The Foundation Trilogy

In the year 2025, many of the Golden Age "classics" of science fiction leave much to be desired. Their cultural attitudes and scientific ideals are often dated, their characters are nearly nonexistent, and their prose isn't often high quality. They were written for an audience that no longer exists, and as such can give readers today the wrong impression about what the genre is capable of achieving, especially when they're held up as the peak of the genre. Don't get me wrong, The Foundation Trilogy embodies most of these trends, but somehow managed to (on the whole) engage me.

During a period of galaxy-spanning peace and prosperity, the scientist Hari Seldon develops a new field of predictive science, psychohistory. It builds on the fundamentals of the soft sciences and can be used to predict the future of large populations of uninfluenced humans. His study reveals that the Galactic Empire will soon collapse, plunging humanity into millennia of scientific and cultural regression. To limit the coming dark age, he seeds two communities of scientists at opposite ends of the galaxy, referred to as Foundations. Their task is to incubate and protect scientific knowledge through the collapse and eventually provide the bedrock for a second Galactic Empire. The trilogy follows these communities across more than three hundred years as they encounter prophesied moments of potential calamity, known as “Seldon Crises.”

Almost all of the material in the trilogy was originally serialized in pulp magazines which were only later collected into three books in the 50's. Though these books can be found separately, I really don't think they function as standalone works. Having read all three, it's my opinion that you kinda need to read all three if you want to have a full picture of what Asimov had in mind. The series was continued by Asimov in the 80's, some forty years after he started it, but from what I can find these works aren't nearly as "essential".

The Foundation Trilogy simultaneously has a massive scope, but is often observed through a tiny lens. Certainly the central premise has remained memorable and influential, (you can see the echoes of it clearly in Star Wars) and compared to many of its peers it's much more ambitious. Asimov's style of writing, however, limits our view of it. Asimov writes almost exclusively in dialogue; dialogue that doesn't necessarily sound like normal human conversation but is nonetheless readable and engaging. It's obvious why he's so broadly popular. The downside is that the majority of scenes boil down to two dudes talking in a room about events that are/were playing out somewhere else in the galaxy. You're never at the heart of the action, but rather a fly on the wall, listening to intellectuals speculating dryly about the implications of events set elsewhere. Asimov also spends little to no effort on description or setting, which makes for a novel that’s not very visually memorable.

As the series progresses, Asimov does slowly branch out, trying to include more action, description, and character into the work, with mixed results at best. The novella The Mule was probably some of his best writing, though the Mule himself has laughably simplistic motivations. By the final volume, Asimov seems to run out of steam; the plot degenerating into a series of mind numbing double-agent fake-outs, and an ending that to me felt very predictable.

The trilogy also shows its age in ways that can break suspension of disbelief. Characters smoke cigarettes constantly, get all of their news from print newspapers, and, most damningly, the highest form of technology is always nuclear. I don’t begrudge these oddities too much considering the era, but they’re noticeable. One fix Asimov could have made when collecting the stories into novels would have been cutting the constant repetition of past events. That may have worked when the stories were serialized months apart, but when read back-to-back the recaps quickly become grating.

An oddity of note is that the galaxy contains no alien life to speak of, something that could almost be said of women as well. We're left to wonder if they (the aliens I mean) never existed in the first place, or whether humanity crushed them in a galaxy-wide expression of manifest destiny. Certainly, Asimov believed our knowledge was worth saving, perhaps even the pinnacle achievement of all sentient life. Your connection to that idea may be rather strained, as mine certainly was.

What Foundation lacks in form is at least partially made up for by an almost ineffable optimism towards science and the future. In a literary landscape littered with depressing, misanthropic dystopias, it's refreshing to read something like this, even if I recognize the naïveté of it. Though most of this review sounds quite negative, I do in fact have a positive view on it. Something about the readability of the dialogue and the memorable premise makes for a work that stands out against its contemporaries.