Foundation by Isaac Asimov – SFFWorld

https://www.sffworld.com/2016/04/foundation-by-isaac-asimov/

Ah, Foundation. For me, returning to this novel is like spending time with an old friend. Often generally regarded as ‘one of the best’*, if not one of the most important SF novels of all time, I personally have reread this one – well, a few times. I consider myself very lucky to own a signed copy, at considerable expense, admittedly. It is one of the first books that I borrowed from my Dad’s bookshelf in the 1970’s and was a formative influence in generating my lifelong love of SF. So much so that on the wall above where I’m typing this I have a signed print of the iconic Chris Foss cover that was on my Dad’s paperback covers (see below).

So, I guess that this may be a word of caution. This review may not be totally balanced. I must say though that 40+ years on, there’s a lot I can see wrong with it. (Others have said so, often and frequently. Io9, for example, in July 2015 put it on a list of Books That You Pretend to Have Read But Haven’t) Some have been quite blunt about its failings. And yet, despite all of its faults, I still find it a ‘go-to read’. I will try and explain why in this review.

First though, a degree of context. For many years, and certainly when I first read it, Foundation was the first book in ‘The Foundation Trilogy”, and so it was until Asimov added extra novels in the 1980’s and 90’s. However this is the first of a number of contradictions, for even in its original trilogy novel format, published 1951-53, it was not really a trilogy. Instead it was rather a series of nine stories and novellas, mostly published in sections between 1942 and 1944 and mainly in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. Foundation is the first four of these already-published-though-revised stories, with an additional section, The Psychohistorians, written to begin the novel and set out the tale. This was common practice in the 1950’s as SF became marketable in hardback rather than just in those old pulp magazines. Just to confuse things a little further, an abridged version was also published as an Ace Double paperback named ‘The 1000 Year Plan’ in 1955.

So, just to be clear, I am going to review the first novel only here, made up of five parts. But the context is important, as I will explain later.

The origin of the series has been written about on more than one occasion, and even by Asimov himself. It was at a meeting on the 1st August 1941 with John W Campbell, regarded as ‘the’ SF magazine editor at the time, and Asimov, a mere 21-year-old, that led to the development of this idea that became Foundation. Inspired by Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Asimov ambitiously wanted to tell a tale, vast in time and scale, of the existence and collapse of a Galactic Empire. Campbell encouraged this and Asimov went away to write what eventually became the second part of the novel, The Encyclopaedists, published in Astounding in May 1942 as Foundation.

The book is therefore five stories. The first, The Psychohistorians, was specifically written to fix up the novel and introduces us to mathematician Gaal Dornick, who has arrived on the planet of Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire, to work for eminent psychohistorian Hari Seldon. When Seldon and Dornick are arrested and put to trial, Seldon reveals his great secret, and tells of  his solution – he believes that the Galactic Empire is doomed to collapse in less than three hundred years and will enter a Dark Ages that will last thirty thousand years. His suggestion is that by using psychohistory Seldon hopes to guide society in the future and reduce this time of anarchy and chaos. Seldon is exiled to Terminus and there sets up a Plan that will be guided by him even after his death, to help civilisation.

The next four parts show us how the Empire survives crisis after crisis following Seldon’s death. In part two, The Encyclopaedists, the story moves to Terminus, where the capital city’s first mayor, Salvor Hardin, has to deal with the first ‘Seldon Crisis’ – that Terminus being is about to be invaded and colonised by The Four Kingdoms, who wish to take over the planet, and there is the suggestion of a coup d’etat. At the end of the story Hari Seldon’s true purpose is revealed.

In The Mayors, set 80 years after The Psychohistorians, we find that the decline of science away from Terminus has led to the creation of a religion around nuclear power, which the Foundation on Terminus still have. Salvor Hardin, having being re-elected as mayor of Terminus City, now has to deal with a new potential Seldon Crisis. One of the Four Kingdoms, the Kingdom of Anacreon, plans to overthrow the Foundation’s influence upon the succession of their young Prince Regent Wienis by using an old Imperial Space Cruiser refitted for war.  At the same time on Terminus we have a threat to the Mayor with the rise of the Actionist Party, who wish to take direct action against The Anacreonians.

In The Traders, fifty-five years after The Mayors, the Foundation has expanded to such an extent that traders now travel between those planets who have technology and those who don’t. Trader Linmar Ponyets is asked to intervene on behalf of the Foundation when Master Trader Eskel Gorov is arrested and sentenced to death for attempting to sell atomics on the planets of Askone, a world which forbids the sale of ancient technology.

Finally, in The Merchant Princes, the main plot is about three Federation spaceships disappearing in the Republic of Korell. Master Trader Hober Mallow is assigned to find the missing ships, deal with Korell and also to investigate their technological developments. Those who have assigned this mission to Mallow, Foreign Secretary Publius Manlio and Mayoral Secretary Jorane Sutt, believe that another Seldon Crisis is about to begin, because they fear that domestic tensions caused by the autonomy given to Traders and the fragile foreign relations may give rise to a nuclear conflict involving the Foundation. Mallow is arrested and tried for murder after being involved in the possible death of a priest, the Reverend Jord Parma of Anacreon. In the end there is a grand reveal that suggests that not all is quite what we expected.

And all told in about 250 pages.

OK: lets deal with the criticism first. First of all, this is a book that is very ‘talky’. For those expecting fleets of battleships blasting planets, a la EE ‘Doc’ Smith or Edmond Hamilton, are going to be disappointed.

The downside of this is that there are passages – whole pages, almost – of characters ‘talking’ rather than ‘doing’. There are enormous info-dumps, and places where characters and dialogue are clearly manoeuvred into revealing great lumps of rather purple exposition.

What strikes me most, though, is that this talking is because of the nature of the book. It is deliberately an intellectual examination, a setting out on paper of quite radical ideas. The book sets up problems and then examines many aspects before solving them. (Signs that Asimov liked mysteries as much as his SF.) And that is not for everyone. Some of the solutions shown here are quite simple and tame for a contemporary readership. However, reading in the context of what else was out there at the time, this is something quite different, a case of the genre upping its game. Unlike many of the stories’ contemporaries, Foundation is not a cosmic tale of ‘Cowboys and Indians’, but something slower and more measured.

Some readers have complained that the book has little continuity, due to the episodic nature of each section. Though there have been fix-ups, it is worth pointing out, as James Gunn did in my Easton Press copy, that each section was originally written without the need or desire to connect them together. They were written for the pulps, months and even years apart. Asimov himself has said that there was not (at first, anyway) a grand unifying scheme planned from the outset, which has led to some difficulties in connecting the dots a little. Whilst I accept this as a weakness, it is an understandable one, and not an unsurmountable one. As my recent reading of Allen Steele’s Arkwright has shown, there is still life in the multi-part story yet.

This also makes me realise of course that Asimov also effectively painted himself into a corner with each part, creating a situation where the background for the story was known but the actual ‘how-do-I-get-myself-out-of-here?’ plot wasn’t. It is only later, connected together, that the whole thing can be examined, but it does create an element of weakness that later novellas and novels, being conceived as a coherent part, do not have.

On the upside though is the rather appealing point that not just global war but intergalactic war can be avoided by discussion and diplomacy, where intelligent manoeuvring is required. The solution is often not to go in all guns blazing, but to outwit your opponent. Brains beats brawn, so to speak. And to many this idea will be very attractive. It is here, after all, that the oft-quoted maxim ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent’ appears, a view very different, and perhaps very brave to make at a time when there was a World War raging.

To me, at the time of first reading this was very appealing and I suspect it lies at the heart of Foundation’s popularity. These days, looking at the twenty-first century actions of global bodies such as the United Nations, such views seem rather simplistic, or at least idealistic.

Other criticisms of Foundation are the usual problems of Space Opera – the improbably huge size of the spaceships, the vast number of planets held together impossibly by some sort of Galactic Order and the physical impracticalities of communication and travel. Many essays and books have been published on such matters (and to my mind best satirised in books such as Harry Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.) I think I would argue there that although such things are part of the fabric of Foundation, they are not the centre of its raison d’etre.

I have no problem personally with buying into such things, as part of my suspension of disbelief, without questioning their viability. My teenage-self accepted that in SF such things happened without question and though they are merely part of the setting. Amusingly, these days, my grumpier post-fifty persona wants such things to be part of my SF experience. In other words, “Damn it, I want – no, demand – it in my SF, even though I know that it is impossible.” And there is a great deal of comfort in that.

To my young pre-teenage brain, I liked the idea that it was a story that turned a Galactic Order into chaos, that all things must change. After all, History has shown it to be true – it has happened before, as part of the Roman Empire of 27 BC to c.400 AD. My Dad was also a bit of a History buff, and I think that this aspect of Foundation appealed to him nearly as much as the Science Fiction – Empires rise and fall, just at different times and at different scales. Throughout Foundation we know that things are going to fail – it’s who causes it and how it happens that is the hook here. It seems almost inevitable and there is a surprisingly comforting and worrying feeling that we know where it will lead.

But most of all, for me the attraction of Foundation was (and still is) its ‘Epicness’ – the sheer size, the scale, the timespan. This first novel is a tale that, although focused on the actions of individuals, is set in a backdrop that is undeniably much, much bigger.  Whilst we read of Gaal and Hari and Linmar and Hober, we know that big things are happening elsewhere, off-stage. And although we don’t always actually see it, the imaginative setting and our own imagination fills in the gaps for us. In the end what becomes important is the psychohistory – that although the future is steered by individuals it is the overall process, of mob actions, that cause the change. Sometimes it’s the things we don’t see that are the most inspiring. And for me, at least in this first book, it is often that which I remember. It is this combination of intellectualism and vast scope and scale that to my mind has ensured the endurance of the books and inspired many other writers since.

There are reasons why, despite all of its faults, that this series is still known in SF (even if, according to io9, not everyone has read it.) George Lucas is clearly influenced by it (For Coruscant, think Trantor) as too many other authors. Greg Bear, Greg Benford and David Brin were so inspired that they wrote their own books set in the Foundation universe, acknowledging the importance of the books in their own formative years. I would also personally recommend Donald Kingsbury’s much underrated Psychohistorical Crisis as well. Its influence, even today, is justly and regularly recognised.

Foundation is not the best of the original trilogy, but it sets up a wonderful and imaginative scenario that still awes and inspires. With hindsight, and on rereading, it is not always the easiest or the most exciting of reads. But it is thoughtful, intelligent and inspiring, coming from a time that looked forward to the end of war and then stretching out into a vast future.  And that is why I still read and reread it.