The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 24 May 2022
by Isaac Asimov
Published as a novel in 1952, this is one of the classic science-fiction books, written by one of the pre-eminent science-fiction authors of the 20th century. It is standard reading for afficionadoes of the genre, though this reader came to it quite late. It's not uncommon for science-fiction writers to adapt stories and history into the realm of sci-fi. Here, Asimov seems to be chanelling the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and why not? Why aim small?
A galactic empire of humans has endured now for twelve thousand years and more. It spans millions of planets throughout the galaxy, and is so deeply established that nobody knows for sure where or when the human race even originated. The capital is a planet near the galactic core, a planet completely submerged beneath a massive steel city (echoed by Corsucant in the Star Wars stories, and indeed there's a lot here echoed in Star Wars). We have, of course, a convenient hyperspace form of travel that negates the impossible distances that make outer-space sci-fi so improbable. The empire is a loosely authoritarian state, where critiques and threats against the galactic order are routinely punished by death. The book is a gathering of five stories, four of which had been published separately during the 1940s and which are tied together here by the story of Hari Selden, a psychohistorian who predicts the fall of the empire, and concocts a solution ostensibly to prevent too long of a recovery of civilization from the ensuing chaos. This throws him afoul of the empire, of course. The ensuing trial is disturbingly prescient of our present day authorities and their dismissal of scientific knowledge and our ability to accuratly predict our own civilization's coming troubles with climate disaster. Selden evades the ultimate sentence in a deft political dance that allows Selden to set up a great enterprise on the uninhabited planet of Terminus. Selden predicts the establishment of a great Encyclopedia Galactica (see episodes of Carl Sagan's Cosmos for further details), which would propagate human knowledge past the coming collapse of empire.
To quote Star Wars yet again: This is not going to go the way you think. And Asimov's stories here pick up on the notion that ambitious and noble goals have a tendency to fall under the wheels of greed and immediate practicality. The fragmented empire becomes a hive of warring principalities. The great Foundation set up to create the encyclopedia must now become a political entity, assuring its own survival by hoarding scientific knowledge and doling it out piecemeal in the guise of a supernatural power. (In a galactic civilization, this reader must observe, it is hard to imagine a universe that entirely forgets scientific knowledge, just as Arab astronomers preserved that science after the fall of Greece and Rome, so much so that many of our star names are still Arabic.)
Foundation found a vast readership, and spawned a sprawling collection of books and stories that won numerous awards and remain a landmark of the genre. This first book, however, is a bit loose, reflecting its assembly from several stories. The characters are universally male (the only female character with any speaking dialog appears for just a few pages and is portrayed as a shrew). One can't imagine that people still smoke cigars and read paper newspapers 120 centuries from now. But that's one of the common story glitches we've come to tolerate in futuristic fiction. But Asimov also deftly constructs the Foundation as an eminently shrewd and pragmatic organization, authoritarian in its own ways, despite the professed nobility of Hari Selden's cause. But that, too, will evolve. Does the Foundation after the empire serve the role of Christianity after Rome? Perhaps. Read another dozen novels to see how then next thousands of years turns out.
Also by Asimov: [The End of Eternity]