Giles Foden of the Guardian details informed speculation about how Bin Laden might have been influenced by Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, or whether the name Al-Queda might have been a direct translation of the word Foundation. Details the relationship between sci fi novels and terrorist groups with respect to a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum:
In 1995, after the subway attacks, a coded letter arrived at the magazine Takarajima 30. Believed to have been from Aum sympathisers, it gives a sense of how seriously the sect’s members took Asimov and science fiction more generally. The letter, which promised an attack on the Tokaimura nuclear reprocessing plant, embedded its threat in a passage of literary criticism.
Shimatsu explains: “The letter was a rebuttal to an essay by Susan Sontag in which she claims the sci-fi film genre is based on a fascination with catastrophe in the age of the bomb. Instead, this critic asserted, science fiction is really about surviving catastrophe, and is therefore optimistic – and the key to the genre is the longing for a sense of scientific community resembling the craft guilds of the past.
“A professor of American literature at one of Tokyo’s top universities, a specialist in science fiction, immediately recognised the passage as the work of literary critic Frederic Jameson. It was obviously selected as a defense of the Aum sect’s effort to build a community of scientists modelled after Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.”
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