Heads up! This article contains spoilers for "Foundation" season 3, episode 5. It also has spoilers for Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" and "Robot" novels. Proceed with caution!
In "Foundation" season 3, episode 5, Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) wakes up from an interstellar jump through space. He sees Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) walk up and say, "First few jumps are always strange." She touches him and adds, "You're not cold. It just feels like it. But ... It's gonna feel like you left a bit of yourself
behind, and it's trying to catch up with you. But it will, eventually."
The line is easy to miss in the midst of the Second Foundation drama unfolding in the show, but there are a lot of points in this Apple TV+ adaptation where the writers manage to sneak in subtle nods to the source material. In this case, the references to things like feeling cold and leaving some of yourself behind may have a bit more to them than at first meets the eye. They are eerily reminiscent of a short story Isaac Asimov wrote called "Escape!" It was included in his 1950 short story collection "I, Robot," which is indirectly providing source material for the current series. (Asimov's robot stories and novels take place in the same universe as Foundation, albeit 20,000 years or so apart.) The best part about the connection? "Escape!" is one of the trippiest Asimov short stories of them all.
Read more: 10 Best Sci-Fi Books Of All Time, Ranked
Interstellar Travel In Isaac Asimov's Shared Universe
When you write a multi-novel epic on the fall of a Galactic Empire and the rise of its replacement, you better believe you're going to need a way to move people across vast distances in space quickly. You don't have to be detailed about it, but that transportational element of galactic human conquest and disaster is a necessary piece of the puzzle.
For Isaac Asimov, interstellar travel was an important part of the process and an integral piece of his storytelling. In fact, in his later "Foundation" novels, he devotes significant time to describing how travel between the stars works — and how the Foundation scientists are rapidly developing it to incredible new levels. There's even a sweet antigravitic ship that connects with the human brain through touch and can make multiple interstellar jumps in sequence — but that's not what's going on here. This is earlier in Asimov's interstellar travel evolution. By this point in "Foundation," interstellar travel is well established, but the hint at feeling cold and left behind actually points backward, to a short story from "I, Robot" that takes place tens of thousands of years earlier — when interstellar travel is tested for the first time.
The story "Escape!" follows the misadventures of two scientists, Powell and Donovan, when they are tricked onto a ship designed by a supercomputer to test interstellar travel. The ship locks them inside and takes off without warning. Eventually, it jumps, and the two scientists inside become intergalactic guinea pigs. The descriptions that follow are wild.
Things Get Trippy En Route On The First Interstellar Trip
"Escape" describes Powell's experience of the first interstellar jump thusly:
"It came with a suddenness and a stab of pain [...] Something writhed within him and struggled against a growing blanket of ice, that thickened. Something broke loose and whirled in a blaze of flickering light and pain. It fell —and whirled —and fell headlong —into silence! It was death! It was a world of no motion and no sensation. A world of dim, unsensing consciousness; a consciousness of darkness and of silence and of formless struggle. Most of all a consciousness of eternity. He was a tiny white thread of ego—cold and afraid."
Sounds pretty wild, right? That's not the half of it. The multi-page description proceeds to trace Powell as he hears a coroner selling caskets. Then it says:
"The white thread that might have been Powell heaved uselessly at the insubstantial eons of time that existed all about him."
He hears a hundred million ghosts clamoring about his death. He goes up a spiral stairway and joins a line bound for heaven and hell. (He's headed to the latter.) Donovan has a similar but different experience, as they discover when they talk after suddenly waking up (or more accurately, coming back to life) hundreds of thousands of parsecs away from Earth, off in a random corner of space.
Again, interstellar travel isn't killing people at the point in Asimov's universe when "Foundation" is set. Humans have come a long way by then. But early on? Yeah. It literally is killing people and bringing them back to life — and it seems we get a subtle reference to that chilly experience in episode 5.
"Foundation" is streaming on Apple TV+.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
