Book Review: Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

The second installment in Asimov’s classic trilogy is Foundation and Empire. The people of the Foundation face their greatest threat yet as Bel Riose, charismatic and brilliant general of the Empire wages a bloody war of conquest. At this time the Foundation’s influence has strengthened in the Periphery while the Empire wanes and decays. Rumors of the Foundation’s ‘magicians’ spread throughout the remnants of the old Empire. General Riose is thirsty for battle and glory. Knowing his prospects for conquest are poor throughout the galaxy, he turns his eyes towards the rumors of the Foundation and seeks to spark a war that will turn him into a legend.
Asimov takes the first half of the novel to build the atmosphere of assurance and invincibility that underlies the people of the Foundation. Hari Seldon’s psychohistoric predictions have gained religious faith and dogmatic certainty. Nothing, they believe, can threaten them now. But as Riose marches from victory to victory, the confidence is slowly chipped away. Individual actions lead nowhere. Time is slipping and it seems as though Seldon’s plans might be thwarted. Asimov establishes the nigh-inevitability of Seldon’s predictions, under normal circumstances, when the psychohistoric trends of the past generations turn against Bel Riose in a way that no heroic undertaking by any mere individual could have.

The first half of this book was enjoyable, pact with intellect and suspense and delightful scenes of action. It was a great way for Asimov to open this chapter in the saga of the Foundation, but it pales in comparison to the second act, where Asimov moves out of our comfort zone into less hospitable territory.

The second story is an inversion of everything we have been taught to expect. The antagonist is a mutant called the Mule who exhibits immense and mysterious powers that he uses in his aims to build his own empire. To accomplish such a feat, he wants, of course, the Foundation. Psychohistory predicts the behaviour and patterns of millions and billions of ordinary humans. The theme underpinning the previous Foundation stories concerns the unbeatable course of history and patterns over the actions of any one man. The rise of the Mule, however, who isn’t an ordinary human, derails Seldon’s plan with alarming swiftness.

Isaac Asimov crafts an intriguing novel and breaks patterns with his previous ventures into the Foundation universe. While I was not as enthralled overall by this episode as I was of Foundation, Asimov sets the stage for a turning point in his narrative, one full of potential and uncertainty. The story of the Mule is easily the most captivating of both the two stories in Foundation and Empire and the first novel.

Book Review: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

It is astonishing to realize that science fiction consisted of a relative humble portion of Isaac Asimov’s ouevre. While most of his time was spent on nonfiction work, his contributions to science fiction proved so monumental that there is not a single science-fiction writer today who has not been influenced, in some way, by Asimov’s writing. His intellectual and engaging fiction has produced some of the finest short stories and novels in the genre, in classics such as “The Last Question” and “Nightfall”. But his seminal work is the top-of-the-pyramid, groundbreaking, and famous “Foundation Trilogy”. He is to SF what Tolkien is for Fantasy.

“Foundation” is an entertaining piece of sociopolitical SF in the backdrop of a space opera. This book is the foundation of SF for the past six decades. Asimov’s prose is clear and concise, without any room for ambiguity or vain style. Asimov’s words, though pared down and stripped of subtext, are not any less true or beautiful or witty.

Set thousands of years in the future, after humanity has colonized millions of planets in our galaxy, “Foundation” introduces the Galactic Empire is in its waning years. One man on the capital planet of Trantor, Hari Seldon, predicts the cataclysmic and chaotic decline and fall of the Empire. Seldon has developed the science of psychohistory, which aims to calculate the behaviour of mass populations over the course of events using, among other things, socioeconomic trends. Seldon has predetermined not only the demise of the Empire, but that thirty millennia of barbarism will follow, unless his organization, the Foundation, is able to finish its gargantuan mission of cataloguing and preserving all accumulated human knowledge and history. The act would serve to lessen an inevitable thirty-thousand years to a mere thousand.

Asimov portrays the epic grandeur of the galaxy through the unyielding arc of time and history. Individual lives are ineffectual, though not inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things.  Throughout the stories, there is a pervading sense of ‘greater good’ or ‘the bigger picture’. There is only one recurring character in each of the five tales: the Foundation. It stands in the background, an entity both mysterious and arresting; a godlike presence that shaped religion and ruled a city. The story of the Foundation is portrayed through the periodic snippets of human life throughout the growth of the First Foundation from an indefensible, dependent, colony in the backwaters of the outskirts of a great empire to a massive political juggernaut with commercial and technological prowess. The central characters: Hari Seldon, Gaal Dornick, Salvor Hardin, Linmar Ponyets, and Hober Mallow are seen in flashes as their importance and contribution to the longevity of the Foundation is waxes and wanes.Asimov has an arresting flair for conjuring up a methodical, articulate, and complex history. In the battle for free will over determinism, Asimov’s “Foundation” falls securely into the side of the determinists. Psychology and economic trends and the insurmountable turn of time dominate the short stories with a sense of inevitability. But it the tone of the story is far from pessimistic. There is only ever the slightest indication that they should lose hope, or that individual lives are meaningless. As one character says, “Seldon’s laws help those who help themselves.” Asimov appears to advocate forging a better future through the sole and collective action of the present.Unquestionably, “Foundation” is an intellectual treat that tends to emphasis the background scenes as opposed to the ones that illustrate more action. Most of the book is exposition and dialogues between characters in a meeting over smokes. The third story, The Mayors, provides the most exciting, and arguably cleverest, climactic confrontation in the book. It is a scene between Mayor Hardin and Prince Regent Wienis. Hardin, in a stroke of brilliance, has manipulated events to stave off a rival political party’s attempt to impeach him and end the threat posed by the Four Kingdoms.“Foundation” is a significant to the genre in more ways than the ideas it challenged us with. It is the culmination of science fiction into a literature encompassing reason and ideas. It reinvigorated the genre and turned it into a platform of higher ideals and concepts. “Foundation” steered it away from the pulp swamp creatures. It did for science fiction what “Spiderman” (2002) did for superhero movies, or in particular, what Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” (2005) reboot did for the franchise. Asimov gives us excellent characters, complex sociopolitics, and a good story that never wanes.

Day 15: The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

The seminal work of one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. This is his opus magnum, the rival of his “I, Robot” works, and the foundational work in SF literature for the past sixty years. The books explore the fleeting, yet heroic lives of the people of the Foundation, an organization charged with reducing the anarchy and chaos in a galaxy after the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire to a thousand years instead of thirty and usher in the rise of a Second Empire. The books are classics and the ideas and concepts are thrilling to envision. The Foundation Trilogy proves that Asimov and science-fiction are not mutually exclusive.