorian.

At any rate, the scene between Lowrey and the Executive Officer does its job of setting up the central conflict between the original settlers of Venus and the newcomers from Earth neatly enough. Any parallels to historical events are entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

The scene then switches to what is going on at the other end of the spy ray, where the Venusian underground has been listening in on the two Earth officers and are now convinced that the worries about immigrants from Earth displacing the Venusians are justified. We meet Svan, leader of the underground, and also learn that the underground has the support of the Venusian council.

Svan is a militant and wants to make sure that the spaceship never returns to Earth. And in order to ensure that the Earth ship never makes it home, Svan has a handy Atomite bomb. He also has a plan how to plant it aboard the ship. Svan and his co-conspirators will go to see the Earth ship like the rest of the town. On the way back, they will feign a car accident to draw away the ship guards, giving one of the conspirators the chance to get close enough to the ship to plant the bomb.

Svan's followers are a lot less militant than he is. An old man named Toller has issues with the fact that planting a bomb aboard the Earth vessel is essentially murder. And a young woman named Ingra remarks that their ancestors came from Earth, too, and therefore Venusians and Earthpeople are of one blood. Svan rightly points out that according to the Executive Officer aboard the Earth ship, the Venusians aren't even human anymore.

Because none of Svan's followers are volunteering to plant the bomb, Svan has them draw lots. Svan draws a blank, but when he looks around, none of his followers announce that they have drawn the lot that makes them the bomber. Therefore, Svan assumes that one of his followers is a coward or worse, a traitor. But if he accuses his followers of treason an cowardice, the traitor will be warned. So Svan quickly marks his own piece of paper, while the others aren't watching, and announces that he will plant the bomb. Why Svan didn't volunteer in the first place, especially since it was his plan and he is the most militant of the bunch anyway, remains a mystery.

Svan's plan hits a not entirely unexpected snag, when he and his party are stopped by a Venusian guard who announces that no one is allowed near the Earth ship anymore, because Svan's spy ray warned the Earthpeople that there was something afoot. Svan signals to the guard that he is on Council business. But the guard refuses to budge and is not a fan of the Council (which we learn is not an official administrative body, but the name of Svan's underground group) either, so Svan attacks and kills the man to the shock of his co-conspirators.

The conspirators go forth with their plan. They drop off Svan at some distance from the ship and drive onwards, unaware that Svan has planted a second bomb in the car. Since he can't trust his followers anymore, he has decided to blow them up, because an explosion will make a much better diversion than a car accident. He does briefly waver, when Ingra kisses him good-bye and wishes him good luck. But then Svan decides that even if she isn't a traitor, Ingra is weak, so she must die for the cause with the others. This confirms that Svan is a murderous arsehole, in case there was any doubt.

Svan makes his way to the ship and waits for the explosion to draw the guards away, while fingering the lot he has drawn and wondering once again who the traitor might be. As terrorists go, Svan is certainly unlucky. For once more, his grand plan goes awry, when the car unexpectedly returns, driven by the loyal Ingra. Ingra tells Svan to jump into the car, because the dead Venusian guard has been found and both Earthpeople and Venusians are now after them. Svan just screams, "Go away!", at Ingra and the car and tries to leg it, because he knows that the bomb is about to go off. But he never makes it.

After the explosion, Lowrey and the ship surgeon find the dying Svan. They also find the second bomb and realise that the Venusians were trying to bomb them.

"Poetic justice if I ever saw it," Lowrey says. Then he notices the piece of paper that Svan is still clutching in death and frowns.

The surgeon asks him what's the matter, whereupon Svan shows him the piece of paper and notes that it is marked with a cross on both sides. So there never was a traitor – Svan was just too stupid to turn over the paper.

"Double-Cross" is a neat science fiction thriller with a surprising, if somewhat contrived conclusion. The title (a good title, which I have used a for science fiction story myself) is also doubly relevant, both the in metaphorical (Svan double-crossing his own followers) and literal (there are two crosses on the piece of paper) sense. It also a good example of the twist ending stories that were so popular during the golden age.

Not a lot of stories surprise me these days – I can usually tell where they're going in a few pages. "Double-Cross", however, did surprise me. Initially, I was expecting something along the lines of a Leigh Brackett story about a revolt of native people against the invading Earth capitalists similar to the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "Citadel of Lost Ships" or the later Eric John Stark stories. Never mind that forty years of Star Wars and its imitators have primed us to inevitably assume that the plucky rebels fighting against overwhelming forces are the good guys. But sometimes, the plucky rebels are just terrorists. And sometimes, those terrorists become paranoid and turn on their own.

Though Lowrey and the unnamed other members of the spaceship crew don't come across all that well either. And indeed, various remarks made by Lowrey and the unnamed Executive Officer suggest that the Venusians were right to worry about the influx of Earthpeople. "Double-Cross" is a story, where there are no good guys, which shows again that morality was not always black and white during the golden age and that there were shades of grey. Furthermore, "Double-Cross" also belies claims from certain quarters that golden age science fiction was just apolitical fun.

Of the named characters in the story, Svan is the only one who has a personality, though it's not a very pleasant one. He is domineering, militant and paranoid to boot. Even if the cause of the Venusian underground is justified (and Pohl hints that it might be), Svan's zeal goes beyond any reasonable boundaries. Svan only lives for the cause and is willing to sacrifice anything and anybody to achieve his aims, whether it's the innocent crew of the Earth spaceship (and while Lowrey and company might not be the most pleasant people, they haven't harmed any Venusians), the Venusians guard who gets in his way or his own followers. In short, Svan is a murderous arsehole. His character also rings true, because revolutionary movements tend to attract people who just want to cause mayhem and will turn on their own comrades at the slightest provocation. In many ways, Svan is an interplanetary Andreas Baader (de facto leader of the West German terrorist group Red Army Fraction) or Charles Manson, even though Baader was only one year old and Manson ten, when "Double-Cross" was published.

Frederik Pohl's left political leanings are well known and he was a member and even chapter president of the Young Communist League for a few years in the 1930s. I wonder whether Pohl encountered types like Svan during his time with the League, especially since Communist groups during the Stalin era were often riddled with paranoia.

The solution with the piece of paper marked on both sides may seem a bit contrived, though it's not entirely unrealistic, because thankfully, quite a lot of terrorists are stupid and tend to blow up themselves rather than their targets. The ideological bent doesn't matter, stupid terrorists come in all political and ideological flavours. Here is an article listing some exceptionally stupid Al Qaeda terrorists and here is one about their equivalents in the IRA.

"Double-Cross is short, only six pages long, including an illustration that takes up three quarters of a page. Most of those six pages are dialogue. We get little in the way of description, unlike what you'd find in a Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Clifford D. Simak or C.L. Moore story. But if you've read enough golden age science fiction, you know what Venus looked like during the golden age and don't really need it. And while Pohl may not have been a particularly poetic writer, his prose is less clunky than Asimov's.

Like several of the stories I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, particularly those originally published in Planet Stories, "Double-Cross" has only been reprinted once, in a 1976 collection entitled fittingly enough The Early Pohl. It consistently surprises me how many of the stories that have rarely or never been reprinted are pretty good, sometimes better than the stuff that was reprinted.
A short and punchy science fiction thriller, that offers no heroes to root for, but some genuine surprises.

Retro Review: "The Big and the Little" a.k.a. "The Merchant Princes" by Isaac Asimov

"The Big and the Little" is a novelette by Isaac Asimov, which was first published in the August 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. Most readers will probably know the story under its alternate title "The Merchant Princes", which is how it appeared in Foundation, the first book of the eponymous trilogy.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

I already recapitulated the Foundation series so far in my review of "The Wedge", the story which directly precedes this one. So rather than repeat everything again, I'll just direct you over there.

"The Big and the Little" takes place approximately thirty years after the events in "The Wedge" and also focusses on the traders, who peddle the Foundation's atomic powered gadgets and spread its influence along the galactic periphery. One of those traders is Hober Mallow, the protagonist of "The Big and the Little".

Like Limmar Ponyets from "The Wedge", Hober Mallow is also something of an outsider on the margins of Foundation society. Like Ponyets, he was born in one of the four kingdoms the Foundation controls via its fake religion and was later given a lay education. But even though Mallow has enjoyed the benefits of a Foundation education, he is still not considered a true Foundation citizen, because he was not born on Terminus. Asimov rarely bothers to give us physical descriptions of his characters, but what little he tells us about Mallow's appearance suggests that he also looks different than other Foundation citizens. For starters, he still dresses in the style of his homeworld Smyrno. And in one scene, while Mallow is hanging out naked (!) with a male friend in his private sun room in what is surely just a harmless discussion about politics, his skin is described as brown. So it's at least possible that Hober Mallow is a man of colour. It is also possible that he is not straight, because the homoerotic vibes in that sun room scene are very strong (at one point, Mallow's friend places a phallic object – a cigar – in Mallow's mouth), even though this went completely over my head when I first read the story as a teen.

At the beginning of the story, Mallow is approached by Foundation politician Jorane Sutt, who worries that a Seldon crisis – one of the flashpoints in Foundation history where Hari Seldon's hologram shows up to prove the protagonist right – is approaching. Now Sutt wants Mallow to head to the Korellian Republic – the Star Wars associations of the name were not lost on my teen self – to investigate the disappearance of three Foundation trading ships in Korellian space. Because the Foundation are the only ones who are supposed to have atomic power on the galactic periphery, attacking and destroying Foundation ships should be impossible. Unless the Korellian Republic also has atomic power, that is. And if the Korellian Republic really has atomic power, the question is how they got it. Sutt fears that there may be a traitor in the ranks of the Foundation, maybe one of the traders who aren't "real citizens" anyway. Maybe even Mallow himself.

So Mallow sets out for the Korellian Republic with his ship, the Far Star, a politically ambitious trader named Jaim Twer in tow. Mallow rightly suspects that Twer may be a spy for Sutt, but takes him along anyway. The Korellian Republic is a republic in name only, but has been ruled by members of the same family for generations now. The latest leader, Commdor Asper Argo calls himself "the well-beloved", but resides in a fortress-like estate and surrounds himself with bodyguards.

Even though Mallow is an official envoy of the Foundation, the well-beloved Asper Argo keeps him waiting. One day, a man claiming to be a Foundation priest shows up on the landing field, begging for help. For while the Korellian Republic tolerates Foundation traders, they forbid Foundation missionaries from entering their territory on the penalty of death, since the fate of the four kingdoms and Askone, the world from "The Wedge", has made all other polities on the galactic periphery wary of the Foundation's fake religion. Mallow's crew lets the wounded priest aboard – against Mallow's explicit orders. Mallow now finds himself in a similar situation to Limmar Ponyets from "The Wedge" – he has to deal with a Foundation citizen who wilfully flaunts the laws of other worlds. Unlike Ponyets, however, Mallow makes no attempt to save the priest. Instead, he delivers him to the mob baying for his blood outside the ship, to the horror of both Jaim Twer and his crew.

I had completely forgotten the episode with the priest. Upon rereading the story, I was stunned by Mallow casually abandoning the man to certain death. Of course, the priests of the Foundation's sham religion are not particularly likeable, but that doesn't mean that you want to see one of them get lynched. Mallow justifies his actions by telling Twer that he believes that the episode with the priest was a deliberate trap. After all, the Far Star has landed in a largely deserted area. So where did the priest and the mob pursuing him suddenly come from? All these are good questions, if there had been any hint regarding these facts, before Mallow brings them up. In the end, Mallow is proven right, too. But even though the plot is rigged in Mallow's favour, the casual cruelty with which he throws the priest to mob still left a bad taste in my mouth. Not to mention that Mallow seem to believe in the "rum, sodomy and the lash" school of captaincy, pulls a blaster on his own crew and even remarks at one point that while he may be a democrat at home, aboard the Far Star he is a dictator. All of the protagonists of the early Foundation stories are jerks, but Hober Mallow is more open about it than either Salvor Hardin or Limmar Ponyets.

Soon after the episode with the priest, Mallow is suddenly given an audience with the Commdor, which he takes as further proof that his instincts were correct. During that meeting, Mallow assures the well-beloved Asper Argo that he has zero interest in spreading the Foundation's religion, all he wants is to sell his wares for mutual benefit. Mallow's dislike for the Foundation's fake religion seems genuine, most likely because as someone born in the four kingdoms he was once on the receiving end of that religion.

The one scene in the story that I clearly remember some thirty years after I first read it also occurs during this meeting, when Mallow demonstrates one of his products, a necklace and belt combination that glows thanks to the miracles of atomic power, on an unnamed female servant in the Commdor's household. This female servant is one of only two female characters in this story (and the entire first Foundation book, for that matter), the other being the Commdor's wife, who is married to him in a political union. The Commdor's wife even gets a few lines – mostly nagging her admittedly awful husband – while the female servant only gets to model pretty glowing jewellery. I remember this scene so clearly thirty years on, because a) this set of glowing jewellery sounded awesome and I would have loved to have one, and b) wearing a belt with a miniature nuclear reactor in the buckle also sounded incredibly dangerous and like a recipe for cancer. However, if someone had managed to make the glowing jewellery without the nuclear reactor, I would have been so there. I clearly wasn't the only person who was fascinated by that scene, because William Timmins' cover illustration shows a hand, presumably Mallow's, holding the glowing necklace aloft.

But Mallow doesn't only have nuclear powered trinkets for sale, he also has more practical wares, which he'd be only too happy to demonstrate to the Commdor, provided he could be given access to a steelwork. The idea behind this is that if the Korellians have atomic power, an industrial facility like a steelwork would be the place to find it, though don't ask me why Mallow expects to find evidence of nuclear power at a steelwork. The Commdor agrees quickly, too quickly, and so Mallow gives his demonstration. He also finds evidence of atomic power, though not in the way he had expected. For the Commdor's bodyguards are armed with atomic blasters bearing the crest of the Galactic Empire.

Once Mallow knows where the Korellians got atomic weapons from, he sets out to investigate further, heading for a world called Siwenna that was once the capital of an Imperial province. But all he finds is an impoverished world under the thumb of a cruel Imperial viceroy who has ambitions to become Emperor himself. Failing that, the viceroy is planning to build up an empire of his own on the periphery and has already married off his daughter to Commdor Asper Argo of the Korellian Republic.

Mallow learns all that from an impoverished and disgraced Imperial patrician who just happens to be the first person he encounters on Siwenna. But contrived as this encounter seems, the story the old man tells about a succession of increasingly weak emperors and ambitious viceroys, about rebellions, counter-rebellions, massacres and genocide is powerful, even if all the action once more happens off stage, as is common with Asimov's work.

But Mallow not only learns that the Galactic Empire, while still existing, is in dire straits, he also learns that the Foundation's technology is more advanced than the Empire's, that most of the Empire's technology are legacy systems which the maintenance techs can't even repair, should they break down, and that the Foundation are believed to be a semi-mythical group of space magicians this far from their sphere of influence. Viewed from the POV of our current information society, where every bit of news travels around the world in seconds and it is possible to have a conversation on Twitter with participants on four different continents, the complete breakdown of communication between the remnants of the Empire and the Foundation as well as the mutual ignorance of each other (Mallow is surprised that the Empire still exists) seems unlikely. I suspect it would have seemed unlikely even in 1944, where Asimov himself had a map in his office at the Navy Yard marking frontlines and troop movements on the other side of the world. If anything, the mutual ignorance of the Empire and the Foundation of each other reminded me of the tendency in the Star Wars universe to treat events that occurred only a few decades ago as ancient and quasi-mythical history.

Armed with this knowledge, Mallow returns to Terminus to build factories to fulfil the lucrative trade contracts he brought back from his trip to the Korellian Republic, accumulate wealth and run for office. But Mallow's political ambitions anger Jorane Sutt, who then brings up the death of the priest in the Korellian Republic to have Mallow arrested and tried for murder.

Now the story takes a sharp turn into courtroom drama territory with the murder trial of Hober Mallow. Mallow takes the stand and proceeds to tear the case apart. First, he presents a hitherto unknown recording of the incident with the priest, which conveniently reveals that the supposed priest has a black light tattoo (something I for one did not know already was a thing in 1944) marking him as an agent of the Korellian secret police. Mallow further reveals that Jorane Sutt was trying to set him up and is planning to use the Foundation's fake religion and the associated church to topple the secular government. Finally, Mallow reveals that his travelling companion Jaim Twer was a spy for Sutt all along and is not a trader, but a Foundation priest. As for how Mallow knew that Twer had to be a priest, in a conversation early in the story, Twer did not know what a Seldon crisis was and Mallow had to explain it to him, even though anybody who'd enjoyed a Foundation lay education would have known about Seldon crisises.

Like many golden age authors, Isaac Asimov wrote in more than one genre and was also a mystery writer. Now Asimov would not start writing straight mysteries until the 1970s and his 1953 science fiction crime novel The Caves of Steel is generally considered his first foray into the mystery genre. Nonetheless, many of Asimov's early science fiction stories are structured like mysteries, even if the puzzle to be solved is "Why does this robot misbehave?" rather than a classic whodunnit. "The Big and the Little" is a good example, especially since there actually is a crime to be solved here.

But even if "The Big and the Little" is a science fiction mystery, it's not a very good one. For even though Mallow's deductions are all logical and make sense, the reader is not given the chance to make the same deductions, because they are not given the same information. Mallow might wonder how an escaped priest and an enraged mob come to show up at the largely deserted landing place of the Far Star, but the reader never learns that the area is deserted until Mallow tells us. Nor does Asimov ever mention that the fake priest's robes are uncommonly new and clean, until Mallow decides to let us know. The incriminating tattoo comes completely out of nowhere as well. And the initial mystery of the vanished trader ships is resolved almost as an afterthought with a single line: "It was the Korellians using Imperial technology. Who else could it have been?" However, I do have to applaud Asimov for turning the incredibly awkward "As you know, Bob…" dialogue to explain what a Seldon crisis is into a vital clue to the central mystery.

Mallow is acquitted, since no crime was committed, and also elected mayor, since his political rival Jorane Sutt was revealed to have been plotting treason all along. However, there still is that pesky Seldon crisis to deal with, which finally arrives two years later, when the Korellian Republic declares war on the Foundation by attacking its trading ships with the much larger and more powerful Imperial dreadnoughts that Asper Argo, the well-beloved, managed to inveigle out of his father-in-law, the ambitious Imperial viceroy. If you've been hoping for a big space battle, you'll be disappointed though, because once more Asimov keeps the action off stage and only gives us a short scene of a crewmen aboard a doomed trading ship getting his first glimpse of a gigantic Imperial warship.
Hober Mallow responds to the Korellians' attack not by launching a counterattack, because this will only put the Foundation into the crosshairs of the Empire (which is what happens in the following story "Dead Hand") and the Foundation is not yet strong enough to deal with the Empire. Instead, Mallow declares a trade embargo against the Korellian Republic. Then he sits back and waits until first the nuclear powered gadgets he sold to the Korellians break down and then the larger, industrial systems as well. And since Mallow knows that the Empire, though allied with the Korellians, does not have the technology to repair or replace the broken Foundation tech, he need only wait until the Korellian economy fails and the populace revolts.

"The Big and the Little" is the story which introduced me to the concept of economic embargos and the logic behind it. And as explained by Mallow, it all makes sense and neatly works out, too. There is no shooting and no bombing, the Korellians back down eventually and hardly anybody is hurt. Of course, reality is never quite so simple, but then the plot of the Foundation stories is always rigged in favour of the Foundation –until it isn't.

Even though there is a Seldon crisis in "The Big and the Little", Hari Seldon himself does not appear in this story. I assume that Seldon's hologram does appear at some point to explain why Hober Mallow is right and Jorane Sutt is wrong, but for some reason we never get to see this moment. Instead, Mallow himself explains to his old enemy Sutt and his friend, sounding board and occasional nude sunbathing partner Ankor Twael that the Foundation will henceforth move away from conquest and domination via religion towards conquest and domination via trade. Sutt, a steadfast adherent to the old ways, is outraged, while Twael worries what will happen during the next Seldon crisis, when domination and expansion via trade stops being effective. Mallow agrees that his tactics will eventually cease working, but since it's not likely that there will be another Seldon crisis in his lifetime (though Salvor Hardin got two), that's a problem for someone else to worry about.

Upon rereading this story, I realised that I remembered very little about it apart from the scene with the glowing necklace and that this was the story with the economic embargo. Part of the reason for this may be that "The Big and the Little" (the title refers to the big but lumbering Empire and the small but nimble Foundation) is something of a mess. The story is long – at the upper edge of the novelette range – and somewhat disjointed. It almost feels as if Asimov – who was after all only twenty-four, when he wrote this story – bit off more than he could chew with "The Big and the Little". Asimov juggles lots of plot strands – there is the central mystery of where the Korellians are getting their weapons from and what they're up to, the political manoeuvring and backstabbing between the various fractions in the Foundation, the Seldon crisis and the shift in Foundation policy as well as setting up the conflict with the Empire, which will come to a head in the next story "Dead Hand" – so it's no surprise that he doesn't tie up all of those many plot strands in a satisfying manner. What is more, the four stories that make up the first book in the Foundation trilogy are mainly set up. The truly memorable Foundation stories – "The Mule", "Now You See It…", "…And Now You Don't" – all come later in volumes two and three. If Asimov had never written another Foundation story after "The Big and the Little", I doubt that the series would be remembered as fondly as it is today.

Isaac Asimov has always stated that the Foundation series was inspired by The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and the parallels are certainly notable, particularly in the latter story "Dead Hand". However, the Foundation series also bears strong parallels to the course of European imperialism and colonialism, which began with sending missionaries (though unlike the Foundation's fake religion, the Catholic missionaries sent out by the Spanish and Portuguese empires were absolutely sincere) and eventually came to focus on trade. Like the Foundation, Europe's colonial powers also exported trinkets and imported the raw materials they lacked. And just like Hober Mallow, people from the colonised countries were never quite viewed as real citizens, even if they had been educated in the colonising country. Finally, the tactics used by the Foundation are also eerily reminiscent of American postwar policy, where the US tried to dominate its sphere of influence both via trade and also via exporting its political, if not religious beliefs (and occasionally those, too, or how else did South Korea come to have a sizeable number of evangelical Christians?).

In fact, the thing that most struck me upon rereading the Foundation stories was how political the series is and how very much it is about imperialism, particularly the American variety thereof. Not that my younger self did not realise that the Foundation series was political, but I mostly viewed it as a blueprint for preventing/reversing social and technological decline (and I was very worried about this at the time, viewing every empty shop and every broken neon sign as a symptom for decline, because Hari Seldon points out broken neon signs as symptom for the decline of the Empire in Prelude to Foundation) and bringing about a better future. And indeed, there is something very seductive about the idea of the Foundation using its superior technology as well as every trick in the book to make the universe a better place and bring about a political aim that none of the characters will ever see.

This is the reason that so many politically interested people – figures as different as Paul Krugman, Newt Gingrich and Osama Bin Laden have all cited the Foundation series as an influence – have been inspired by the Foundation series, when they read it at a young age. I don't even exclude myself there. My love for the Foundation series was the reason why I picked sociology as my secondary subject at university, because I wanted to do what Hari Seldon did, predict the future and find a way to make it better. Of course, I quickly figured out that it doesn't work that way in reality and that psychohistory is far more fiction than science.

The Foundation series will always remain a classic of political science fiction. However – and this is something my younger self missed – the vision of politics the series presents is not necessarily a good one and the Foundation is not necessarily right.

Retro Review: "The Wedge" a.k.a. "The Traders" by Isaac Asimov

"The Wedge" is a short story by Isaac Asimov, which was first published in the October 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. Most readers will probably know the story under its alternate title "The Traders", which is how it appeared in Foundation, the first book of the eponymous trilogy.

Since "The Wedge" is one of the stories that make up the Foundation trilogy, perhaps a recap is in order, though Asimov, whose 100th birthday we are currently celebrating by remembering his accomplishments and personal faults, never gives us one, neither in the magazine nor in the book version. Still, for anyone who needs a reminder, here is the story so far:

Warning: Spoilers!

The Foundation started out as a group of scientists sent to the planet Terminus on the galactic periphery to compile an encyclopaedia and preserve knowledge at a time when the Galactic Empire was falling apart. However, the true purpose of the Foundation, revealed by psychohistorian Hari Seldon or rather his hologram, is to guide humanity through the dark age following the fall of the Galactic Empire, to reduce the length of that dark age from thirty thousand to a mere thousand years and to establish a second Galactic Empire, all following Seldon's master plan.

Alas, the Foundation is still just a group of encyclopaedists on a small and poor planet, surrounded by aggressive neighbours who have declared themselves independent from the Empire. However, Terminus has atomic power (Asimov's word choice) and its neighbours do not. And so Salvor Hardin, mayor of Terminus, creates an artificial religion called Scientism to bring and keep the neighbouring four kingdoms under the control of the Foundation.

All this happened in the first two stories of what would eventually become the Foundation series, published in Astounding some two years prior in 1942. "The Wedge" is chronologically the third and by publication order the fourth Foundation story. It is set some fifty years after the previous story "Bridle and Saddle". The four kingdoms are now fully under Foundation control thanks to the fake religion, but other planets have caught on to what the Foundation is doing and understandably want nothing to do with them. So the Foundation tries to spread its influence via traders who peddle atomic powered gadgets along the galactic periphery.

One of these traders of Limmar Ponyets (named Lathan Devers in the magazine version, but I will stick with the name most readers will be familiar with in this review) who has a hold full of unsold wares and problems making his quota. A call reaches him in the shower (literally) and a ship pulls alongside to deliver an important message that self-destructs upon reading – twenty-two years before Mission Impossible.

A trader named Eskel Gorov has been arrested on the planet Askone for attempting to sell atomic gadgets there, even though Askone has banned all Foundation traders and gadgets, because using atomic power is against their religious beliefs. Gorov is facing the death penalty for sacrilege and Ponyets is supposed to get him out. An additional complication is that Gorov is not a trader at all, but an agent of the Foundation whose mission it is to introduce atomic powered gadgets to Askone to soften up the local government to Foundation control.

Ponyets has a quite interesting backstory. It is implied that he was not born on Terminus, but in the four kingdoms and initially trained as a priest (and indeed a later story explains that most traders actually hail from the four kingdoms). But representatives of the Foundation recognised his intelligence and brought him to Terminus to be educated there. So, unlike most citizens of Terminus, Ponyets is actually familiar with the scripture and rituals of the Foundation's fake religion. This knowledge will come in handy on his mission.

Fake religions, which are science in disguise, were a popular trope during the so-called golden age of science fiction. And since fake religion stories predominantly appeared in Astounding, I suspect this was one of Campbell's pet subjects which he foisted on his writers. The early Foundation stories are probably the best known examples of this trope, but the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist Gather, Darkness by Fritz Leiber is another science as religion story and a most excellent one, too. Now Fritz Leiber actually did train as an Episcopalian priest and left, because he did not feel the vocation, even though the church wanted to keep him. These experiences influenced Gather, Darkness and Leiber's hilarious 1959 story "Lean Times in Lankhmar". And in fact I wonder if Leiber, whom Asimov must have known, wasn't an inspiration for Limmar Ponyets, the failed priest turned Foundation trader.

On Askone, Ponyets meets with the local elders who imply that Gorov may be released, if Ponyets is willing to pay for his freedom. However, the Askonians have no interest in Ponyets' wares. Instead, they want gold.

Ponyets has no gold – the Foundation had no particular interest in precious metals for their own sake. However, he uses his superior scientific knowledge to rig up a matter transmutator to turn iron into gold, which he demonstrates to the Askonian elders with great theatrical flair. The Askonians may hate atomic power and science in general, but they really love gold, so they are willing to turn a blind eye to where it came from.

Ponyets also exploits tensions inside the council of elders by setting up a private meeting with an ambitious council member named Pherl. Ponyets offers to sell the transmutator to Pherl, so he will have enough gold to finance his rise to power. Pherl knows that the religious taboos of his world are just superstition "for the masses", but he has to pretend to adhere to them to avoid the gas chamber. Ponyets assures him that no one need ever know that he has the transmutator.

Pherl finally agrees. He purchases the transmutator and Gorov is freed. However, Ponyets has tricked Pherl and installed a camera in the transmutator. He then proceeds to blackmail Pherl by threatening to broadcast footage of Pherl using forbidden technology to the superstitious masses of Askone. This would mean certain death for Pherl, so he is forced to purchase Ponyets' entire inventory. And so Ponyets not only makes his quota, but has also fulfilled both Gorov's mission and his own by installing a Foundation friendly leader on Askone.

I first read the Foundation series as a teenager and was blown away by the sheer scale, the twists particularly in the later volumes and also by how the Foundation usually triumphs by using brain over brawn.

My memories of "The Wedge" were vague – I mainly remembered it as "the one with the gas chamber", because several characters are threatened with execution by gas chamber, which disturbed my younger self a lot. Upon rereading, the gas chamber references are not nearly as prominent as I remembered. It also turned out that a vivid scene of Gorov being taken to the gas chamber, only seconds from execution, only existed in my mind. This occasionally happens for me with stories I first read as a teen – scenes I remember very clearly don't exist, because my vivid imagination supplies the details.

As I reread the story, I also remembered Ponyets' transmutation parlour trick and how much it impressed my younger self. Because I'd learned in chemistry class that it was indeed possible to turn mercury or lead into gold, but that it took a whole lot of power and the resulting gold was unfortunately radioactive (the Foundation has solved the latter problem, but not the former). In fact, radioactive gold was first synthesized from mercury in 1941 in an experiment that Asimov as a graduate student of chemistry would have been familiar with and that may well have inspired this story. The Foundation series is often called hard science fiction, largely because the stories originally appeared in Astounding, even though there is very little in the way of hard science in the series. The transmutation parlour trick in "The Wedge" is probably as close as the Foundation stories come to actual hard science fiction. And my younger self was very pleased to see something I'd heard about in chemistry class pop up in a science fiction story (so pleased that I even told my chemistry teacher about it) and used in such a clever way to trick a bunch of idiots.

The cleverness that pleased my teen self so much is still evident in the story when I reread it as an adult, because Limmar Ponyets is a very clever man who comes up with a very clever scheme to trick the Askonians. There is just one problem. Ponyets may be clever, but he's also an arsehole and even admits it. After all, he quotes a saying attributed to Salvor Hardin, mayor of Terminus and hero of the first two Foundation stories, "Never let a sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."

It's a great line, which also serves as the epigraph of the magazine version of the story. But is what Ponyets and the Foundation are doing truly right? My teen self would probably have said yes. After all, the Foundation are the good guys here. They are trying to preserve civilisation and stave off the dark ages, even if I'd have preferred it is the ultimate aim of the Foundation was the creation of a Galactic Republic or Federation rather than an Empire. Still, if the Foundation has to use subterfuge and dirty tricks to fulfil that purpose, then so be it. Never mind that it is hard to feel sorry for the Askonians, because at least the ones we meet are all greedy and pompous idiots. And besides, the Askonians have gas chambers and obviously like to use them. As a matter of fact, Askone would probably be better off under Foundation control. After all, the Foundation has better technology, they are smart and they don't have gas chambers.

Adult me can see that the Foundation is in the wrong here. Yes, the Askonians may be pompous, greedy and superstitious idiots, but they have made it very clear that they want nothing to do with the Foundation as is their good right (though I still disagree with the gas chamber threats. Just send Gorov back to where he came from and blast him out of the sky, if he comes back). It's the Foundation which keeps violating the Askonians' sovereignty and which clearly wants to take over Askone as it took over the four kingdoms. At least with the four kingdoms, the Foundation had the excuse of self-defence, since the four kingdoms were threatening Terminus. With the Askonians, they have no such excuse, because the Askonians are no threat.

No matter how noble the intentions of the Foundation are (and they only are noble, if you believe that Hari Seldon was right. Otherwise, the Foundation becomes a bunch of fanatics taking orders from a hologram), their methods of coercing other planets are wrong. Adult me also cannot ignore how strong the undercurrents of imperialism and colonialism are in the Foundation stories. Because the Foundation uses religion, trade (silly gadgets against various resources they lack) and force to take over other worlds – for their own good, of course – just like any real world coloniser. And just like the USA post-WWII in the real world, the Foundation has absolutely no qualms about meddling with the governments of sovereign nations. There are golden age stories which are critical of colonialism and imperialism – the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "The Citadel of Lost Ships" by Leigh Brackett is one example – but "The Wedge" is not one of them. The Foundation is always right, at least in the early stories (They are disastrously wrong in "The Mule"), and the narrative doesn't invite us to question them or their motives.

But it's not just the uncritical endorsement of imperialism that makes "The Wedge" and the other early Foundation stories feel dated. In fact, these stories were already dated when I first read them as a teen in the late 1980s. And so you'll find people nonchalantly smoking aboard spaceships and a total lack of women. All five named characters are male and no women appear at all, not even as walk-ons.

But the most glaring issue to me was the uncritical veneration (in the most literal sense of the word) of atomic power in the early Foundation stories. Because when I first read those stories a few years after Chernobyl, nuclear power was viewed as a failed and extremely dangerous technology that needed to be phased out as soon as possible (By 2022, Germany will finally get there). Literally everybody in Germany who wasn't either completely stupid or a rightwing politician (which was pretty much the same thing) was opposed to nuclear power, so seeing an organisation as smart as the Foundation endorsing it was jarring to say the least.

However, I had developed the habit of checking copyright dates by that point and could see that the Foundation stories were very old and had been published before the first atomic bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so I decided to give Asimov a pass, because he couldn't have known how dangerous nuclear power was. Of course, the dangers of radioactivity were well known even in 1944 – the radium girls lawsuit took place in 1927/28 – and as a graduate student of chemistry, Asimov would certainly have known about the dangers. And to his credit, Asimov made a sharp turn away from nuclear optimism after Hiroshima. Nuclear power is barely mentioned in the post-1945 Foundation stories and by the Galactic Empire stories of the 1950s, Asimov frequently described Earth as a radioactive wasteland.

"The Wedge" is one of the less memorable Foundation stories and coincidentally also the only one where Hari Seldon's hologram does not appear, since a Foundation agent nearly getting himself killed trying to undermine the society of a neighbouring world apparently does not qualify as a Seldon crisis. "The Wedge" also displays several of Asimov's trademark weaknesses such as bland characters and clumsy dialogue, though the latter isn't as noticeable here, because the Askonian elders are supposed to be pompous. This story also shares the unfortunate tendency of Isaac Asimov to let his climactic scenes happen off stage. And so instead of showing us Ponyets confronting Pherl with filmic evidence of the latter committing sacrilege, Asimov just tells us about it by having Ponyets recount the events to Gorov after the fact.

In spite of the story's obvious weaknesses, the plot of "The Wedge" still holds up seventy-five years later and I enjoyed the story upon rereading. "The Wedge" is still a clever science fiction story – albeit one that comes with a generous helping of the unexamined imperialism and colonialism that afflicts the entire Foundation series.