Golan Trevize
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This article or section describes a work or element of fiction in a primarily in-universe style. Please rewrite this article or section to explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective. |
Golan Trevize is a fictional character, a major figure in two books in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series: Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. He was noted for being irreverent and somewhat flamboyant: at a time when fashion on the Foundation demanded drab grey clothing, Trevize always wore a brightly coloured sash around his waist.
He is also a womanizer: at the start of Foundation's Edge, his latest 'housemate,' Flavella, has just left him due to his erratic schedule, and he later shows great interest in Sayshellian and Gaian women. Throughout Foundation and Earth he sleeps with two women, Comporellon's Minister of Transportation and an Alphan woman. However, both are for ulterior motives: the first on Trevize's part, to get favorable treatment from a hostile government, and the second on the Alphan's part, to infect Trevize with a unique type of S.T.D.
He received military training and served in the naval forces of the Foundation. Leaving the navy, he was elected to the Council of the Foundation.
Trevize was a citizen of the First Foundation (or Foundation), which was founded by Hari Seldon on the planet Terminus when the Galactic Empire was crumbling. Using a science called Psychohistory, Seldon was able to arrange matters so that the inevitable chaotic interregnum between the fall of the First Empire and the rise of another could be shortened from 30,000 years to a millennium.
A more mysterious establishment of Seldon's was the Second Foundation, which was made of Psychohistorians and Psychologists capable of manipulating the emotions of other people. The Second Foundation was by far the more important, since it could continue to direct the course of history even if the First Foundation was destroyed.
Trevize shows a unique intuition, much like Elijah Baley in the Robot Series, the ability to guess the correct solution to a problem or outcome of a dilemma, even when knowing almost nothing about it. This ability is noted by his friend Munn Li Compor, an unimportant observer working for the Second foundation, and by the planet Gaia. Gaia is a planet in which all the human beings, animals, and inanimate surroundings are combined into one collective consciousness with the capability of detecting and manipulating thoughts and emotions at a great distance.
At the end of the book Foundation's Edge, the First and Second Foundations are manipulated into a confrontation with Gaia, while Trevize is manoeuvered there to decide which of the three courses of action represented by the three parties is the best choice for humanity. The First Foundation represents the undirected course of history, random force and freedom from manipulative planning. The Second Foundation represents planning, calculation of the future and direction of humanity by equations and psychological manoeuvering. The third way, by Gaia, consists of Gaia's expansion across the Galaxy, making Galaxia, a single Galaxy-wide super-organism.
In the climax to Foundation's Edge, Trevize chooses Galaxia, with his intuition. Foundation and Earth opens with Trevize debating with himself over why — and if — he made the right decision. Convinced that the answer lies on Earth, the ancestral planet of the human species, Trevize decides to search for it. Upon Earth's Moon, he meets R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot who has been using mental powers similar to those of the Second Foundation to direct human history for the past 20,000 years. Olivaw discusses the Zeroth Law of Robotics, which states 'A robot may not injure humanity, or by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm'. Throughout the quest, Trevize had felt that the two postulates of Psychohistory (the number of humans must be large, and unaware of the predictions made by psychohistory) were not the most basic postulates necessary for Psychohistory to make accurate predictions. When Olivaw mentioned the Zeroth law, more basic than the other Three Laws of Robotics created long ago to prevent robots from being dangerous, Trevize suddenly realised the most basic postulate: the species predictions were being made for must be humans, Homo sapiens. Only Galaxia could protect humanity from an alien invasion; it would be beyond the powers of Psychohistory.
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