Dr. Han Fastolfe

Dr. Han Fastolfe is a Spacer scientist who seeks to redirect Earth toward space colonization, first by changing its economy and later by finding native people who might carry that change forward. His experiment with Elijah Baley turns the investigation into more than a contest over competing visions of Earth: it reveals Fastolfe’s effort to shape a political movement, and the limits imposed by the very human dispositions he hoped to recruit.

Identity and Background

Fastolfe belongs to the Spacer project of transforming Earth through the introduction of C/Fe culture. He recognizes that this effort has failed to win broad support: after twenty-five years, the stronger the Spacers pressed their economic model, the stronger the opposing Medievalist movement became. That history leads him and his associates to reconsider not only their tactics but also who on Earth might be capable of advancing their aims.

Earth’s Future and Fastolfe’s Vision

In a later conversation, Baley imagines Earth supplied with effectively unlimited energy. Yeast farms could expand, hydroponic agriculture intensify, minerals be brought from uninhabited rocks, and water and atmospheric elements replenished from distant sources. Such resources might permit a population of a trillion or two. Fastolfe’s counterargument, as Baley considers it, is not that Earth must remain confined to its existing limits, but that a planet dependent on imported air and water and on energy stored fifty million miles away would be perilously unstable: failure anywhere in the system could bring catastrophe. The disagreement places abundance beside dependence, and technical possibility beside the fragility of the infrastructure required to sustain it.

Baley’s own response is to favor shipping Earth’s surplus population elsewhere, though he recognizes that the suggestion is more an answer to his imagined future than to Norris’s question. Norris answers bitterly that any uninhabited planet might have them. Fastolfe’s concern with planetary stability thus touches a political problem as well as an engineering one: Earth’s population cannot be treated as an abstraction when migration depends on whether another world will accept its people.

The Experiment with Baley

After the failure of economic pressure, Dr. Sarton proposed reversing the approach: find an Earth population that already desired the Spacers’ goal, or could be persuaded to desire it, and help it make the movement indigenous rather than foreign. Baley himself became an experiment in this strategy. The Commissioner’s recommendation brought him to the Spacers’ attention; his psychic profile suggested he might be useful, and cerebroanalysis conducted by R. Daneel Olivaw upon meeting him confirmed their judgment.

Fastolfe saw in Baley a practical person who neither romanticized Earth’s past nor stubbornly clung to the City culture of the present. The Spacers believed such people might lead Earthmen toward the stars again. That assessment was one reason Fastolfe was eager to see Baley the previous morning. It also shows how an apparently personal encounter was folded into a longer political project: Baley was valued not simply as an investigator but as a possible native advocate.

Persuasion and Its Limits

The experiment included a mild drug intended to make Baley’s mind more receptive. It did not make him accept ideas foreign to his basic pattern of thought. Fastolfe had hoped he would become fanatical and single-minded about the cause; instead, Baley became only distantly approving. His practical nature blocked the more intense response the Spacers had wanted.

That disappointment forced a revision of their judgment. Fastolfe and his associates concluded that their best hope lay with romantics after all, even though the romantics were, unfortunately for the Spacers, actual or potential Medievalists. Baley felt proud that his stubbornness had resisted the attempted influence. For Fastolfe, the failed experiment exposed a contradiction in the strategy: the kind of person who might lead Earth toward the stars did not necessarily respond to ideological inducement, while the people most moved by romantic vision were aligned with the opposing movement.