Foundation

Like many others, I have read this book a number of times because it has a fascinating and irresistible concept: the fall of an empire. Asimov, by his own admission, drew on historical examples - mostly the Roman Empire - so a lot of the story contains plausible and reasonably sensible portrayals of how such a collapse would occur. I also very much enjoy the very American subtext of the conflict between individualism and collectivism, and the much broader philosophical conflict between determinism and free will.

But (and you knew a but was coming) the problems are myriad. Blatant sexism, if not outright misogyny, for one. Asimov's is a man's universe. Men do all the thinking, ruling and leading. Group addresses uniformly begin with “Gentlemen . . .” Women are non-existent or ornamental at best. Despite his ability to forecast the growth and change in technology tens of thousands of years into the future, Asimov seems incapable of imagining any change in ca. 1941 gender roles. Then there's his weird obsession with age, and his belief that 50 is old age (full disclosure: I'm 56 and only just got my first senior's discount card at the local pharmacy). The dialog is just plain weird, with a stilted, formal, expository and very British style (correction: a young American man's misapprehension of British style). Granted Asimov was a teenager when he started writing, and barely 21 when he started on Foundation, but still. The characters don't talk: they Elocute, Declaim, Pronounce, and Inveigh.

And the repetition. I get that the novel began life as a series of stories, but once they were collected into a novel someone somewhere should have sat down with a blue pencil and deleted the almost continuous restatements of the key plot points. After the fifteenth time being told “psychohistory was the creation of Hari Seldon who . . . “ I wanted to throw the book against the wall (which, as it's a Kindle, would have been a Very Bad Idea).

There are some logical issues as well. The size of the empire strains credibility. Asimov posits that in the roughly 12,000 years of the galactic empire, humanity has grown to quadrillions of humans on millions of worlds. This is too fast a growth rate. Consider that on earth at the time Asimov wrote this, there were approximately 3 billion people after more than 150,000 year of human growth. Wars, plagues, disasters and other factors kept the population growth rate relatively low for all but the last 100 years or so. How are we to believe that population expansion on other worlds wouldn't have similarly been constrained? For that matter how are we to believe that that many habitable planets could be discovered, let alone settled (and terraformed) in sufficient numbers to sustain such growth?

And where are the alien species? A pan-galactic empire spanning millions of planets and not a single non-terran life form? No exotic animals? No sentient beings? Not even a plant? In later novels Asimov goes to great lengths to hand-wave this problem away, but those were 40 years in his future. Maybe, despite his misogyny and imperialism, Asimov wasn't a colonialist.

I like very much the idea of psychohistory and the idea that it is possible to predict the economic, political and sociological trends of human behaviour. To some extent, that has come true and we are able to forecast somewhat based on mathematical trends. I also like the emphasis on non-violent means to solve political crises, a stance that I'm sure was influenced by the world war that was raging while Asimov was writing the book. Many have commented (some complained) that all the action takes place offstage with most of the book being consumed with conferences, meetings, discussions, assemblies and conclaves. Asimov himself said that upon rereading the book in the 80's he kept waiting for something to happen. But I think I can forgive that as, really, most problems that we encounter in our lives are settled non-violently through talk and careful thought. Yeah, there are some space wars, and there is loss of life on an appalling scale, but to my mind it was the right approach to focus on solving (and resolving) the crises rather than the disasters the crises caused. Smarts and wisdom will take us farther than guns and ammunition.

So who should read this book? And why? Anyone with a desire to understand the history of science fiction for sure if only to hear the echoes of later works (the Ringworld series, the Star Wars cycle, The Co-Dominium Universe). Suckers for the triumph of the cerebral over the physical will also be rewarded, as well as those who reject the western-frontier-in-space trope of many works of SF. But don't go into it expecting grand insights or even commentary about the contemporary world. Asimov's vision, unlike many SF writers, was squarely backward looking which is odd given what was going on in the world when he was writing it. Maybe that's the point: by averting his gaze he could pretend, for a while, that he wasn't living in a dystopian world of violence, corruption and wholesale slaughter. Maybe he wanted to imagine a world where reason, logic, and intelligence could rule.