Anderson-Asimov Parallels III

I quoted Isaac Asimov's Susan Calvin here and had replied earlier:

Asimov never considers that since economics, society and war are our activities, we collectively might come to understand and control them without needing an elite to do this for us.
-copied from here.

I think that that completes my remarks about Susan Calvin and Laurinda Ashcroft.

Another parallel is that, although Asimov's Second Foundationers, like Anderson's galactic nodes, communicate non-verbally, their discourse is rendered into words for our benefit. In both cases, the narrator directly informs the reader that these conversations are a pretense. Thus, instead of remaining unobtrusive and invisible like the omniscient narrator of a modern novel, Asimov's and Anderson's narrators revert to an earlier literary formula by directly addressing their readers in the first person:

"Which is as far as I can go in explaining color to a blind man - with myself as blind as the audience."
-Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (London, 1964), FIRST INTERLUDE, p. 22.

"We must end, as we began, making a myth, if we would tell of that which we cannot ever really know. Imagine two minds conversing."
-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), Part Two, XII, p. 241.

One critic objected to Asimov's unexplained introduction of a first person narrator, asking if this was God, then saying that it could not be. It cannot be because God, like the modern omniscient narrator, God is omniscient, not "blind." I welcomed the mystery of this higher (or lower?) level narrator. In my experience, the sf writer who plays the cleverest tricks with point of view and narration is CS Lewis in Volume III of his Ransom Trilogy.