Book Review: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Foundation is an old classic science fiction novel I read many, many years ago. Recently, I picked up an omnibus version containing the first 3 novels in the series. This is a review for the first book, a story about ideas, a story about a Galactic Empire that falls and the mathematical principles that allow humanity to pave the way for a new one.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Overall Impression

This was an interesting read and even though I first read it many years ago it has always been in the back of my mind. The principles of psychohistory, the statistical study of masses of humans to predict their behavior, was fascinating and today's real-world applications of data science scratch at similar concepts. Of course, this is a science fiction book, but it nonetheless explores the what-if, what-if this psychohistory were real and could be applied on human civilization at large? That is the premise and the promise of this book.

Plot

The story is divided in several parts, each focusing on the nature of the Foundation at the time. Firstly, we focus on before the Foundation existed at all, and why it needed to be created. Then we focus on the first crisis as the Foundation finds itself in a tight spot, alone in a galaxy of barbarism. Finally, we see the Foundation growing out of that initial bind, as the solutions it came up with mature to new ideas to further solidify its survival. It's an interesting tale of a nation building itself out of nothing, but as such the plot is fairly shallow as it mainly exists to show case the principles and ideas that the novel wants to explore.

Characters

There are very few major characters in this book, as it really focuses on the ideas more than anything. There is the mythical Hari Seldon, who drives the whole story with his principles of psychohistory; the major Salvor Hardin, and the trader Hober Mallow. Each has their moment to shine, but they live decades apart and their stories serve only to highlight the next step in the Seldon plan.

Setting / World Building

As previously alluded to, this is the main focus on the novel. In fact, pretty much everything just serves to further the vision of psychohistory and to demonstrate how it would work. With an Empire decaying from a multitude of reasons, it's not too hard to speculate that the current lifestyle is unsustainable and that dark times are coming. It's also not unreasonable to speculate that the dark times will end, and another empire will take its place. The selling point here is that Asimov creates a statistical branch of mathematics and psychology that is capable of predicting the behavior of large groups of people over thousands of years. This being statistical, it is unable to predict individual actions, but can describe percentages for events when considering billions of humans at a time.

Naturally, psychohistory doesn't exist and it is not fully described in the book since this is not a text book, but a work of fiction. However, it's an interesting concept that I've seen in some other places too, including real-world non-fiction. For example, the Strauss–Howe generational theory attempts to find a cyclical pattern in Anglo-American society over generational cycles. When I first heard of that, I saw how similar it was to the ideas of psychohistory, even if it is purely observational with no actual science behind it. Regardless, the idea of predicting the future is tantalizing, and Foundation offers an interesting take on this in a realistic way that leaves you thinking if it could actually work.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed re-reading Foundation and plan to continue to read the others in the series. As I've grown older I've become more appreciative of history and how it has shaped our lives, so reading about a science fiction setting where people effectively write the history they want to have is just fun. Despite lacking memorable characters and plot, it still is enjoyable for the simple point of making you think if such a thing could be possible.