Foundation, from 1951, is the first book in a series, one of the series that established Isaac Asimov as one of the giants of science fiction.
It is set thousands of years in the future, when humans have colonized most or all of the galaxy, so far in the future that the origins of the human race have been lost in the shadows of the most ancient of ancient history. (There is some speculation that humans originated on one little planet, but this is merely one of multiple unproven theories.)
The various inhabited planets in the galaxy are centrally ruled by a massive empire. The empire has been in power for a very long time but is now in decline.
This book is another indication of how the future is just about the hardest thing to predict. While certainly there are technologies in the book that are more advanced than what we have today, what’s wild are the things that have changed so little.
Remember, we’re not talking about a book written in the mid-20th century that purports to depict life in 2000 or in 2100, or some time in the upcoming decades or centuries like that, but a book set many millennia or tens of millennia in the future. Yet so much about the technology and the way people live is almost comically 20th century.
It’s like a book written in 1890 about life in the year 9595, and the only air travel is by balloon (albeit considerably more advanced balloons than those of 1890). Or a book written in 1920 about life in 8510, and they’re still making telephone calls that go through operators.
There are elements of Foundation that, even today, less than a century after it was written, already feel more like the past than the distant future.
In Foundation, the most advanced power source is nuclear power, and that is far from universal. It is still so advanced a technology thousands or ten thousands of years from now that only a comparative handful of folks understand it and are able to build, operate, and maintain nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, etc. Due to the rarity of such expertise, many planets no longer have this cutting-edge technology, if they ever did, and rely instead on fossil fuels.
A significant part of the storyline involves people attempting to compile an encyclopedia that accumulates all present human knowledge in one source, which will then be copied and taken to numerous planets all over the galaxy, in the event that the galactic empire does indeed collapse soon and chaos ensues, thereby hopefully facilitating an eventual rebuilding of civilization. It certainly sounds like a physical set of books they’re talking about. (A quick check of Wikipedia states “Originally published in a physical medium, it later becomes computerized and subject to continual change,” key word here being “later,” meaning that in the period of Foundation—way, way into the distant future—the encyclopedia does indeed consist of books or some physical objects like that.)
Which is an already outdated version of an encyclopedia today, with just 1% or whatever of the time between the publishing of Foundation and the time period it purports to depict having transpired.
So, you can make a case that the book does not do all that impressive a job imagining the technology of the distant future.
But at times I get the impression that that stuff was something of an afterthought for the author. The futuristic material is what places this novel in the science fiction genre, but about 90% of the book feels like it could take place just about anytime and anywhere, that at its heart it is a story focused on certain human dynamics, where the science fiction elements are incidental.
But these human aspects of the plot raise their own related question, for in this world of 10,000 years from now or whatever, with humans having long since spread throughout the galaxy, just as the technology isn’t nearly as different as one would think it should be, the people—psychologically, socially, politically, economically, etc.—are even less changed from what we are familiar with.
They have ray guns or whatever instead of swords, but the galactic empire is structured, governed, policed, etc. in basically the same way as the Roman Empire. In various places in the novel we encounter more-or-less democratic elections, war lords, capitalism, conventional wars, conventional rebellions, etc. People are motivated by greed, idealism, fear; they lie, they scheme, they bluff. Their nature is similar if not identical to that of us and the people we are familiar with from the last few thousand years.
So, the technology, the science, the knowledge, hasn’t changed nearly as much as it probably should, but human nature, human behavior, the forms of human organization, haven’t changed even that much.
But whereas I’m inclined to say that the world of Foundation too closely resembling 1951 technologically is a flaw (albeit an understandable one, given, again, the future’s mischievous insistence on being so damn difficult to predict), I’m undecided if the depiction of people as being largely unchanged is also a flaw.
People of the present arguably don’t differ in their basic nature much if at all from people of the past, so it’s plausible that people of the distant future won’t differ much if at all either. So maybe it’s not a failure of imagination to so depict them.
I could see it either way. On the one hand, technology, ways of life, change so much that someone from Alexander the Great’s time would struggle to make sense of what the heck was going on if he were plopped down in Napoleon’s time, as someone from Napoleon’s time would if plopped down in Winston Churchill’s time, and as someone in Winston Churchill’s time would if confronted with our smartphones, Internet, space travel, and concerns about human-caused climate change. But in terms of human nature, of what makes people tick, of their basic psychology and their ways of forming together into groups, etc., those three people from the past and a person from the present would differ far less than their technological circumstances.
I mean, we would never seek to acquire scientific knowledge from Aristotle. But people still look for wisdom in Aristotle (or Confucius, Jesus, Sun Tzu, Buddha, Marx, Aquinas, etc.) when it comes to matters of morality, political theory, economics, war strategy, and so on, because those fields don’t progress in the same way. Something that was morally or psychologically insightful a hundred, or a thousand, or more, years ago might well still be insightful, whereas you’d be hard pressed to find much in science or technology from the distant past that is still cutting edge today.
On the other hand, maybe there have been at least some changes in people and how they interact with each other over time. Historians who study such matters argue that, in spite of the bloody reputation of the 20th century, with Hitler, Stalin, and the rest, 20th and 21st century humankind is much less prone to war, much less prone to settling differences through violence, etc. than humans in the past. Certainly the percentage of people who live under reasonably democratic governments and are able to enjoy at least a reasonable set of civil rights and liberties is far greater today than any time in the distant past. It seems we’ve made considerable progress toward being nicer, more peaceable folks than ever before (as hard as that is at times to square with the daily news).
Granted, there are scholars who defend the intriguing hypothesis that humans were happier and treated each other better in prehistoric times, that it’s the supposed “progress” of what we think of as civilization, of agriculture, of the forming of nation-states, etc. that turned us into assholes. But be that as it may, either way there’s evidence that we can change and have changed—maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, maybe sometimes in one direction and other times in the other direction.
I’m more inclined to believe that people do change, however slowly and modestly. Indeed, I certainly hope that’s true. I want to believe that the things we do today can change not only what gadgets folks will use in the future, but what sort of people they will be and how they will behave toward each other.
I’ve also long claimed not only that such change is possible, but that it might well be necessary in order for there even to be much of a future. I contend that a collective moral “paradigm shift” toward something akin to Gandhi’s philosophy of truth and nonviolence may be the only way we avoid obliterating ourselves in the fairly near future. The human nature we’re used to could and did cause plenty of damage in the eras of spears, guns, airplanes with conventional bombs, etc., but was not an existential threat to the species as a whole. In the era of nuclear weapons, nightmarish biological weapons, environment-destroying technologies, and so on, it absolutely is such an existential threat.
So, what will people be like in 10,000 years or some such point in the far distant future? Pretty much like they are now, as depicted in Foundation? (Actually, if anything the folks in Foundation are worse on average. The book feels more like Medieval times, or indeed like the last days of the Roman Empire, which is what it’s modeled on. I think today we’re already at least a modestly kinder, more rational bunch than that.)
Maybe, but I would guess not. Like I say, I’m skeptical human history will even last much longer if people prove unable collectively to improve significantly. I can’t see us colonizing the whole galaxy and all that if we never outgrow the mindset of warlords, self-interested bureaucrats, demagogic politicians, exploitative capitalists, etc.
I mean, again, this isn’t a book set a hundred years or two hundred years from now (not to say quite drastic changes aren’t entirely possible even in that short time frame). I suspect that thousands or tens of thousands of years from now, not only will the technological circumstances be unimaginably different from today, but the humans, if there are any, will be as well.
I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion of whether we are approaching the “singularity” as some believe (indeed, some think it’s surprisingly close), but if we go through something even 2% that dramatic, then the distant future will look nothing like Foundation. And 2% or more as extreme as the singularity seems like a pretty safe bet (assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves before that point, which would also mean no future like Foundation). At the very least I would think that if we’re still around that far in the future, then we (if you can even call such future folks “we”) will be far more of the nature of cyborgs than we are now, and than the people in the book are, as we continue to incorporate technology more into who we are and not just what we use.
Anyway, I know I’ve said next to nothing about the story itself yet, just that it involves people very much like us and the people we know from history, behaving and interacting very much in ways we’re familiar with, just in a technologically different (albeit unrealistically less different) context from that in which we live.
As I say, the book takes place in a galactic empire, at a time when central control is weakening, when a certain amount of rot has set in.
Key to the story is the science of psychohistory.
In a deterministic universe, in principle everything would be predictable. If you knew the precise position of everything in the universe, from the largest entity to every subatomic particle, and you knew every causal law by which nature operates, you could predict everything.
Which is not to say that the universe is in fact deterministic and even in principle knowable. I believe it is still a majority if not consensus position in science that the laws of nature are irreducibly probabilistic, not deterministic, plus there are all the related peculiar phenomena of the quantum world, where you seemingly can’t know certain fundamental facts about subatomic particles simultaneously, where measuring for one prevents you from knowing another.
But leave that aside. If the only uncertainly were that kind of quantum stuff, things on a macro level could still be predictable to a very high degree if you had all the aforementioned information. The problem of course is that we never have all the information. And if we’re talking about anything really complex, like human stuff rather than billiard balls striking each other or whatever, then things very quickly become unpredictable in practice, regardless of how predictable they would be in principle.
That’s why forecasts in economics, etc. are so notoriously unreliable, how even the smartest people with access to all the available relevant information, and with the most advanced computers and other tools, fare barely better than chance when predicting when the next recession will commence, where the inflation rate or interest rates will be two years from today, etc. There are just too many factors at work, too much opportunity for a butterfly to flap its wings somewhere and throw off any prediction.
In Foundation, one of the most impressive advances in all those thousands of years from today until then isn’t faster rocket ships, deadlier weapons, extraordinary new life-extending medical techniques, and certainly not improved political forms (where they instead seem to have regressed a bit, if anything), but psychohistory. Psychohistory is this very science of combining all knowledge of human history, human nature, present circumstances, etc. in order to make predictions.
Not predictions of individuals (like, Lester will move to Akron in fifteen years), but predictions of broader, collective, social developments. People will be a lot better than chance in the future, that is, at predicting, say, the onset of the next recession.
They are not at the point where the predictions can be super precise, even about collective developments, but they’re enormously better at predictions than we are.
Most notably, the most distinguished of the psychohistorians, Hari Seldon, realizes that the empire is on its last legs. He can’t predict that it’ll be overthrown completely in precisely the year such-and-such, but he knows that it will continue gradually losing control over the next x number of years and fading into irrelevance while other smaller, disparate power centers arise to battle each other in what will be something of a dark age of human history.
That something roughly like that is going to happen he can say with confidence based on the data. However, there are numerous details that cannot be so predicted, that could still go different ways, including how long the dark age will last, to what extent galactic civilization can eventually be rebuilt into what it was or preferably something better, etc.
The powers-that-be in the empire are none too happy with Seldon. No one likes a prophet whose prophecy is “You’re going to fall from power. And not too long from now, either.” There are some who would just as soon execute such a buzzkill.
But he is able to get them to agree to let him, along with a team he assembles of some of the finest minds of the time, embark upon the project I mentioned above of compiling the greatest, most thorough, encyclopedia of all time, to safeguard human knowledge, especially since work on this project will be done on the planet of Terminus, which is way out at the edge of the galaxy farthest from the power center, out where he’ll be least able to cause any trouble, so far removed from things that they might well have executed him.
Seldon secretly actually wants to be in the middle of nowhere, though, as his true purpose is not so much to put together this encyclopedia as to have a core group of talented folks as far as possible away from where the bullets will soon be flying, where hopefully they can organize themselves well enough and maneuver skillfully enough as to avoid destruction or capture from elements of the dying empire or whatever war lords and other threats arise in its wake.
Terminus, in theory, is a place to more or less hide away until circumstances change to where it is possible to facilitate the recovery of civilization.
Really the rest of the book, then, is about these various maneuverings in the next few generations to keep Terminus free and thriving so that later it’ll be able to fulfill its destiny. Psychohistory has only advanced to where Seldon can predict in very broad terms what crises will occur, when they’ll occur, and how they must be dealt with. So he is able to offer some guidance to those who will come after him, but not in the sense of “Here’s exactly what’s going to happen, on this day in this year, and here’s exactly what you need to do here, or say to this person here, in order to steer through it successfully.” He can help them as much as he can help them, but they will have to have the wisdom to work their way through a lot of what happens as the situation on the ground develops.
This is where, like I say, the book feels less like science fiction, and more like we’re reading about the career of Talleyrand or Kissinger. It’s all about how this party is bluffed in this way, this party is maneuvered into directing its aggression toward some entity other than Terminus, this party within Terminus is placated so that it does not run opposition candidates and ruin the plan by bringing to power folks who don’t have the foresight to understand what is going on, etc.
I’m not going to summarize all those goings-on in detail, but, for instance, fairly early after these folks have retired to Terminus, a war lord on a nearby planet starts casting a covetous eye on Terminus, to the alarm of Terminus’s leaders. As a very temporary solution, they are able to bluff the warlord into backing down by implying that they have nuclear weapons. (They don’t, though they do have nuclear power. The warlord’s planet is one of those that has regressed technologically over time to where they now have neither.)
Later they dole out their nuclear technology selectively to this war lord’s planet, but also simultaneously to two other nearby potentially threatening planets, to where each of the three has an incentive not to allow either of the other two to conquer Terminus and grab all it has for itself.
Furthermore, when they do share any of their nuclear technology with these other planets, they add a lot of pseudo-religious rigmarole so that the inhabitants on the recipient planet associate their improved lives that the technology facilitates with a cultlike religious faith, overseen by priests put in place for that purpose by the leaders of Terminus. The result is that any future anticipated attack on Terminus must contend with the added complication that it will be akin to a country whose citizens are largely devout Catholics being taken to war against the Vatican.
I experienced Foundation as at least modestly interesting in its explorations of human psychology and politics, but I wouldn’t say it captured me in a big way. The fact that the story overlaps 90% or whatever with one that could have been set at any time in at least the last few thousand years of human history maybe left it with unsatisfyingly few of the elements I expect or enjoy from science fiction. I mean, if it were an unusually strong story of political maneuverings and diplomacy then I probably would have appreciated it as such and not been bothered by the lack of more futuristic sci fi gizmos, intriguingly unfamiliar and unhumanlike aliens, etc., but it’s only a decent such story.
Overall, I liked it just enough that I’m leaning toward reading more books in the Foundation series in the future, but it’s not like it blew me away to where I feel great enthusiasm at that prospect.
Philo on Books 