Foundation book review
Books don’t get much bigger than Asimov’s Foundation. Awarded “Best All-Time Series” in 1966, Foundation was a trailblazer — some say it even invented the space opera genre. Needless to say, it’s difficult not to have high expectations.
Spoilers ahead.
Foundation, written in the 1940s but collected and published in 1951, is an enduring classic. The story has that big retro sci-fi feel, where anything is possible. Set it 50 000 years in the future? Sure. 25 million planets contained within a single empire? Hell yeah.
Some parts of the book have aged like wine, others like milk. Let’s get the negatives out of the way. Firstly, I don’t think I counted a single female character. Not even one. Secondly, nuclear power is all the rage, with the split atom powering everything from electric razors to clock radios. Thirdly, there are minor details dragged in from yesteryear — like people chuffing on a cigar or reading a newspaper. Most of this is pretty forgivable, assuming the no-girls-allowed thing doesn’t bother you too much. The book is 70 years old, after all.
Foundation’s story itself is a collection of loosely connected novellas set within the same fictional universe. Each one leaps ahead in time, casting a new set of characters and exploring the decline of the empire and the rise of the Foundation from a different angle.
The most unexpected part of the story, for me, was the focus on religion. The Foundation keeps those pesky outer planets in check by turning the Foundation’s advanced science into a spiritual belief system. Acolytes to the faith rote learn how to control the mighty machines, without understanding the mechanics behind them. But as time progresses, religion no longer keeps the populace sufficiently on their knees. Thus, trade becomes the emerging force by which the Foundation keeps itself in relative safety.
It seems that mathematician and crystal-ball enthusiast Hari Seldon can predict the future pretty well, and most of the time the characters keep out of history’s way until the next “Seldon Crisis” presents itself. On the face of it, a set of characters championing the idea of doing nothing — unless a hologram of the big man himself, Hari Seldon, rises from the grave and gives direction to the nearest, man, woman or child what to do and where to go — could be a rather boring story. It’s often the tension between when to act and when to kick back that drives the narrative forward.
Dialogue rules Foundation. A good portion of the book is spying on philosophical conversations, backroom deals, political machinations and social manoeuvring. There are no space battles, no military institutions, and no alien bad guys to blow up.
Asimov’s prose is lean and clean in the extreme. Terse, even. His descriptions of the wondrous future are bare and often rely on the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Although the book can feel a bit rushed at first, I believe it’s Asimov’s succinct prose that helps it be so readable today. The arcana of futuristic technology or science never threatens to bog the story down.
Foundation poses a fascinating thought experiment: Could we eventually learn to predict the future scientifically? Analyse the data, run the numbers, and predict the likely outcomes? Hari Seldon believes that pschohistory — which is, I suppose, a pastiche of psychology and mathematics — can do just that. Believers in free will need not apply for a position in Hari Seldon’s team.
Given the book spans a couple of hundred years and lacks anything in the way of action or romance, anyone crazy enough to adapt it into a TV series would soon grow a lot of grey hairs and possibly take up day drinking. Not surprisingly, Apple TV’s “adaption” of the show is only loosely connected to the book’s plot. I don’t have a problem with gender flipping the main characters, or whatever other casting choices were made. But the story itself barely resembles what’s between the covers. For example, Salvor Hardin is now a trigger-happy town sheriff — whereas in the book he/she often quotes the phrase: violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Okay, I realise some big character arc is probably being set up, in which Hardin learns that bigger guns don’t equal better results. But it’s difficult to watch the show and wonder why it had to stray so far from the source material.
Okay, back to the book. For some reason I often find myself comparing Foundation to Frank Herbert’s Dune. I don’t know why, other than they’re both old-timey sci-fi books that I’ve read in recent years. For me, Dune has aged better, although it was written many years later. It will be interesting to read the next two Foundation books and compare them to the mixed bag that was Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.
There is a lot to like about Foundation. It weaves together themes of free will, scientific persecution, religious institutional power, and trade-vs-colonisation. If you can forgive the dated aspects — particularly the all-male cast — it holds up as a genuinely clever study of how, in the face of crumbling civilisation, we might dedicate our lives to the pursuit of something truly bigger.
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
- Foundation, part 5 chapter 3 / Isaac Asimov