词条 | Galactic Empire (Isaac Asimov) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
释义 |
| name = Galactic Empire | image = Spaceship and Sun emblem.svg | caption = The Spaceship and Sun, emblem of the Empire | image2 = Artist's impression of the Milky Way (updated - annotated).jpg | caption2 = At its height, the Galactic Empire spanned the entire Milky Way galaxy | source = Foundation series, Galactic Empire series, and Robot series | creator = Isaac Asimov | genre = Science fiction space opera | type = Empire | ruler = Emperor | locations = Aurora, Solaria, Terminus, {{nowrap|Trantor (capital)}} | population = 500 quintillion | characters = Arkady Darell, Hari Seldon, R. Daneel Olivaw, The Mule }} The Galactic Empire is an interstellar empire featured in Isaac Asimov's Robot, Galactic Empire, and Foundation series. The Empire is spread across the Milky Way galaxy and consists of almost 25 million planets{{sfn|Foundation Trilogy|page=7}} settled exclusively by humans. It had a total population of 500 quintillion. For over 12 millennia the seat of imperial authority was located on the ecumenopolis of Trantor, whose population exceeded 40 billion,{{sfn|Foundation Trilogy|page=12}} until it was sacked in the year 12,328. The official symbol of the empire is the Spaceship-and-Sun. Cleon II was the last Emperor to hold significant authority.{{sfn|Foundation Trilogy|page=20}} The fall of the empire, modelled on the fall of the Roman Empire, is the subject of many of Asimov's novels. BackgroundAsimov created the fictional Galactic Empire in the early 1940s based upon the Roman Empire, as a proposal to John W. Campbell, after reading Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he was working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Robert Heinlein. The concept evolved through short stories and novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine during the 1940s, culminating in the publication of the Foundation stories as a trilogy of books in the early 1950s.[1][2] As of 827 G.E. (Galactic Era, the number of years after its founding), the Galactic Empire comprises millions of inhabited worlds with 500 quadrillion residents.[3] According to the Foundation series chronology established in the late 1990s, it comes into existence approximately 10,000 CE, year one of the Galactic Era. (The establishment of the Empire was originally 34,500 CE, according to Asimov's unofficial unpublished early 1950s chronology.) The Galactic Empire was made possible by the ability of humans to travel through hyperspace. The space navy of the Galactic Empire is called the "Imperial Navy".[4] The empire's capital, named Trantor, is the closest habitable planet to the center of the galaxy, and the novels in the Foundation trilogy describe its fall, over a period of centuries, and a period of anarchy and decay, a parallel to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Dark Ages. Asimov posits that two foundations are instituted to restore the empire to its former glory. Through the use of psychohistory, a future science hypothesized by Asimov, a scientist on Trantor named Hari Seldon in about 12,000 Galactic Era predicts the fall of the empire, and institutes the two foundations.[2][5] The PeripheryThe Periphery is a fictional location in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series and refers to the outer rims of the Galactic Empire, including planets such as Anacreon and Santanni. Imperial control is weakest in the periphery, as planet governors there frequently possess their own fleets. Santanni revolts during Forward the Foundation. About 50 years after the First Foundation is established on Terminus, the emperor will grant the periphery autonomy. This effectively removes them completely from Imperial control, making the dissolution of the Empire far more apparent than it had been before. In the years preceding the fall of Trantor, the periphery became any area outside the empire. As this area became larger the empire became less and less great. As the empire decreased in size and power, the stagnation that would ultimately cause the collapse of the empire increased. EmperorsA complete list of Galactic emperors and their dynasties does not exist; however, a number of names and their rule are known:
Consensus cosmogonyAsimov's Galactic Empire was the first example after Olaf Stapledon's 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker of one of the eight stages of a "consensus cosmogony". This is also called the Science Fiction Cosmology, identified by Donald A. Wollheim in the 1950s. Science fiction writers needed only hint at this cosmogony in their stories for experienced SF readers to slot into their perception of future history and envisage the background to the tale, without the writers needing to expend time and space explicitly explaining it. These stages are:[7]
Other authors and Asimov's universeBondanella (listed in Further reading) analyzes Asimov's Galactic Empire as an example of the influence of the myth and history of the Roman Empire upon modern fiction. Asimov himself wrote two non-fiction books on the subject of the Roman Empire, aimed at the mass market and young readerships, The Roman Republic in 1966 and The Roman Empire in 1967, reflecting the positive view of the Roman Empire that then prevailed, as it was considered the prototype of the rising American Empire. After the cinematic release of the first Star Wars trilogy, another parallel to the Roman Empire that presents the negative view of the empire that became widely prevalent in late 20th and early 21st century popular culture as a result of the negative view of the American Empire resulting from the Vietnam War, Asimov revisited his Galactic Empire and wrote further novels in the Foundation series. Other writers to have been influenced by the Roman Empire include, of course, those who have written novels set in Asimov's universe of the Galactic Empire, such as David Brin's Foundation's Triumph, and Robert Silverberg, who wrote of an alternative universe in which the Roman Empire never fell, and who edited Far Horizons (listed in Further reading) which contains several examples of Asimov's influence upon science fiction. Brian Herbert's and Kevin J. Anderson's Dune: House Atriedes (1999) is, similarly, a Greek parallel to ancient Rome.[8] Other works to have been influenced by Asimov's Empire include Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis, whose galactic empire, and the scholar-empire that succeeds it, are clearly based upon Asimov's Galactic Empire and the Foundations, albeit that Kingsbury was not granted permission{{Citation needed|date=May 2009}} to set his work directly in Asimov's universe. Seed calls this work "perhaps the most remarkable homage that any SF writer has received from another SF writer".[9] Asimov's Galactic Empire, its decline, fall, and rebirth, in particular, is characterized by Perelman as a simple repetition of the history of Western Civilization from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 20th century, borrowing freely from Toynbee, and a validation of postwar American culture of the 1940s and 1950s, with the Second Galactic Empire being "definitely suburban".[10] Other writers to explore the cycles of civilisations in their works include James Blish, who studied the works of Oswald Spengler and whose novels Cities in Flight, They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph of Time portray the rise and fall of the galaxy as an inevitable cycle, of which (unlike in other dystopian SF stories of the 1940s and 1950s) the use of machine technology is merely a symptom not the actual cause, and culminate, as in Wollheim's eighth stage, with the end of the universe and the birth of a new one.[2][11] Colin Manlove characterizes Asimov's description of the Galactic Empire, its people, its culture, its history, and its planets, laid out in the Foundation novels as an aesthetic monotony: "persons are usually seen as typical rather than special, even as clichés … the mutant Mule […] is not given a personality, he is merely a powerful anomaly … Nor do we hear much of landscapes, apart from Trantor and one sea-scape … we do not know how one planet differs from another, as, say, Ursula K. Le Guin differentiates the desert Anarres from the lush twin Urras … Nor are we given details of battles, lingering accounts of love, different customs of civilisations. There are no animals, only man. … Thought-processes and conversations largely fill the trilogy, and nearly all these are confined to finding things out and with gaining power."[12][13] Primary sources
References1. ^{{cite book|title=Asimov Analyzed|author=Neil Goble|year=1972|publisher=Mirage|pages=32–34}} 2. ^1 2 {{cite book|title=Teaching Science Fact With Science Fiction|author=Gary Raham|year=2004|publisher=Libraries Unlimited|isbn=1-56308-939-4|pages=27,96–97}} 3. ^{{cite book | url=https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W/Pebble_in_the_sky | title=Pebble in the Sky | publisher=Doubleday | author=Asimov, Isaac | year=1950 | chapter=14}} 4. ^Isaac Asimov worked at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II when he began writing the Foundation series, having been recruited to work there by Robert Heinlein. 5. ^{{cite book|title=Our Cosmic Future: Humanity's Fate in the Universe|author=Nikos Prantzos|year=2000|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=0-521-77098-X|pages=151}} 6. ^Historically, "Agis" was the name of several Kings of ancient Sparta. Asimov does not provide a plausible explanation how, when Earth was held in contempt and its pre-space history virtually unknown, this could have become a popular name for Galactic Emperors. 7. ^{{cite book|title=Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel|editor1=Jaś Elsner |editor2=Joan-Pau Rubiés |year=1999|publisher=Reaktion Books|isbn=1-86189-020-6|chapter=Per ardua ad astra: Authorial Choice and the Narrative of Interstellar Travel|author=Edward James}} 8. ^{{cite book|title=Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema|author=Martin M. Winkler|year=2001|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=0-19-513003-0|pages=273}} 9. ^{{cite book|title=A Companion to Science Fiction|author=David Seed|chapter=Isaac Asimov|year=2005|publisher=Blackwell Publishing|isbn=1-4051-1218-2|pages=371}} 10. ^{{cite book|title=Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher|editor1=Susan Gushee O'Malley |editor2=Robert C. Rosen |editor3=Leonard Vogt |chapter=Science Fiction Novels and Film|author=Les Perelman|year=1990|publisher=SUNY Press|isbn=0-7914-0355-6|pages=172}} 11. ^{{cite book|title=Shaw and Science Fiction|author=Milton T. Wolf|year=1997|publisher=Penn State Press|isbn=0-271-01681-7|pages=83}} 12. ^{{cite book|title=Science Fiction: Ten Explorations|author=Colin Nicholas Manlove|year=1986|publisher=Kent State University|isbn=0-87338-326-5|pages=28–29}} 13. ^{{cite book|title=Science Fiction|author=Adam Charles Roberts|year=2000|publisher=Routledge|isbn=0-415-19204-8|pages=77}} Further reading
3 : Foundation universe|Fictional human races|Galactic empires |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
随便看 |
|
开放百科全书收录14589846条英语、德语、日语等多语种百科知识,基本涵盖了大多数领域的百科知识,是一部内容自由、开放的电子版国际百科全书。