The Foundation Trilogy
From LoveToKnow Sci-Fi
The Foundation Trilogy: Future Historical
Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy is a classic of Golden Age Sci-Fi. Written as short stories and novellas in the '40s and '50s, the components were collected into three novels; Foundation in 1951, Foundation and Empire in 1952 and Second Foundation in 1953.
The premise has been rather overtaken by modern mathematics, but the concept continues to intrigue. The basis of the novels is the theory that large groups of people can be mathematically modelled and their actions predicted, assuming you know everything about conditions under which they live. This science was invented, fictitiously, by Hari Seldon, and he called this science 'psychohistory'. (The term has been co-opted and re-used today to apply to a backward look at history from a psychological perspective.)
Future Galactic
In Foundation, first volume of the trilogy, we are introduced to Hari Seldon and the Galactic Empire, which has existed for some 12,000 years. It spans the galaxy, and enforces a beneficial Pax Galactica throughout. But only Seldon can see the signs that the empire is fraying. (Asimov is known to have modelled his empire on the Roman Empire and the fall of the Galactic Empire on the fall of the Roman Empire.)
Using his new science, Seldon predicts that if the Galactic Empire falls, which will be a lengthy and protracted affair, there will be 30,000 years of chaos, a new Dark Ages, before another empire emerges to carry civilization forward. It is his intention, not to forestall the fall, which is already too far advanced, but to curtail the ensuing Dark Ages.
Two Foundations
To accomplish this, Seldon manuveurs the Emperor into granting him a planet 'at the end of the galaxy' to create his Encyclopedia Foundation. The putative purpose of this Foundation is to collect all the empire's knowledge in a vast compendium, the Encyclopedia Galactica. The sub rosa purpose is to form a nucleus around which a second empire can form, guided by the principles of psychohistory.
He also creates a 'Second Foundation' at the 'other side of the galaxy', to store and expand on his understanding of psychohistory, and to watch over the burgeoning new civilization from afar.
The first novel deals with the machinations and subterfuge with which the First Foundation is formed, and its early history, through its discovery that the Encyclopedia is not its raison d'etre and the dwindling power of the Empire.
New Beginnings
Hari Seldon has plotted the future of his Second Galactic Empire, using the principles of psychohistory, so that the leaders essentially don't need to 'lead' - when they have exhausted all possible options and only one remains, that is the psychohistorially correct one. Those who understand the principles of the 'dead hand' of psychohistory are the ones who take advantage of it and rise to rule.
In the trilogy's second installment, Foundation and Empire, however, psychohistory seems to take a beating. Because one of the peripheral kingdoms that rise up in the wreckage of the empire is overtaken by a rogue - a ruler who can telepathically alter the minds and loyalties of people he comes into contact with. He is called the Mule, and he poses a serious threat to the First Foundation, which they eventually overcome.
But because psychohistory works on statistical people en masse, it is presumed not to work against an anomalous person such as the Mule, who was a mutant. It is therefore believed that Hari Seldon's plan is overthrown, a theory which receives validity when the time capsuled reappearance of Hari Seldon's taped image describes a future very different from the one they are now facing.
Freedom?
The First Foundation had, over the course of the few hundred years of their history, felt trapped by the 'dead hand' of psychohistory, and greet the apparently overthrow of the Second Foundation and the control of psychohistory without grief. Now their future is theirs to create or not, on their efforts alone. The Foundation Trilogy's final volume, Second Foundation, explores whether the burgeoning First Foundation's empire is really as free of the guiding hand as they believe.
More Foundation
Asimov returned to his galaxy-spanning 'Foundation Universe' in the '80s with Foundation's Edge, and Foundation and Earth. In these novels, he ties his robot novels with his Galactic/First Foundation Empires universe.
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Comments
I often wonder what Asimov would have made of our 21st century versus the worlds he envisioned. Thanks for visiting Love to Know Sci Fi!
-- Contributed by: HVLongI read it long ago. I am listening to some audiobooks of it now.
No computers and global internets in Asimov's universe. So now we get to change the course of history with the redistribution of information.
-- Contributed by: psikeyhackrI read the Foundation Trilogy in the sixty's while in high school, but had heard nothing of it since. I am surprised at how closly my feeble memory of the overall "Feel" matches the above outline. I had not known of Foundation's Edge or Foundation and earth, but I now have a mission to complete the job. I had always felt the first reading lacked somthing so it is a pleasure to learn that I had not simply "missed something" in the story line.
-- Contributed by: Wesley Lee
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