Foundation shows you can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul

A sci-fi classic unearths transhumanism’s flaws

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A woman confronts a man whose clone stands behind her.

Apple TV.

One of the reasons that science fiction has had enduring popularity as a genre is its ability to illustrate thought experiments. The way it can attempt to answer questions that can’t even be asked in any other kind of fiction is what gives it power as a form of storytelling. One question that keeps coming up is: what if you could live forever, through technology?

One person to attempt to answer this question is Isaac Asimov, one of the early giants of the sci-fi genre. Born in 1920, Asimov arrived into a world that was rapidly changing, and yet, his imagination was still able to outpace it. Much of what he is known for is his depiction of robots, with ‘Asimov’s laws of robotics’ influencing the depiction of androids in Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, direct adaptations of Asimov’s own work were few and far between. Robin Williams’ Bicentennial Man released in 1999 and Will Smith starred in I, Robot in 2004 were the best of the bunch. That is, until Apple TV began adapting Asimov’s Foundation.

Asimov’s Foundation books were written across the span of fifty years. The premise of the stories is that in a distant future, a galactic empire is beginning to fail and cannot be saved. The mathematician Hari Seldon develops the theory of psychohistory, where he uses statistical laws to predict the future of large populations. In the wake of the empire’s fall, Seldon predicts a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Seldon devises a plan to reduce this dark age to just one thousand years by preserving a ‘foundation’ of knowledge. The novels describe some of the dramatic events that frustrate, or are a result of Seldon's Plan. One of the features of the story that the Apple TV show of Foundation focuses on is attempted immortality.

Foundation gives us three depictions of ‘immortality’. Firstly, Seldon orchestrates having his conscience eventually uploaded into the Prime Radiant, a super-computer in order to allow him to shepherd his plans beyond the limits of his own human lifespan. Secondly, his protégé, Gaal Dornick is throughout the first season put into a cryo-sleep that lets her move into the future without ageing. Finally, the characters of Dawn, Day and Dusk attempt immortality through cloning. The tyrannical emperor Cleon decided that the only person fit to succeed him was…himself. So, he creates a revolving triumvirate of his own clones: Brother Day, a Cleon in his prime; Brother Dusk, an aging Cleon who serves to advise Day; and Brother Dawn, a young Cleon being trained to succeed Brother Day. This "genetic dynasty" has been ruling with an iron fist for 400 years by the start of the series.

These interpretations of immortality grant each character the ability to shape and curate history in a way that no one human could ever achieve. But as there’s no drama without conflict, Foundation shows us the downsides of this kind of immortality. Firstly, Gaal’s version, being frozen in cryo-sleep for decades might literally extend her life, but from Gaal’s perspective, it is no longer than it would have been otherwise. Whilst she does get to see history play out, she loses connections with people like her family and her lover Raych. She is unable to build the life she would have planned for herself.

No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about.

Seldon’s version of immortality is flirted with by tech bros and transhumanists like Peter Thiel. The idea of a computer that has the processing power to replicate a human brain turns up in numerous stories, but it’s another false immortality. Firstly, the original Hari Seldon still dies, and the ‘digital version’ stored eventually in the Prime Radiant is merely a copy. We might not think much of copy and pasting a document or file on our computer, but it doesn’t quite work the same for human beings. A copy is not the same as the original. You can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul. In addition to this, we find out at one point that due to a mistake, Hari’s digital self has been trapped in darkness, fully conscious but with no rest, no distractions and no way of communicating with the outside world for 148 years. This naturally drags Hari into an interminable madness.

Lastly, the Empire run by the clones, Dawn, Day and Dusk suffer much the same problem as the other two. It’s not a real immortality; as each clone eventually dies. But in many ways, it’s even worse than death. No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about. This is a trope that is troubling, because a protagonist dying and being returned via cloning is often presented as a ‘resurrection’. It has been used as a story arc in the X-men comics and in Peter Capaldi’s era of Doctor Who, with very little outcry from their respective fandoms. Possibly because the thought that the producers have canonically killed the main character and replaced them with an exact copy is simply too uncomfortable to consider. In Foundation itself, the clones are judged by their fidelity to the original (a cold and petty despot) and any deviation is met with a death sentence. Whilst clones may be one way to rule a sci-fi galactic empire, it’s possibly their inability to adapt to changing circumstances that contributes to the fall of civilisation.

The great irony in all of these interpretations is; you are only immortal to those observing you, and an immortality that relies on perspective is not really an immortality at all.

It seems that hard science fiction, and ancient Greek myths can at times, overlap in their focus. Viewed in one light, Asimov’s Foundation series can be seen as one long story of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to give it as a gift to mankind, only to be punished by Zeus for his actions. Asimov appears to be telling us that mankind can’t accurately predict the future and you can’t live forever. So despite being a staunch atheist, one of the great minds of science fiction might be suggesting that immortality may belong squarely in the realm of the divine.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.