Trantor
Trantor is a planet that features in Foundation.
Contents |
History
Trantor was a planet that was one of the five worlds of the Trantorian Republic growing into the Trantorian Confederation and then Trantorian Empire.
Over time, Trantor came to control about half of the worlds in the Galaxy, while the other half is divided into innumerable independent worlds and miniature empires – which naturally makes a Trantorian Ambassador a person of great consequence on any of the still-independent worlds.
Later on, conquest of the entire galaxy made the Galactic Empire, with Trantor as its capital planet. The planet no longer sending out ambassadors, but only governors to royal subject worlds. This situation had already existed for thousands of years at the time of Pebble in the Sky, the next chronological book on this timeline.
The fall of the empire was first noted by Eto Demerzel, the Emperor Cleon's First Minister. However, like any sudden deterioration, the Empire was in its golden age during the period that Eto Demerzal noted this. The Empire, specifically on Trantor with its population of over 40 billion, was becoming too administrative and was beginning to ignore the upkeep of itself. First the crime rate shot up, then various infrastructure began to fail, and the Empire fell.
During the fall of the Empire the Second Foundation was founded by Wanda Seldon through Hari Seldon. These mental scientists were kept secret and set up their base of operation in the Imperial Library.
A couple of centuries after the fall of the Empire, Trantor was finally attacked and destroyed by several different warring kingdoms. Only the Imperial Sector was spared through the Second Foundation's actions. The only native Trantorians, known to themselves as Hamish-folk, began an agrarian society among the ruins of Skyscrapers.
At the time of the Stettinan War, Trantor was known as a agricultural planet exporting high quality animal fodder and grains.
Overview
In appearance, Trantor was depicted as the capital of the first Galactic Empire. Its surface of 194,000,000 km2 (75,000,000 sq mi, approx. 40% of Earth's surface area), implying a radius of around 4000 km (somewhere in between the Earth and Mars),[2] was, with the exception of the Imperial Palace,[3] entirely enclosed in artificial domes.
It consisted of an enormous metropolis (an ecumenopolis) that stretched deep underground, and was home to a population of 45,000,000,000 (45 billion) human inhabitants at its height (although Second Foundation mentions a figure ten times that of administrators alone), a population density of 232 per square kilometre (600 per square mile, similar to the current population density of Germany or Connecticut). Its population was devoted almost entirely to either administration of the Empire or to maintenance of the planet itself, including energy provided by "heatsinks" (geothermal core taps) and production of food via underground farming and yeasts.
The Encyclopedia Galactica states further on Trantor: "As the centre of the Imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of generations and located, as it was, toward the central regions of the Galaxy among the most densely populated and industrially advanced worlds of the system, it could scarcely help being the densest and richest clot of humanity the Race had ever seen."
A Trantorian day lasted 1.08 Galactic Standard Days.
One of the prominent features of Trantor was the Library of Trantor (variously referred to as the Imperial Library, the University of Trantor Library, and the Galactic Library), in which librarians index the entirety of human knowledge by walking up to a different computer terminal every day and resuming where the previous librarian left off.
Near Trantor were twenty agricultural worlds which supplied food which the world-city could not grow for itself, and the "Summer Planets", where the Emperor went for vacation.[6] Around 260 FE, a rebel leader named Gilmer attempted a coup, in the process sacking Trantor[7] and forcing the Imperial family to flee to the nearby world of Delicass, renamed Neotrantor. After the sack, the population dwindled rapidly from 40 billion to less than 100 million. Most of the buildings on Trantor were destroyed during the sack, and over the course of the next two centuries the metal on Trantor was gradually sold off, as farmers uncovered more and more soil to use in their farms. Eventually the farmers grew to become the sole recognised inhabitants of the planet, and the era of Trantor as the central world of the galaxy came to a close. It began to develop a dialect very different from Galactic Standard Speech, and the people unofficially renamed their planet "Hame", or "home".[8]
As revealed to the reader at the end of Second Foundation, not all these farmers were what they seemed, with the now-rustic Trantor serving as the centre of the Second Foundation. From Trantor, the Second Foundationers secretly guided the development of the Galaxy (roughly parallel to the city of Rome becoming, after the fall of its empire, the headquarters of the Papacy, with its enormous influence on the development of Medieval Europe). Indeed, their self-perception as leaders of the future Second Empire is captured in the Second Foundationers' use of the word "Hamish" to describe the farmers despite reserving for themselves use of the word "Trantorian". It is noted that it was the Second Foundation which ensured that the famed library would survive the sacking of Trantor and the destruction of its urban culture – especially significant, considering that the library was vital to the Second Foundation itself.
In the Asimov canon, where events of this time are depicted mainly from a Foundation perspective, the Fall of Trantor is mentioned only as a piece of faraway news and in various later short references. However, Harry Turtledove attempted to fill in the details in his "Trantor Falls", focusing on the efforts by the Second Foundation to survive during the sacking of Trantor (published in the 1989 Foundation's Friends, where various writers took up the Foundation universe).
Food production According to the original Foundation Trilogy (1951), Asimov states (by way of the Encyclopedia Galactica), "the impossibility of proper administration ... under the uninspired leadership of the later Emperors was a considerable factor in the Fall." To support the needs and whims of the population, food from twenty agricultural worlds brought by ships in the tens of thousands, fleets greater than any navy ever constructed by the Empire. "Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millennium of the Empire, the monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial policy became little more than the protection of Trantor's delicate jugular vein" (Encyclopedia Galactica).[9]
In Prelude to Foundation (1989), Asimov indicates that this was not always so: originally, most of Trantor's basic food needs were fulfilled by Trantor's "vast microorganism farms".[10] Yeast vats and algae farms produced basic nutrients, which were then processed with artificial flavors into palatable food.[11] The subterranean farms, however, depended entirely on care provided by tik-toks (lesser robots), and their destruction following an abortive uprising (chronicled in Foundation's Fear) left the Imperial capital largely dependent upon food brought from other worlds. Foundation's Edge mentions algae growing on Trantor, which is called a totally inadequate source of food, so it is possible some of the later Emperors attempted to rectify the situation with limited success. Trantor is, of course, again able to produce its own food after the sack by Gilmer, with the increasing amount of usable land as the metal on the surface was removed and sold.
Although by 22,500 years in the future, there had been much racial intermarriage and most people were multiracial in the Galactic Empire as a whole as well as on Trantor itself. There were still some recognizable populations primarily descended from the original races on Earth. What we call Caucasians were called Westerners, what we call East Asians were called Easterners, and what we call Black people were called Southerners. No one could remember why these names were used because no one remembered human origins on Earth.
Inhabitants
- Cleon I :
- Arcadia Darell :
Notes
- Trantor was created by Isaac Asimov where it featured in the setting of the Foundation universe.
In other media
Television
- In Foundation, Trantor appeared in the setting of the live-action television series adaptation.
Appearances
- Foundation:
External Link
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