Isaac Asimov's Foundations
Isaac Asimov
I have often found that the authors of my favorite books are just as interesting as the books they’ve written. This is truer in the case of Isaac Asimov than perhaps any other author.
When fact-checking the stories I’d heard about Asimov I came across a succinct and accurate page on Biography.com, which I will post at the end of the section, but I still want to mention a couple of things that amazed me about him.
I can’t help but grow dizzy thinking about his career. Asimov’s prolific writing career produced near to 500 books and many short stories. He wrote from the age of 19 until he died at 72. The topics he covered were so wide ranging that he had a published book in almost every section of the Dewey Decimal System. He even had work published while serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
Besides his career, I’m also impressed by his values, especially for someone born in the early 1900’s. He felt that homosexual rights and women’s equality were essential for a successful society, and he was a strong humanist. He was a polymath who saw hurdles in the future but was mostly positive about humanities ability to overcome those obstacles with science and cooperation.
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Asimov
There are many theories—undiscussed on the Biography.com page—that Asimov worked for/had connections to the government and the military beyond his naval service. This is because—in writing about the future—Asimov’s work often introduced or adopted technologies and concepts that were being secretly employed by the U.S. government in the years during and after his works were published. What we do know for sure is that he and Robert Heinlein, another very important science fiction author, confirmed that they were involved in a classified government project. The promised Biography.com page:
https://www.biography.com/people/isaac-asimov-9190737
There is much more to learn about Asimov’s amazing life and career. Here is the link to a secondary biography.com page that lists additional facts beyond the sites bio on him:
https://www.biography.com/news/isaac-asimov-facts
Foundations
Synopsis/Analysis
Before the main science fiction concept comes into play, Asimov introduces the reader to a future human society that has inhabited millions of planets (bit bold, but the series was written before man had even begun to leave Earth’s atmosphere). Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire, is described to have a worldwide city that covers every bit of the surface.
(I wonder where Lucas got the inspiration for Coruscant)
Most people in the capital of the empire live underground. They have hydroponic farms that hang or float in the sky, and they derive their electricity from geothermal and nuclear power. In fact, burning coal and oil is an outdated custom. “Nuclear technology” is everywhere from domestic goods, to weaponry and defensive force fields with pocket sized generators.
You are introduced to Asimov’s driving concept, “psychohistory,” during a private rebuke/trial for a pshycohistorian named Hari Seldon on Trantor. Hari Seldon has been using mathematic principles combined with advanced computing and the data of tens of thousands of years of recorded human history on millions of planets to say with near certainty what the future will hold. It doesn’t look good.
Seldon claims that humanity faces a coming Dark Age that will span between 10,000 and 30,000 years, but he believes that his plan can reduce that period to a mere 1,000 years. Some in the Galactic Empire see his cataclysmic predictions as an attempt to take down the Empire, while more decide to entrust Seldon to prepare for the dark age to come. With their support, Seldon sets up two separate and independent societies on resource poor planets at opposite fringes of the Galactic Empire with thousands of scientists who are told to create an encyclopedia encompassing all that is known.
"The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop."
- Asimov, Foundations
From here on out you get a series of stories that seem pretty straight forward, but have a touch of brilliance to them. These are the simplified touchstones of each story:
1. The reader finds themselves experiencing a specific time of crisis in one of Seldon’s colonies.
2. Seldon has created a prerecorded video of himself to either help guide or explain the predicament to the colonists, or to help push them in the right direction. The videos are locked in a vault that only opens on certain dates, all designed by Seldon in advance.
3. There is always a different, savvy central character that understands the predicament better than his contemporaries. This character is often doubted and ostracized by the most powerful and influential figures in the colony up until the very last minute when they are shown to have been correct about their actions or ideas.
Laid out like that, the series can sound kind of boring, but there are a couple more touchstones that reveal the brilliance of the series.
4. Asimov’s understanding of history and society help him to create increasingly complex problems and solutions for his colony to face.
As a history major and teacher, I’m obsessed with the idea of humanity amassing so much data from the past that we can use it not only to get a general idea of what could come, but to predict to the year what will come. Asimov doesn’t have the benefit of fifty thousand years of recorded history at his disposal, and yet he sets up such intricate situations, crises, and solutions that seem supported by patterns in our history.
5. Perhaps my favorite similarity shared between all of the crises is the fact that knowledge, science, and technology are always the tools that enable successful navigation through a crisis, and that a peaceful solution is found in each scenario. The message Asimov sends is clear, no matter the crisis, no matter the violence and destruction that your enemy can employ, science, technology and intelligence can help you overcome. Foundations is Asimov’s instruction guide for defeating bullies and tyrants by making them rely on you in some way.
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Asimov
6. Lastly, Asimov shows that the colonies approach to one crisis must be abandoned to successfully overcome the next crisis. This is important because it sends the message that society must evolve, but the one thing that remains constant is science and technology.
At one point a character accuses other members of the colony of “worshipping the past.” They are so hell bent on preserving the past that they are not progressing to new technologies and sciences.
This seems to be a strange sentiment in a book about how history can be a science, but I think it highlights my theory above. One of Asimov’s central messages in Foundations is that progress and success in the face of great adversity require evolution. Democracy, aristocracy, socialism, capitalism; these are not as important as we make them out to be. What’s most important is progress and success achieved with morality and science.
“You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren't patriotic?"
"Notoriously not. Pioneers never are.” – Asimov’s Foundations
I look at the turmoil that the world is in today, and I can’t help but think that much of it can be avoided if we were only willing to evolve.