Foundation by Isaac Asimov
A Somewhat Rambling Retro-Review by Gene Stewart
What prompted me to revisit this classic of science fiction was a blurb in the SFWA newsletter in which Joe Haldeman and others mentioned that Asimov's classic had not only provided Al Qaeda its name -- it means The Base, or Foundation -- but also inspired much of what's happening in this post-9/11 world. Apparently, in searching out Al Qaeda's roots, scholars found that Asimov's Foundation series was hugely popular and influential.
Asimov's Foundation trilogy won a special Hugo award in the 1960s as Best All-Time Series, beating out the likes of E. E. "Doc" Smith, E. R. Burroughs, and even J.R.R. Tolkien.
Reading it these days is unsettling on many levels. It's about, after all, manipulating history by applying pressure at certain pivotal points.
This first novel appeared in 1951 and is actually a collection of novellas, the first dating to 1942, each moving the vast storyline along by decades or more. In typical Asimov fashion, virtually no action takes place on stage. Instead we're treated to a series of fascinating Socratic dialogues. The effect is to make this writing timeless; it hasn't aged particularly. Oh, the characters s moke a good deal, but that's a cultural quirk having no bearing on things.
What Asimov does brilliantly is systematically strip away appearances so that we can see the true forces behind history. By postulating an overarching science of Psychohistory, founded by Hari Seldon, whose image and thought influences this galactic empire throughout its entire existence, Asimov offers a kind of game-theory approach in which certain pivotal moments of development, each a crisis, forces things to go one way and one way only. In this way is a vast, complex system "guided", or directed.
It's fractals, it's fuzzy-logic, it's complexity theory before such things were worked out by Mandelbrot, Kosko, and the Sante Fe institute and so on. And the chilling parts are when we recognize in the fiction various elements from our current dilemma, from a Homeland Defense he called a Commission of Public Safety to religion seen as a control mechanism to keep scientific truths mystifying and thus beyond the reach of the uninitiated.
Reading Foundation is like seeing an X-ray of how history works. Asimov wrote the first stories, he was using both Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant as references and models. His goal was to portray how an empire might span an entire galaxy and how manipulating a single culture on such a scale might be possible. He succeeded admirably, and left us with an overview of how the forces of history can be analyzed, nudged, and used, especially by the ruthless among us.
When 9/11 happened, some of the hidden truths Asimov sought to let us in on came home to roost. To continue stumbling through history in ignorance is a choice we can't afford to make, and a more enjoyable way of sloughing off the ignorance I cannot think of than reading Asimov's Foundation series. Or rereading it.