Foundation

The Foundation series has been staring me down now for awhile on my shelf, and I finally decided to commit to it. The trilogy is regarded as one of, if not the, best science fiction works of all time, and an inspiration for Star Wars and other films. And it is still incredible to think about how long ago, and with what foresight, Asimov was able to churn these out.

Before reading the story itself, I really benefitted from reading a history of Asimov’s career and the foundation novels, indexed by the real-life events that coincided with their creation and publishing. Asimov was obsessed with Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and pitched his publisher on a galactic-scale future version, set across an epochal timescale. What began as a short story became the Foundation Trilogy (as well as some accessory novels afterward).

“Foundation” begins Asimov’s universe-building brilliantly — it is itself a collection of short magazine stories published in succession. Psychohistory, the futuristic concept of future prediction based upon the amalgamation of, and interpretation of, mass physiological data, is set as a backdrop technology across the series, and is well introduced here through the character of Hari Seldon (the 21st-century reader might see some parallels with what some scientists think the far future of complexity science could bring).