RogerBW's Blog

Foundation, Isaac Asimov 07 August 2025

1951 classic SF, collection of short stories. The Galactic Empire is bound to collapse, and millennia of barbarism will follow. But one man has a plan to shorten that time.

It's not that these stories show their age; they show their Asimov. There are two female characters in the whole thing, one piece of scenery and one harridan wife of a tyrant, and even she doesn't get a name. (But I've read The Gods Themselves and this is probably better than Asimov actually trying to write female characters.) The only possible states of affairs are a single Empire ruling over all humanity or barbarism. Nobody ever questions that.

Meanwhile: Hari Seldon, Hari Seldon, Seldon Seldon, Hari Hari. Not only was he the one person who could invent a way of shortening the dark age, it wouldn't work if anyone else knew what was going on, so everyone just has to do what the great man says and not ask questions. Especially once he's dead.

He's commissioned the writing of the great Encyclopædia Galactica as a cover for gathering all the most knowledgeable people in the Empire for his Foundation. This cross-section of all human knowledge does not include any psychologists, who might spot what he's up to. Nobody seems to notice that the Encyclopædia Galactica is strangely silent about this particular science. Nobody grows, nobody changes, they just bash against each other and the side which the author favours wins.

But Roger, you say, this isn't supposed to be about the people; this is supposed to be fiction covering a vast span of time, and the people in it are just examples of the sort of thing that is happening. Yeah, I say, but I have read Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men from twenty years earlier, and that was honest in its lack of character. Clarke can't write characters in Rendezvous with Rama twenty years after this, but he has the good sense not to try: all they really need to express is competence at their jobs and awe in the face of the unknown.

All right, the ideas are interesting. But the basic idea of a predictive science of historical trends is quickly devalued since after the first segment (added for this publication in 1951 to the stories that had been published in 1941-1944) Seldon is dead and nobody is there to do the predictions. (Seldon himself appears in some time-delayed recordings, but mostly to say "congratulations, I saw this crisis coming and since you are watching this you have survived it".)

Meanwhile a recurrent theme is an explicitly false religion used to insert a fifth column into barbarous worlds: locals are trained up as priests who can rote-operate high-tech gadgets (obvious influence on Warhammer 40,000) but this is explicitly a snare: to get people who are more loyal to the Foundation than to their homeworlds, and to get other powers dependent on gadgets that can be turned off in an instant, and none of the top men in the religion is a believer. This is a good thing. This is all that religion is good for.

Basically it's thoroughly paternalistic: we are the only smart guys, we are the only guys who are anything more than comic-opera tyrants, we can corrupt you and you'll thank us for it because it's all for your own good.

We're told explicitly that some of the barbarian kingdoms have lost the ability to use atomic power and are burning coal and oil to generate power for their cities; we're told that their warships cannot stand up to older atom-powered warships. Can this imply anything other than oil-fired spaceships? How do you make those work, then?

At least this is relatively short; it doesn't suffer from Asimov's later tendency to loquacity (I have read The Robots of Dawn). It has its moments; I'm not sorry to have read it, if only to see where some well-known SF ideas were first used. But my word, it really isn't good.

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See also:
The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke


  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 12:18pm on 07 August 2025

    For Psychohistory as nightmare see IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND by Michael Flynn.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 03:17pm on 07 August 2025

    Heh, yes - which I read shortly after it came out. some time in the late 1980s. It impressed me at the time, particularly its central idea (if one person can discover this stuff, so can other people, and they will be working towards different goals), and that may well be part of why this didn't grab the me of nearly forty years later as much as it might have.

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