The Encyclopedists

Those who read the “Foundation Trilogy” by the late Dr. Isaac Asimov must surely have noticed how “The Encyclopedists” were only one section of the first book. Yet they were the original workers and scholars of The Encyclopedia Foundation, the Foundation sent to Terminus by the Emperor to collect and preserve all the knowledge of the galaxy.

What happened to them? There are only scattered references in the expanded series. Chapters often started with a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica, indicating that over a 1,000 years after they started that they were done. And they had an edition out earlier than that, as Golan Trevize once mentioned in “Foundation’s Edge”.

We know that Salvor Hardin took power away from the Board of Trustees and put Terminus – and the Encyclopedia Foundation – on an expansionist course. But he did not stop the original project. We just never heard about the Encyclopedists specifically.

What difficulties did they encounter, and have to surmount? It was referenced that the physical scientists were the most highly regarded, while pure scholars like Janov Pelorat were looked down on. But even Janov was a “new researcher”, rather than an archivist or Encyclopedist.

It seems that while their founding was that of a scholarly institute, that those who labored at it were not well regarded. Tolerated, but thought to be somewhat useless. Elsewhere I have pointed out that this could not have been the case. That in spite of how the populace regarded them – if they were regarded at all – that they were the ones who made it possible for the technological growth of the Foundation Federation.

How was the situation on the Periphery described? A tour of those outer planets, in the first book, showed that they had “forgot” atomic power and were back to coal and oil. A person might “forget”, but when this is said of a culture, what it really means is that the books with that knowledge in it were lost or destroyed, and the last person to have read those books is dead or not speaking.

This then was the case on planets such as Anacreon and Locris and such. Their books were gone or destroyed, and no one was left who remembered the knowledge. Were it not for the Foundation, they would have slipped even further back into barbarism.

And were it not for the Encyclopedists, the Foundation would have been no help at all.