Plan Consistency
Finding a complete canonical reference for the Plan is difficult. Asimov admitted that he wrote the last two novels due to reader demand, and not from a predetermined plan or vision. Thus, he may have made significant changes to his original vision, as set forth in the Foundation trilogy. He also made efforts in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth to tie the books into his Robot and Empire series. This can, at least somewhat, account for some of the discrepancies that the reader finds in the literary development of the plan. Eventually, the Seldon plan was abandoned in favor of the giant super organism Galaxia, also known as Gaia. However, later works by other authors suggest that the great second empire could be a powerful combination of the two possibilities.
In the end of Foundation and Earth, the main character, Golan Trevize, explains that psychohistory had a flaw, that it didn't apply for humaniform robots like R. Daneel Olivaw, Gaians like Bliss and the Mule and more like them. Also, Trevize says that, the only smart life beings are humans, and if other life beings attacked them, humans wouldn't be united to defeat them. If it was Galaxia, every planet would be united. With this message, all of Asimov's books have a chronological ending, and it seems that humans have universal peace now.
Read more about this topic: Seldon Plan
Famous quotes containing the words plan and/or consistency:
“Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
And in himself posses his own desire;”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“People who love only once in their lives are ... shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)