When our trading “partners” don’t do what we want, we’ll pull the plug on their energy infrastructure until they learn to behave. Sure, we’ll do this by giving them cool gadgets and promoting mutually-beneficial trade to prevent armed conflict, but only when that serves the Foundation’s interests. We’ll just plant the Foundation on the Galactic Periphery where it will be the only extant purveyor of advanced technology, then use our competitive advantage to manipulate, bribe, and conquer less fortunate planets. Seldon wants a Second Galactic Empire!įorget about the failures of the original Empire, and forget about questioning the validity of imperial paradigms. So what’s Seldon’s grand plan for the Foundation? The preservation and expansion of knowledge for its own sake? The amelioration of human suffering and promotion of creativity and art? The discovery of new forms of government less reliant on military power, economic domination, and political bureaucracy? Nope. Who wouldn’t want to use knowledge to soften the blow, right? But this is not Seldon’s main goal, we discover. Thirty thousand years of chaos and ignorance can be reduced to a single millennium of disorder, Seldon claims. Seldon conceives of the Foundation as a way of preserving human knowledge and shortening the length of time that civilization will be lost as the Empire unravels. This idea is hopelessly silly from a contemporary perspective, and it’s hard to imagine many people could have taken it seriously back in 1951 or the decades that followed.

In some very distant future, a Galactic Empire that has ruled for thousands of years is on the brink of collapse, and psychohistorian Hari Seldon has used the “science of psychology” to predict the grim future ahead. Now that I’ve done so, the only conclusion I can honestly come to is that Foundation is a conceptual relic with nothing to offer modern scifi readers I found it utterly lacking in all the qualities I look for in a good book.įoundation gets off to a promising, if preposterous, start. For years, I’ve heard the Foundation Series discussed with reverence, and always intended to read at least the first novel at some point.

Few figures in the history of science fiction command more gravitas than Isaac Asimov.

Foundation by isaac asimov 1951