Foundation by Isaac Asimov - Science Fiction Book Review

Tweet

Here I am, not far off middle age (OK, I'm in my late 50s), a life-long science fiction fan, and can you believe I've only just got round to reading Foundation? It's one of the traditional SF standards, it's like a fan of detective stories not having read any Sherlock Holmes! Looking for something to read last week, I had a look through a box of recently-bought vintage paperbacks and found a beaten up old copy. For those who don't know, Foundation started as a series of short stories that Asimov wrote in the 40s. They were eventually collected together into a trilogy of "novels". This is a quick review of the first volume, "Foundation". The story is set many thousands of years in the future, during the declining era of the "Galactic Empire". The Empire rules every star system in the galaxy, and has done for 12,000 years. It's so far in the future that no-one remembers anymore which planet the human race originated from. Because the Empire has been around so long, people think that it's secure, but an academic called Hari Seldon sees the end coming. Seldon is this civillisation's leading proponent of pschohistory, a science that uses knowledge of crowd psychology, history and statistics to predict future trends. Seldon has worked out that the Empire will collapse and perish within a few centuries, and the collapse will then be followed by a dark age lasting 30,000 years. Seldon doesn't see any way of avoiding the collapse but he has a plan to reduce the length of the dark age down to 1,000 years. The plan is to set up a Foundation to preserve all human knowledge, and eventually to become the nucleus of a second Empire. Of course the corrupt aristocracy that runs the Empire doesn't want to hear that it's doomed, so instead they put Seldon on trial. But he's able to manipulate the proceedings so that instead of being sentenced to death, Seldon and his followers are exiled to the distant planet of Terminus, right on the edge of the galaxy, where they are free to start their Foundation. What follows is an episodic story, with each individual story set decades apart, as different generations deal with the existential crises brought about by the decline of the Empire. As the Empire loses its grip on the outer edges of the galaxy, petty kingdoms arise and struggle to carve out territory for themselves. Terminus is poor in metals, so it can't deploy large military forces of its own. Instead, the emphasis is on the use of "soft power" - trade, diplomacy, promotion of a manufactured religion, monopolisation of scientific knowledge, clever politics and even outright blackmail to secure their position. Whatever it takes at the time survive the current crisis - and events always proceed in accordance to Hari Seldon's masterplan - which is a secret even to his successors. Although I wouldn't call it an absolute classic, it is a decent read, and anyone familiar with SF can see where it has influenced other work. The fall of an empire and its eventual rebirth is one that Jerry Pournelle re-used in his "Co-Doninion" stories, for instance - and there are a couple of names that were used by George Lucas in "Star Wars". Because of the political nature of the story, the heroes are academics, politicians, businessmen etc, not fighters. A lot of the "action" involves diplomacy and committee meetings. But you can get away with that kind of thing in a book. I found it enjoyable enough, and doubtless I'll read the next one in the trilogy before too long. 6/10.