Bel Riose

Who He Is

Bel Riose is the hero and villain of "The General," the first half of Foundation and Empire (1952). He is the Galactic Empire's last truly capable general: young, brilliant, loyal, and honest. Stationed at Siwenna, an old province on the Empire's frontier, he hears rumors of "magicians" on the Periphery with technology the Empire has lost, and he decides to find out whether they are a threat.

They are. The Foundation, about two centuries old at this point, has grown into a real power through trade. Riose concludes that it must be crushed before it grows further, and he goes to war, partly out of duty and partly out of a soldier's appetite for glory.

The Campaign

Riose's campaign is the one serious military threat the Foundation faces from the Empire, and for a while it goes well. He is a far better commander than anyone the Foundation can put against him.

Two people try to stop him from close range. Ducem Barr, a Siwennian patrician whose father Onum once met the trader Hober Mallow, is forced to help Riose and spends the campaign calmly telling him, on the basis of psychohistory, that he cannot win. Lathan Devers, a Foundation trader, lets himself be captured so he can sabotage the general from inside, and then escapes with Barr to Trantor to try to turn the Emperor against Riose.

Devers's scheme fails. Nobody on the Foundation's side outsmarts Riose. And yet Riose loses anyway: the Emperor Cleon II, suspicious of a successful general, recalls him and his minder, the Privy Secretary Ammel Brodrig, and both are arrested for treason and later executed.

Why He Had to Lose

The genius of "The General" is that Riose's defeat has nothing to do with anyone's cleverness. Barr lays out the logic at the end. A weak general could never threaten the Foundation. A strong general could, but only under a strong emperor, and a strong emperor in a decaying Empire stays in power precisely by not letting strong subjects rise. So a general good enough to win is a general the Emperor must destroy.

That is psychohistory in its purest form: a result determined by the structure of a society, not by the choices of the people in it. Asimov never makes it more convincing than here. It also sets up the next story, "The Mule," which shows what happens when that logic meets someone it cannot account for.

Character and Motives

Riose is not a tyrant. He is courteous to Barr, respectful of his enemies, and loyal to an Emperor who does not deserve it. That makes him one of the most sympathetic antagonists in the series, and his fate reads as a small tragedy about good people serving a dying institution.

His one flaw is that he believes effort and skill decide outcomes. Barr's quiet certainty that they do not is the story's running argument, and history proves Barr right.

In the Apple TV+ Series

The show's Bel Riose, played by Ben Daniels in Season 2, is a considerably expanded character. Demerzel frees him from the Lepsis prison colony to investigate the Foundation, and the series gives him a husband, Glawen Curr, whose fate hangs over his choices. His meeting with Ducem Barr on Siwenna is adapted fairly faithfully, though Barr's ending is darker than in the book. In the Season 2 finale, Riose refuses Brother Day's order to destroy the Foundation's allies and is relieved of command. The show keeps the core of the book's character, the loyal soldier caught between duty and a system that cannot tolerate him.