Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire Quiz

Answer: Much of its surface is radioactive.

The second page of the book sets a grim mood for Earth: "Nuclear warfare had done its worst to Earth. Most of it was hopelessly radioactive and useless. There was nothing left to lose..." Entering students at the university buy a Geiger counter and a wristwatch that doubles as a personal monitor for radiation exposure. So when someone plants a radiation bomb in Biron's room, he takes it very seriously -- and is sucked into a conspiracy on a grand scale.

The catastrophic radioactivity of future Earth is a recurring motif in Asimov's books, although as the years went by and the threat of a U.S.-U.S.S.R. nuclear war receded, he evolved a new explanation for this sad state of affairs. Check out his "Robots and Empire" for more.

Answer: The Tyranni

Humanity has been spread out over the galaxy for thousands of years, and now some worlds are starting to flex their muscles and dominate their neighbors. The Tyranni (who hail from the planet Tyrann, of course) have spent fifty years dominating the planetary kingdoms on the far side of the Horsehead Nebula. (Amusingly, the meaning of that name has been lost over time, and Nebular folk etymologists refer to a mythical space explorer named Horace Hedd.) The Tyranni are sketched out here as classic cardboard villains: less physically attractive than the denizens of the fifty worlds they rule, they rely on "devious methods, intrigues, assassination." Unfortunately, this novel does not show Asimov at the top of his game.

Answer: The U.S. Constitution

The U.S. Constitution won't help defeat the Tyranni directly, but, in the words of one conspirator, it will help "hold our winnings once we had won ... Without it, we could perhaps defeat the Tyranni, but we would only have exchanged one feudal despotism for another." Armed with a blueprint for democracy, however, our heroes are confident that freedom will reign!

This big reveal at the end of the book is rather heavy-handed and unsatisfying; Asimov was said to have regretted the whole subplot soon after the book was published.

Answer: A fiber based on cellulose

Midway through the book, Lady Samia Fife muses on the miraculous kyrt: "Of course kyrt didn't really shine of itself, but properly spun, it would gleam metallically in the sun in a variety of colors or in all colors at once ... Its fibers could be spun finer than the most delicate synthetics and those same fibers had a tensile strength no steel alloy could duplicate." People have tried to grow kyrt on other worlds, but away from Florina, it grows "white, flat, weak and useless. Not even honest cotton."

Its immensely valuable kyrt crop could have been a blessing for Florina, but instead, the people of that planet are horribly oppressed by the Squires of Sark, and their riches flow to that other world. Until something changes...

Answer: His mind is damaged when he is psycho-probed.

His assailant -- whom we'll call X, as amateur detectives do later in the book -- uses a psychic probe, which is supposed to be for use in the criminal justice system. The probe can be used to make subtle suggestions or suppress certain types of feelings, but it is used quite heavily on our Earthman.

He ends up in a ditch just outside a Florinian peasant village, unable to walk or talk or take care of himself. The villagers call him "Rik" after their term for mental retardation. But slowly, under the patient care of a village woman named Lona, Rik begins to recover himself -- and, after almost a year, he remembers why he came to Florina. Suddenly, Rik's and Lona's quiet world is a dangerous place.

Answer: Its sun is going to go nova.

Over the course of the book, Rik slowly remembers his old job: he was a Spatio-analyst. Their joking motto is "We analyze Nothing"; what they actually do, alone in ships in the vast vacuum of space, is analyze tiny particles of interstellar dust -- the "currents of space." And what Rik did, just before the novel's opening scene, was to realize that Florina and its sun were in the path of one of those currents, which had turned the star into a time bomb even as it made kyrt possible. Florina must be evacuated, but its people are kept in ignorance by the ruling Sarkites, who are not exactly anxious to abandon their gold mine. To see how this circle is squared, I highly recommend that you spend a few hours with the book!

As a scientific note, although Asimov's description of stellar fusion contains some very solid nuclear physics, we now know that stars go nova due to internal factors rather than external currents of interstellar dust. Give the author credit, though: this wasn't fully worked out until decades after he wrote the book!

Answer: Earth people must submit to euthanasia on their sixtieth birthdays.

Earth's ubiquitous mid-level radioactivity makes life on the planet difficult (though we now know it would actually make life impossible). The planet is poor and its people mostly subsistence farmers; the harsh conditions have led to the Sixty, where people report to special centers to be put to death on their sixtieth birthdays.

This "custom" is strictly enforced, with penalties for recalcitrant family members as well. Schwartz will be in big trouble once his age is learned!

Answer: He is subjected to an experimental device to improve his ability to learn.

The Synapsifier, brainchild of an Earth physicist named Affret Shekt, "is supposed to improve the learning capacity of the mammalian nervous system." It has killed many of its test subjects, but Schwartz -- volunteered by the terrified family that first found him -- survives and thrives. he learns the local language rapidly -- and soon his mental powers expand beyond what he had dreamed possible.

Answer: A specially engineered virus

Because of its radioactivity, Earth is home to some uniquely hardy lifeforms -- so Earth viruses are exceptionally difficult to kill. Using the Synapsifier to enhance their abilities, Earth virologists have developed a lethal strain to which the people of Earth will, alone, have immunity. Earth's leaders plan to spread the virus by stealth, until they can achieve independence by making billions of corpses around the galaxy. Let's hope our heroes can save the day!

Answer: Trantor

It is Trantor, loosely modeled on the Roman Empire, that rises to greatness in the background of this loosely defined trilogy. For thousands of years, Trantor's dominance keeps the galaxy at peace -- until the Empire crumbles and falls. Asimov's justly famous "Foundation" series explores the aftermath of this collapse, and one group's efforts to shorten the resulting galactic Dark Age.