Foundation
Isaac Asimov
189 pages
published in 1951

If you've ever been in the Netherlands on 30th April than you know we celebrate Queensday (the queen's birthday party, held on the birthday of the previous queen but don't ask) by holding massive flea markets/car boot sales. Ideal opportunities to pick up a lot of books fast and cheap. This year it included a lot of Asimov books, from a guy selling off his science fiction collection, including all the good Foundation series books: Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. These were orginally written as short stories in the forties, then reworked into novels in the early fifties, among the first science fiction novels to be sold as such. Much much later Asimov would write new sequels to these three books, but those were .. not good.

The originals though were, if not the first Galactic Empire stories, the ones who popularised it and set the pattern for a flood of imitators (see for example Brian Aldiss' two anthologies, Galactic Empires volume I and volume 2). Influenced by Edward Gibbons History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Asimov basically transplanted the Roman Empire to Outer Space and had it rule the Galaxy, a Galaxy devoid of any other intelligent life and in which it was axiomatic that humanity should be united under one emperor and ruled from one planet and anything else would be barbarism. Yes, these are all utterly clichéd and wornout concepts now, but don't forget that this was first published in 1951 and based on stories from the forties, in other words, this is some seventy years old. You may therefore wonder if Foundation is worth reading for anything but historical value. Certainly Asimov's reputation as a not very good writer doesn't help -- you don't read his stories for his sparkling turn of phrase.

And yet... The characters may be twodimensional, the plots somewhat on the simple side and the language no more than what's needed to tell the story, but somehow the end result is more than just the sum of its parts. It's the ideas Asimov plays with that made Foundation worth reading. He started with the slow fall of the Roman Empire transplanted to the stars and then added the idea of psychohistory, the notion that it is possible to predict the future history of a large enough group of people -- which a galaxy full with inhabited planets certainly is. It's one of those ideas that seems obvious in hindsight, a logical extension of what marketeers and poll quizzers were already doing.

Foundation starts with the story of Hari Seldon, last and greatest of the psychohistorians, who has worked out that the Empire, still looking strong, is actually in an irreversible decline towards a state of barbarism that will last some 30,000 years if nothing is done. His predictions are seen as traitorous and he and his followers are sent into exile to Terminus, at the far end of the galaxy from Trantor, the Imperial Capital, a worldwide city of forty billion people covering up the entire planet. This it turns out is exactly what Hari wanted, to get away from the attention of the court and establish a nucleus around which a new empire could coalesce, masquerading as a foundation for an Encyclopedia Galactica. This way the barbaric interregnum would only last a thousand years.

Seldon predicted that this foundation would go through a series of crisises during its history as the old empire gradually collapsed and withdrew from the outer frontiers and new kingdoms would try and gobble up Terminus. The rest of Foundation is about these crisises and how they are resolved; you can really see that this was originally a series of short stories. With each crisis the Foundation grows and becomes stronger. For each crisis Hari Seldon recorded a holographic message explaining it, when it has reached its peak or it had already been passed. As is repeated over and over again in these stories, how these crisises are resolved is fixed: for each there's only one possible solution and though "psychohistory helps them who help themselves" in the end it comes down to the blind processes of historical progress rather than individual heroism to solve them.

Together these stories provide the thesis of the Foundation series, with the second and third books of the trilogy forming the Hegelian antithesis and synthesis -- if that's not too much honour. The stories here are those of (easy) triumph, as the Foundation glides through crisis after crisis and becomes more powerful. The next volume however will see much greater challenges -- and fewer triumphs. Not to mention the first hint of the second foundation...