I started reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation as a kid, and couldn't get through it. I think I probably wanted more laser swords and blasters. I've heard that it's being adapted, somehow, into a TV series now, and that motivated me to try reading it again. This is my review of the first book, Foundation, and it contains MAJOR spoilers. If you want to avoid spoilers, then the review is: It's good, you should read it (especially if you're a Warhammer 40,000 fan!)
A lot of "early" science fiction was written for magazines, so short stories has been pretty prevalent, historically, in the genre. The result is that some really famous sci-fi books are actually compilations of short stories, loosely strung together into a linear narrative. Bradbury's Illustrated Man and Martian Chronicles are both good examples, and as it turns out, so is Foundation. According to the preface of the edition I read, Asimov had pitched an idea for a story, only to have his editor tell him that it was too good an idea for just one short story. So Asimov ended up writing entries into the Foundation mythos whenever his editor requested one.
The first Foundation novel is a collection of many of those short stories, and it feels like it, but it also gets away with it. By design, it's a future history book. Foundation is the record of the human race tens of thousands of years from now, and how an intergalactic empire rose, and then inevitably fell. It's a collection of artefacts you've uncovered in some long forgotten digital archive, light years away, to learn about what came before you. The fact that its chapters are self-contained stories that start and end sometimes as if they were the only surviving tale, makes sense in this context.
A lot of geeks love world building, so much that it's often a defining trait. It expresses itself in many ways, many of which overlap. Some like model trains because they can design a tidy closed-loop system, others build and paint 28mm toy soldiers with painstaking internal logic about how each army functions, and still others play roleplaying games because its world and the forces within it are meticulously documented. Whatever the expression, creating an imaginary world that makes better sense than the real one is often considered a geeky hobby.
Obviously science fiction authors, like Asimov, fall neatly into this category. Asimov is a world builder, but in Foundation he's a recursive world builder. He's the geek who not only built a future empire, but also provided it with Hari Seldon, a brilliant psychohistorian who uses mathematics and probability combined with psychology to predict all the different possible paths of the human race. Asimov not only built a fictional world, he built a fictional system that could reverse engineer it and predict how it would develop.
Hari Seldon is the central character of Foundation, even though he dies pretty early in the book (as one does, when a book covers thousands of years.) Seldon predicts that when the Galactic Empire falls, as empires do, humanity will be condemned to 30,000 years of regressive turmoil. So he establishes a great foundation, ostensibly to preserve all human knowledge in a great masterpiece called the Encyclopedia Galactica. When the empire of man falls, its descendants can use this work to re-learn everything it had once known. Instead of 30,000 years of confusion, the human race will only have to endure 1,000 years.
Seldon and his "conspirators" (the Empire believes he's advocating for its demise) are exiled to a far-off planet called Terminus. They continue their work in exile, which Seldon says was part of his calculations all along.
At some point, Seldon dies but his foundation carries on. On the fiftieth anniversary of Seldon's death, a vault automatically opens and plays a hologram recording of Seldon, who reveals the true mission of the foundation (queue record scratch).
OK, maybe a record scratch was over-doing it. It's not as nefarious as it sounds. But the truth is that the Encyclopedia Galactica is just busy work. It's nice to have, but the foundation isn't just a publishing house after all. I won't spoil what it is, but the revelation sets a new trajectory for the story, and somewhat changes the perspective of the narrative.
Foundation is about the Big [humanist] Picture. It's science fiction at its purest. There's the conceit of science, and a focus on humanity and human knowledge. It takes everything in impossibly large chunks. The factors of distance and time are light years and millennia, and even the foundation itself has goals of interstellar proportion. The foundation isn't just working on an encyclopedia, it's working on an encyclopedia that contains everything. It isn't just looking out for human history, it's designing the future.
Similarly, I guess, Asimov's Foundation book is impossibly influential in the world of speculative fiction. If you're a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide or Dune or Warhammer 40,000, then at least a few things about Foundation are going to feel eerily familiar to you. This is a ground-breaking book, where the individual ideas in it are, I think, more valuable than the book as a whole.
The story is good, and it's strangely gratifying to see how Seldon's so-good-it's-basically-magic science predicts problems and guides the foundation. In fact, it's a very Doctor Who kind of story. Problems arise, but deep down you know it's going to be fine because science has already figured out the solution. Or has it?
Yeah, of course it has.
But the stuff you remember more than the story are the details. It's like looking at a miniature train set. You can see the loop that the train takes, you can see all the switches that alter the train's course. You can see the stations and stops along the way. But what captivates you is the library, with all the tiny books that actually have titles written on their spines, and the grocer with the tiny fruit including the one apple that rolled off the pile and is being batted about by a bored cat. The gems in this book are the details, the small idea that could have been a whole book in itself. Many of those tiny details have been adopted by other authors, so we get to have it both ways.
In short, if you like speculative fiction, then you owe it to yourself to read Foundation by Asimov.
Photo uses the Unsplash License.