Foundation Trilogy

"Isaac Asimov wrote many good books, but the one that stands as his finest, and the one that most rewards periodic rereading, is The Foundation Trilogy – Foundation , Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation . (Yes, Second Foundation is the third volume of the trilogy.) Following Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in tracing the predictable collapse of a galaxy-wide interstellar empire, Asimov wrote with an episodic structure because each section was to be published separately in John W Campbell’s magazine Astounding . The stories never feel fragmentary, though, because they are all woven together by the Seldon plan. Hari Seldon, at the beginning of the book, is a psychohistorian who predicts the fall of the empire – not a politically safe move to make – but instead of being executed for treason he is given safe passage to Terminus, a world at the edge of the galaxy. There, he and a team of scientists can work on the Encyclopedia Galactica , a compendium of all human knowledge, so that the dark ages following the collapse of the empire won’t take so long or sink so deeply into ignorance. But it soon emerges that this is all a blind. Terminus is really a place for the successor empire to be seeded and grow in isolation, with Seldon’s plan marking great psychohistorical thresholds that the new empire will pass through. At each important juncture, Seldon himself reappears as a holographic image. But midway through the second book we run into something that even psychohistory couldn’t predict – a charismatic leader who throws a wrench into the works, derailing the Seldon plan and leaving the secret guardians of his future empire to scramble in order to put things back on track. “If you’re looking to try out science fiction, the best idea is to ask somebody who reads within the genre. Don’t ask them what they read, ask them what they reread ” Foundation and its sequels show you the scope of first-rate extrapolative science fiction, and there is no better writer of the American plain style than Isaac Asimov. He never calls attention to himself as writer, but invisible as he is, he writes with such lucidity that everything is always clear and you slip through the story effortlessly. I loved it when I first read it at 16, and I loved it still when I reread it recently in my late 50s."

"Yes. This is a very unusual set of novels from Isaac Asimov, but a classic. It’s not about gadgets. Although it’s supposed to be about a galactic civilisation, the technology is virtually invisible and it’s not about space battles or anything like that. The story is about these people, psychohistorians, who are mathematical social scientists and have a theory about how society works. The theory tells them that the galactic empire is failing, and they then use that knowledge to save civilisation. It’s a great image. I was probably 16 when I read it and I thought, “I want to be one of those guys!” Unfortunately we don’t have anything like that and economics is the closest I could get. Obviously I try to do straight economics and I do it as well as I can. But this is for a purpose. That purpose is not to find better ways of making money – although I have no problem with people doing that. The purpose is actually to make a better world. So yes, I do feel that I am trying to do something that goes beyond just the analysis. It’s not under threat – it’s actually largely, but not completely, gone. We’re trying to recapture it. We really have had a tremendous polarisation [in wealth]. People notice it every once in a while and it comes as a huge revelation to them. So for example, in last week’s New York Times , Nicholas Kristof had a column about how maybe we’re turning into Pakistan. It’s clear that we are not at all the relatively equal middle-class society we were, and we’re getting less so. That’s something you want to try to turn around."

"There’s a whole series. The first one is Foundation . It’s a very beautifully written book imagining that humans were so broadly successful in the universe that they’re in multiple galaxies and working at an interplanetary scale. There is even a capital city where the entire planet is one big city. It has seven or eight other planets that are agricultural, just bringing food to the other planet, because it was so big. Some people would live and die and never see the sun their whole lives because the city is so deep, but they didn’t see it as bad. That’s just how they live here. So it’s interesting imaginings of humans at that scale. The second thing I found really striking about that book is that the protagonist in the book is something called a psychohistorian. He has studied history so well that he can try and predict what will happen next. He knows that strife and war are coming, and that the big Galactic Empire is going to crumble, and there’s no way to stop it. All he can do is limit the amount of time there will be this dark period, where people are scattered throughout the galaxy, with massive deaths and loss of technology and quality of life. And he realizes the thing that is needed to decrease the amount of suffering during that period is to preserve information, that the reason people fall into these big traps is because they don’t know how to build things. They don’t know the technology that drives survival in many cases. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So his obsession is not so much to stop the end of the Galactic Empire, but just to reduce the length that it would be in this dark period and preserve information. These are all such interesting concepts—just about thinking at a galactic scale, and what the world look would look like if you could. It introduced to me, at an early age, to the idea that maybe it’s possible. Asimov was the first book I ever read where I got curious about the author. I was like, ‘Who is this guy? What brain could come up with this?’ I started to read him and it’s the first time I learned what the word humanist means. Until I read about Asimov I didn’t know what a humanist was, I was a kid in high school and I thought, ‘Wow. That’s really interesting. I think I’m a humanist.’ But he had died by then. He died in 1992 and I started reading his books in ’93, or ’94. I was palpably sad that I had just missed meeting him. I don’t know what I would have said to him except, ‘I like your book.’ I usually like nonfiction better. Most fiction I dislike because it’s too fictional. That’s why I like The Martian , because even though it’s fiction, it’s very anchored in fact. If it’s very scientifically-based fiction, then I’ll be happy. But if it’s too fiction-y, I just have to be in the right mood for it, I guess. He isn’t too fiction-y because he based his books on scientific precepts and principles that were known and that were based in reality. He didn’t have to concoct anything new. That’s why I like it."

"The Foundation series was originally short stories that were published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine over the course of many years. They were collected initially in three books: Foundation , Foundation and Empire , and Second Foundation . You can get these all individually, or you can get them in one volume. I do recommend that people also pick and choose here, because as I said with the robot stories, not all these stories have aged well. The best way I can think of to explain what I mean is by pointing to the recent Apple TV adaptation of Foundation, a big-budget TV series that David S. Goyer developed and that has its merits. When I first heard about it, I was really curious because the Foundation series does not give you a lot of material to work with if you’re trying to adapt it into a TV show. Until much later in the series, there are no real characters. There is not a lot of action and there isn’t really a lot of world building. So what do you have to work with? The answer is that you have one idea, and that’s something called ‘psychohistory.’ Psychohistory comes out of Campbell and Asimov’s conversations. It’s the idea that you can have a science of prediction, where you’d use things like symbolic logic to predict the future in a detailed way for centuries, and figure out small interventions in the present that can change the direction that history takes later on. This is a really good, exciting idea. That idea alone, I think, is what has made the Foundation series, at least the earlier stories, so famous. The reading experience can be a little bit mixed, but the psychohistory idea itself is really compelling. This is an idea that has changed lives. People have become, say, economists because they were so intrigued by psychohistory – people like Paul Krugman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist ; and Newt Gingrich, who has talked about how the idea of psychohistory was a huge influence on him… So just the premise is strong enough to take people over the limitations of the earlier stories. I would recommend people get a copy of the complete trilogy. I would read the first two stories as collected, ‘The Psychohistorians’ and ‘The Encyclopedists,’ which give you a sense of the background. They introduce you to this guy, Hari Seldon, who is the inventor of psychohistory (although he disappears from the story). After the first two installments, I would then go to Wikipedia and read some summaries for the remaining stories up until one called ‘The Mule,’ which is a long novella and is the second half of Foundation and Empire . ‘The Mule’ is a really good story – the story where the potential of the series is realized. It takes place in a galaxy that has been colonized by a single Galactic Empire. It’s an entirely human empire; there are really no aliens in any significant way in the story, and it’s essentially analogous to the Roman Empire . Asimov was inspired to write the story in part by Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His initial pitch to Campbell was, “I want to do that, but on a galactic scale. I want to write a story about the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire.” Campbell liked the idea and said, “Let’s make psychohistory a part of this.” Psychohistory is much more Campbell’s contribution than Asimov’s. I think Asimov was actually a little bit uncomfortable with the idea, but it’s part of the story now. Psychohistorian Hari Seldon has foreseen the fall of the Galactic Empire, and he has made plans to shorten the duration of the ensuing Dark Age. He can’t prevent it entirely, but he can make it shorter, and he can reduce human suffering by planning ahead and making a few small interventions at crucial points. So the first few stories in the series are following up on this idea. It’s not especially dramatic – because Hari Seldon has foreseen a lot of these things. The characters have to figure out what he foresaw, but it’s dramatically unsatisfying to have a story where so much of it seems predetermined, right? If Hari Seldon foresaw what was going to happen, then where’s the suspense? Where’s the surprise? So what Campbell essentially said was, “We’re going to have something disrupt the Seldon plan. We’re going to introduce a new factor that Hari didn’t see coming.” That takes the form of the Mule, who is a telepath, a mutant who is born with the ability to mould minds, psychically. It takes the story in a new direction. As a result, it becomes the best Foundation story because it challenges the premise in a way that I don’t think Asimov saw coming."