The Re-Read: Isaac Asimov, Foundation/Foundation and Empire/Second Foundation
Sunday's Child is Bonny and Blithe
I re-read these recently and I discovered a number of things.
The first is that I hadn’t really ever read Second Foundation cover to cover despite thinking that I had. As I was reading this time, I remembered that I’d found it so boring when I first read the series around the age of 11 or so that I just skimmed it to find out what happened to the Mule and to the whole Seldon Plan. I couldn’t have told you any of the characters’ names or any specific plot points. On re-reading, it’s no less boring.
The series has not held up at all well. It’s the story of an entirely human Galactic Empire which is on the cusp of an unavoidable decline and collapse. A scholar named Hari Seldon working on the capital planet, Trantor, has discovered a method of mathematically predicting the future course of history with great precision (though not at the individual level), which he calls “psychohistory”. Seldon’s method shows him that the Empire’s collapse cannot be prevented, but it does suggest to him and his colleagues a method for shortening the collapse, softening its consequences, and building a far more durable structure for galactic civilization after the rebuilding. He creates a Foundation that is sent to a far distant planet at the edge of imperial space whose ostensible mission is to make a encyclopedia but which is really part of Seldon’s plan. Seldon shows up for centuries after his death in messages during “crises” where the Foundation appears to be in trouble to explain that everything’s going to come out just as planned. The novels then develop as a series of episodes in the unfolding of the Plan over the centuries after Seldon’s death in which he is proved right—until a mutant called the Mule who has telepathic powers appears and drives the Plan off course. That’s when we find out that there’s a hidden Second Foundation that also has telepathic powers and has further developed the science of psychohistory. Their job is to preserve and correct the Plan whenever it goes off course.
Psychohistory’s substance is all tell and no show. Meaning, Seldon doesn’t seem to have anything like a theory of history per se. He just says “I do the mathematics and they’re very science-fictiony maths capable of predicting every large-scale event without any guesswork or beliefs”. Asimov’s explanations of the Seldon crises are decent historical sociology but not especially clever or insightful.
On re-reading, I was just struck at how utterly grey and dull everything in it is. None of the settings have anything remotely vivid or imaginative about them. We visit maybe ten or so planets in the original trilogy and none of them are remotely memorable settings. Everything is banally human, described with labels. This place is an entrepot, this place is a warlord’s planet, this place has an atavistic religion. I’d have to pore over the books minutely to assemble any kind of meaningful description of Terminus—the Foundation’s planet. There’s a bunch of stuff about the relative technology of spaceships that matters in the first two books but it’s just a cog in the Seldon Plan’s mechanisms. Terminus is supposed to be the only technologically progressive planet left as the Empire falls apart, but somehow they keep media and communication technologies that allow Seldon’s messages to the future to appear on schedule to everyone. No one tries to hack the archive of Seldon’s messages, which seems odd—and whatever he recorded them on suffers no physical degredation over centuries. (Asimov wrote some sequels later which did explore the thought that the veneration of Seldon’s prophecies poses the danger of becoming a kind of anti-intellectual religion for the Foundation.) Once you get the idea after the first “Seldon was right” story with the Foundation leader Salvor Hardin, the details of the stories don’t matter much.
There’s no one or nothing to really latch on to. Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow, the two main Foundation characters in the first book, feel like they wandered in from a Heinlein novel: they’re quippy, they have derring-do, they’re cunning. But the book goes out of its way to say, “And none of that is really important.” The only character in the three books that I remembered while re-reading and was still invested in was Bel Riose, the Imperial general who sets out to defy the Seldon Plan. He ends up losing too, but it’s one of the few moments on re-reading that I actually bought that Seldon could have had a foreknowledge of why an individual like Riose would never succeed in reversing the decline of the Empire. But the point made again and again is that human agency under the Plan doesn’t matter at all. I guess you could root for the Mule, the rebel telepath out to seize the galaxy for himself, but Asimov is mostly interested in playing games about his identity in the latter half of the second book and not in developing him more fully. He basically comes off like a bullied nerd looking for revenge through conquest.
What’s really striking is that the third book concludes with centuries remaining in the development of the Plan. We never really get to see what it is that Seldon is building, we just see that the Second Foundation has a sure hand on the tiller and all is well. What is a better galactic civilization? Who knows? Seldon has almost nothing to say about his ethical or moral vision. The most you can say is that he’s pro-stability and pro-strong government. He doesn’t really have to convince anybody besides a few scholarly colleagues charged with setting up the Second Foundation—the people who are sent off to Terminus are kept completely ignorant about their real role.
The only protagonist in the series really is the Plan itself. And in rooting for it, you’re not rooting for its content or consequences but for the idea of a science that could let one man predict everything and in predicting it, control humanity’s future for all time. It reads like now is a kind of like a religious tract for positivism, like a manifesto for that kind of older man who fancies himself the yardstick of rationality who ought to get his way in all things. If only everybody would just do as he says, everything would come out perfectly. Psychohistory is a fantasy for that person: look here! a rational method that lets the rational man make everybody do what he wants for millennia into the future. And even better! The rational man gets to show up every century or so to say “I told you so” on prerecorded messages. Sure, it turns out eventually that Seldon has a cheat mode (the Second Foundation), but that’s the core of it all.
(Asimov’s later two prequels and then two sequels try to answer some of these objections: Seldon gets developed as a character, the implausibility of psychohistory gets centrally engaged, the source of telepathy gets explained, Seldon gets some measure of an inner life and an ethical compass. Asimov also tries to lend a bit of drama to the series by continuing to pit the Foundation and the Second Foundation against one another in a way that is expressly exempted from the Seldon Plan and then tying them in a rather ill-advised way to his other series on robots. They’re not bad in their way, but they are also Asimov’s acknowledgement of the weaknesses of the original series.)
I noted to a friend on Facebook that I’d try to figure out why I really did feel like I liked the books back when I first read them. (He was trying to figure out the same thing for himself.) Maybe it’s that I was at that time thinking about joining the religious crusade for positivism and self-satisfied rationality, but I don’t quite think that’s it. I think maybe it is just that the idea of the Plan seemed interesting and original to me. I remember reading Gordon Dickson’s Tactics of Mistake, one of his Dorsai novels, around the same time and it had some resonance with the Foundation trilogy for me. (It features a genius general who has the same kind of prescient understanding of the future of human civilization across a wide swath of planets and proceeds to personally and improbably secure the future that he prefers.)
The Foundation trilogy sells the idea of psychohistory and the Seldon Plan so hard that all the questions I might have had about it then just didn’t occur to me as a youthful reader. I think on first reading the trilogy comes off like a puzzle or a locked-room mystery. How will the Plan survive THIS crisis? How can the Foundation possibly come out on top now? But that explains why the Mule kind of killed off my active engagement even when I first read it. If the first three installments of crises in the Seldon Plan (through to the middle of Foundation and Empire) functioned as entertaining if mechanistic mystery stories, then the Mule is a cheat—a whodunit where the murderer turns out to be a character we never met until the conclusion of the story. Once you find out that the Plan can be upset by an unforeseen individual and then worse that the Plan is actually a fake front for a star chamber of telepathic mathematicians who are tautologically making the Plan come true because the Plan provided for them to make the Plan come true, the whole puzzle element of the first half of the trilogy just goes pffffffft like a collapsing balloon. On this re-read, I just found myself thinking, “Who cares whether the Second Foundation can survive and get the Plan back on track? There aren’t any stakes here that I’m invested in, there are no characters I care about. Thirty thousand years of barbarism or one millennium of transition, so what.”
If the series turns out to be unadaptable (I’m not particularly interested in the Apple TV version though I do love Jared Harris as an actor), it’s because the source material is just not very good. It’s a one-trick pony. The best I can say for it is that the scope of the book helped inspire later, better space operas. I see on Wikipedia that there’s one critic who argues that Dune is an inversion of the Foundation trilogy where the Mule is the protagonist (e.g., Paul Atriedes) but that comparison also just illustrates how barren and dull the world-building in Asimov’s trilogy actually is.
"All tell and no show" is pretty much Asimov's style in all his work. OTOH the Foundation series was pretty much the second actual science fiction work I read (after somehow reading Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky in 6th grade, during a rather interesting period when my desk got put in a corner), so a lot of the atmosphere and the science-fiction conventions that I encountered there stuck. And of course a good bit of Asimov's setting and details got re-used later by others.
This reminds me of why I disliked the novels from the first. It also reminds me of why I liked Heinlein better, of the two of them. When my brother was deeply immersed in Foundation, I was going for John Brunner and that crowd. But thanks for the shout out to the Dorsai novels. I liked those, too.