Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Book design by Karin Batten
Published by Bantam Spectra
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I originally encountered the Foundation Trilogy in an omnibus volume in our high school library. In our small town the school libraries were not overly large or well-stocked, and "escapist" speculative fiction was not exactly a priority for acquisition. So finding science fiction and fantasy meant scouring the shelves book by book, wading through shelf after shelf of mundane stories of ordinary people doing ordinary things, which I would read only if assigned to do so. I had no idea that the Foundation Trilogy was considered a classic of science fiction. I just knew that it was a story of the far future, and thus the sort of story I liked to read.
As soon as it was in my hands, I dove in, expecting a story of grand adventure. After all, I was familiar with Galactic Empires from Star Wars and various works of written space opera. So I thrilled along with Gaal Dornick at the description of Trantor, the world-city that was the capital of a vast Galactic Empire. I recognized some parallels with the Cities of Asimov's The Caves of Steel, which was the first adult novel I ever read (get your mind out of the gutter -- I'm talking about a novel written for grown-ups, with grown-up protagonists who have grown-up problems of work and marriage and family, as opposed to a children's book with child protagonists whose conflicts revolve around school and relationships with parents and teachers and classmates) -- the entirely enclosed environment, the tendency of people raised in it to develop severe agoraphobia (for which the solution was to require children to be taken up to the surface and exposed to open air and sunlight at prescribed times, although the authorities were admitting that it was proving less than satisfactory), etc.
So my teenage mind was shocked when I read the discussion between Gaal and Hari Seldon, and discovered that all of this magnificence and wonder was teetering on the edge of destruction. That within five centuries, the star-spanning empire would fall to pieces and Trantor itself would be sacked and ruined, predicted to over ninety percent probability. And then these characters are swept up by the Committee of Public Safety, and while I didn't have enough familiarity with the French Revolution and the Terror to recognize the historical origin of that name, I was a child of the Cold War and was all too aware of secret police and secret trials in Those Countries Over There, so I knew that this was not a good situation to be in.
So imagine my relief when I discover that Seldon and his team of mathematicians were not to catch the sf equivalent of a bullet to the back of the skull in a hidden basement execution chamber somewhere in this vast city that was a planet. No, they were to be exiled to the farthest star, to a newly discovered planet known as Terminus at the very outer edge of the Galaxy. There they will head up a project to produce an Encyclopedia Galactica -- the one whose 116th edition provides the excerpts that head each section of the novel, so we are already told that in the long run this project will be successful.
As a result, I was expecting the next section to be their arrival on Terminus and their work on this monumental chore. Not quite the derring-do of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, but perhaps they'd have a run-in or two with space pirates out on the Rim. Imagine my surprise when the next section, titled "The Encyclopedists," takes up fifty years later. They've set up their organization, which they call Encyclopedia Foundation Number One, implying that there will be others scattered throughout the Galactic Empire, working in parallel to produce this monumental compilation of All Human Knowledge. Hari Seldon is nowhere to be found. Instead, the main character is now Salvor Hardin, the mayor of Terminus City, a municipality which has been created to support the Encyclopedia Foundation's efforts -- and things are not going well. It seems that four neighboring prefectures have broken away from Trantor's control, and now want to take Terminus under their "protection" in exchange for suitable tribute. Yeah, that kind of "protection."
Only some years later did I discover that the Foundation Trilogy had not been written as a unit, unlike Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which I was also reading around that time (albeit from the public library rather than the school library). Instead, Asimov had originally written most of it as a series of short stories and novelettes for John W. Campbell's Astounding. Asimov, who lived in New York City and could easily visit Campbell's offices, was one of the editor's proteges, and often wrote on topics suggested by Campbell. In one of these meetings, Asimov suggested retelling the fall off the Roman Empire in the distant future, but with a group of scientists in the place of the monasteries that preserved the knowledge of Classical Antiquity through the Dark Ages and made the Renaissance possible.
Originally the section that is titled "The Encyclopedists" was titled "Foundation," and all the subsequent sections were originally short stories, and all had different titles. Only some time after the entire sequence of Foundation stories and novelettes were published were they finally assembled into the three novel-length works that were published as what became the Foundation Trilogy. It was at that point that "The Psychohistorians," the first section of Foundation, was written to provide a better introduction to the 'verse. This kind of novel made of several short stories plus additional connecting material, is known as a fix-up, and became very common as the center of gravity of sf publishing shifted away from short works and toward novels, courtesy of the death of the pulps and the rise of the paperback. A lot of authors had written numerous stories in a shared background, sometimes sequential, sometimes not, and if they were collected, they could be put together to make a story that was greater than the sum of its parts.
At the time, knowing nothing of this history, my focus was more on the maneuverings of the Foundation to avoid being taken over by a group of people who had lost much of their former science and technology, and were operating what they had left almost entirely by rote.I did note the name Anacreon for one of the leading worlds of their would-be conquerors, and wondered if Asimov had taken it from "To Anacreon in Heaven," the song that provided the melody for "The Star-Spangled Banner." I also found the concept of semantic analysis fascinating, but assumed it was a completely made-up far future science, not realizing that it was an idea current at the time, which Campbell had become interested in and encouraged Asimov to incorporate in his story (this being a time when sf was still viewed as a means of introducing readers to scientific principles via entertainment).
While the way in which the Foundation ended up dominating their would-be conquerors was fascinating, being somewhat reminiscent of the way in which Greece was conquered by Rome militarily only to conquer it culturally, I found the made-up religion of Scientism intensely disturbing. Although I was familiar with the idea of knowledge decaying into superstition from having read a number of post-apocalyptic stories, there was something intensely off-putting about the idea of deliberately creating a false religion to manipulate and control people via superstition and fear of supernatural retribution. While I was a bit uncomfortable about the role of the Missionaria Protective in Frank Herbert's Dune, at least the Bene Gesserit were manipulating religious communities that had a genuine faith experience. Scientism was a willful and deliberate sham, and my feelings of revulsion toward it would not be equalled until I came across the Skalmar Prophecies in Zilbrant the Traitor by Catherine Mintz.
Even so, works of speculative fiction were hard enough to come by in my childhood that I didn't immediately abandon the book. I wanted to find out what was going to happen to this tiny community of scientists and historians who'd effectively been abandoned on the outermost fringes of a Galactic Empire that was slip-sliding into disintegration. I read on through the story of an attempted rebellion being quelled by secretly planted explosives, which were presented as the actions of wrathful gods who demanded the punishment of the "blasphemers." And I read on through the establishment of the Foundation's system of Traders who began to travel back into the fringes of the Empire and offer goods far superior to what could be had from Imperial manufacturers. It was an understandable situation -- Terminus was a metal-poor world, so the Foundation's industries had to stretch their resources as far as possible, resulting in micro-miniaturization of what the Empire could build much larger with their greater resources.
Yet there wasn't that much of those sections that stuck with me. Here and there I'd see a name that sounded vaguely familiar: for instance, did the Korellians inspire George Lucas to name Han Solo's people, albeit with a different spelling? And there was the grim vision of a culture in decay, of the loss of innovation and then of understanding, of ossified societies in which social mobility was lost and castes of tech-men operated and maintained their forefathers' machinery by rote, unable to build replacements or even repair any significant damage, where a bright kid born into a lowly class would be seen as a sticking-up nail to be hammered down. Amidst this vision of the lights going out one by one across the galaxy, the Foundation and their allied worlds were like a vision of light pressing back the growing darkness of ignorance and decay, even with that deeply problematical pseudo-religion they were propagating -- which was clearly coming to the end of its usefulness at the end of this novel, to be replaced by a commercial confederation that offered trade goods far superior to the Empire's.
Looking back, it's easy to see Foundation and its sequels as deeply flawed. The world building and characterization are quite thin, even well-nigh non-existent compared to Dune and the various other works of the New Space Opera that have been inspired by Frank Herbert's monumental work of science fiction world building. (Asimov didn't consider characterization a priority for science fiction, and once wrote an essay titled "The Little Tin God of Characterization" in which he made his views clear). There are many places where it's obvious that Asimov really doesn't grasp the scale of worlds or galaxies: for instance, the numbers given for the population of Trantor sound huge compared to present-day populations, but spread across an entire Earth-sized world, would result in a population density that doesn't even compare to Manhattan, let alone Hong Kong. He casually talks about confederations of worlds who have lost nuclear power (called "atomics" in the language of the time), but still fly between the stars, which suggests a simplistic translation of sea travel to space travel without any understanding of the technological underpinnings that make space travel possible, including navigation and life support (but it's also important that Asimov was writing the original Foundation stories and novelettes in the 1940's, over a decade before Sputnik, let alone the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions). And of course there's the Science Marches On problem: he places Trantor in the exact center of the galaxy, which has since been discovered to be the location of a giant black hole.
But one must also remember that, in the 1940's and particularly under John W. Campbell, science fiction was first and foremost the literature of ideas. And the entire Foundation series was built upon one central idea: the concept of the forecastable future. From the dawn of humanity, people have sought to press back the veil of time and peer into the future. From primitive superstitions that conflated correlation with causation to the complex auguries of astrology and divination, humans have sought to determine what will be the best course of action in the days to come. Even the otherwise quite logical neo-Platonists of the late Roman Empire regarded it as critical to consider signs and portents in undertaking any venture, and had whole volumes on the proper reading of the entrails of sacrificed animals (and occasionally even sacrificed slaves) to determine the most auspicious course of action.
Judaism (Asimov's own religious background) and its daughter faiths Christianity and Islam all rejected divination as presumption upon God's sovereignty over the universe. To be sure, those prohibitions did not by any means prevent the wealthy and powerful from honoring them primarily in the breach -- European kings routinely had court astrologers well into the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. The movement from astrology to astronomy, and from alchemy to chemistry did sweep away some of the claptrap associated with those disciplines, and as science rather than religion increasingly provided explanations for the various "how things work" questions, various forms of divination were relegated to circus sideshows and parlor games.
But that same science was also providing the ability to take our understanding of the past and extrapolate into the future. By understanding past weather phenomena, we could begin to forecast the weather days in advance. So Asimov posited that a future society might be able to take vast amounts of data about human behavior and forecast the development of societies and governments, even far into the future. From this notion came psychohistory, a science which would combine psychology and statistics to create a history of the future -- and if one was careful, to even be able to manipulate it to lead to a better outcome for all humanity (much as the science fiction writers of that era thought that it would be possible to scientifically control the weather). From this, Asimov created the key element by which his story of the Foundation was fundamentally different from the history of the monastic preservation of knowledge through the Dark Ages: instead of just warehousing and copying knowledge, the Foundation was able to build upon it and actually shorten the galactic Dark Age -- an actual Shortening of the Way that may well have inspired Frank Herbert's use of that term to describe what the Bene Gesserit were trying to accomplish with their breeding program.
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Review posted February 6, 2021
