On "Foundation" and revising the canon

A review of Foundation (1951) which is really boring

• Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

• Science Fiction: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)

• Literary: ★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

• Vibe: ★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

Psychohist’ry

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, better

Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away, oh-oh-oh

This review is not divided into a no spoiler/spoiler section because the book is over 70 years old. The science fiction rating is begrudgingly getting a bump up from two stars simply because writing a narrative version of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but across the galaxy in the future was a novel idea in the 1940s¹. By space, this book is boring. And I don’t think it’s just because I’m seeing it with modern eyes. A contemporary review said it was “competent enough writing and thinking, if on the dull side.” I grabbed that quote from the wikipedia page where I also discovered an old io9 article titled “10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read” which includes Foundation (along with Dune)². There’s a certain hagiography of science fiction — and I am here to say you do not even need to pretend you’ve read Foundation. Life is short and unless you’re writing a thesis on Asimov, just walk out. Hit da bricks.

I loved Asimov’s non-fiction books and regularly checked them out of my elementary school library — I put a reference to one of them in Inner Horizon. I’d read Dune after seeing the movie, so as a 10 or 11 year old of course I picked up Foundation ... and never finished it. Much like my experience of reading Lord of the Rings around the same time, I found it incredibly boring.

Now, after having matured somewhat, I am able to say: it’s boring and poorly written. It reads like a bad D&D campaign. 

DM: The kingdoms to the north are massing to attack.

Player 1: I do nothing about it because the wizard Harry Seldon has already planned for this.

Player 2: That seems like a bad choice and would like to do a charisma check to become the new leader of the party.

DM: [doesn’t even roll dice] Your check fails and the kingdoms invade.

Player 1: Because I know about the wizard Harry Seldon, I secretly set up a coup in their governments while I was seemingly doing nothing so their invasion force turns around.

DM: [doesn’t even roll dice] Your coup is successful. The ghost of Harry Seldon appears to tell you how right you were.

Player 2: Um, what?

Player 1: Thank you. I also have this magic item that helps me in those hostage negotiations with that intransigent anti-magic kingdom.

DM: That you do. There’s suddenly one guy that isn't as committed to the whole anti-magic culture of their kingdom and gives it a try.

Player 1: Just so you know, I had previously rigged it with a magical listening device so can now blackmail him.

DM: Of course.

Player 2: This is ridiculous.

DM: Some of your ships have vanished in the seas of Korell ...

Player 1: Seldon.

DM: Everything turns out great.

Player 2: I’m leaving.

This is what makes it boring. Discussing your boring political issues at length and then having them resolve based on secret machinations you only hear about after they have borne fruit — and then discussing that at length — is a recipe for tensionless writing. And that tensionless pulp is then subjected to the fact that psychohistory³ is isomorphic with fate.

Being from the 1940s and 50s, of course it’s also sexist. It’s sexist in that particularly 1950s way of just completely erasing women from existence. They literally just add to a population figure or are relegated to props. From my modern perspective, it just comes across as childish — basically, Asimov is not enough of an adult to take his musings about society and history seriously. Dune is better in the sense that despite the whole sexist witch/betrayal trope, at least the female characters exist and have agency. Basically the book is a science-minded male power fantasy for nerdy technocrats who don’t think people who aren’t like them have anything interesting to say.

I also have to say that it’s kind of ridiculous that you’d go along with any more of Harry Seldon’s plans if he tells you after 50 years the plan you thought you were working on was actually fake and the real plan is something else. How do we know this new plan isn’t some other fake plan? I mean, psychohistory does predict the broad strokes of the future⁴ so it’s not like it matters if you follow the plan or not. You don’t even know the plan! But then Harry Seldon appears like a bad Sherlock Holmes to tell you everything worked out exactly as it should have.

The worst part is that the small slices of the decline of the galactic empire are either wrong about how these things work⁵ or selects the dullest slices that have little to do with the fall of an empire. There’s a part about a smaller city-state staying safe by shifting alliances and balancing other nations against each other (no fall of an empire needed). There are two parts about selling stuff to other kingdoms (no fall of an empire needed, but also — why is imperial fiat money still accepted⁶). All through this, the Galactic Empire is losing territory — which is just the most tautological use of “the fall of an empire” possible. Then there’s the overarching trope.

I’ll say it succinctly. Since the advent of writing, technologies fall from common use because of economics — not lost knowledge. Either input materials stop becoming widely traded (e.g. tin at various times in the ancient world so you lose bronze technology that rapidly rebounds once tin is available again), or your economy declines so much society can no longer support complex division of labor and highly skilled workers (e.g. pottery in post-Roman Britain⁷). The main issue is that if this goes on long enough and your knowledge storage technologies are perishable, you eventually lose knowledge as well. But a) it’s not the first to go, and b) this is supposedly an advanced galactic empire so probably has archival storage materials⁸. Foundation (1951) takes place over ~150 years during the decline of the empire. It’s highly improbable that the knowledge is the key missing input in the production function. I have a book from 1909 on my bookshelf. It’s 114 years old⁹.

We don’t need this. Even if the rest of the books in the series are better, science fiction has developed so much more material that can be held up as part of the canon. Let’s drop the Foundation series and replace it with the Hainish Cycle. The Dispossessed (1974) was a thousand times better.

1. The whole analogy is mired in the old Anglo-focused popular narrative of the 18th-20th centuries. It ignores the Eastern half of the empire that actually continued through the middle ages and uses the same “monks on the edge of western civilization saved advanced knowledge for the age of reason and the new British Empire” trope. (I.e. the people of foundation living on the edge of the galaxy saved advanced knowledge for the future galactic empire.)

2. I do not pretend to have read any of the 10 books on the list. I have only (as of now) read three of them (Dune, 1984 and, now, Foundation).

3. It is somewhat funny to me that there are similarities between psychohistory and information equilibrium — they somehow predict human behavior, but only when there are millions or billions of humans; they both would be thwarted when the actions of individuals have large impacts on the system. However, information equilibrium predicts human behavior by assuming it is essentially unpredictable — humans are so complex they appear to randomly explore the available economic state space. This assumption will fail in periods of groupthink or herd behavior, so it’s nowhere near as good as psychohistory apparently is which can somehow handle cases of groupthink.

4. Broad strokes that seemingly rely on the actions of individuals quite often despite the fact that it’s specifically stated that psychohistory doesn’t predict the actions of individuals.

5. I mean Asimov was “cribbin’ from Edward Gibbon” where the most recent volumes were published in 1789 (prior to the advent of modern historical research or archeology) is obviously going to have some shortcomings about its subject.

6. And if it’s not fiat money — how would you redeem commodity-backed money with the collapsing empire? And if it’s not commodity-backed, then why did an advanced galactic empire use primitive commodity money? The Foundation universe makes no economic sense.

7. I often look at the pictures of post-Roman Britain pottery as an archeological version of “nailed it”.

8. I’m reminded of the “people in Star Wars are illiterate” article (follow-up here). The galactic empire in Foundation likely has more in common with either the Republic or the Galactic Empire (take your pick) in Star Wars, than, say, the Federation in Star Trek.

9. In Inner Horizon, some information from between the 1990s (the advent of the public internet) and the “crisis of the 90s” (by which is meant the 2090s, where a Foundation-like collapse of our present world order occurs but based on still theoretical but plausible reasons) has been lost or corrupted because digital storage becomes non-viable after the advent of ubiquitous quantum computation and the breaking of encryption. Digital information is no longer trusted (see previous link) except via trusted agents (memorizers). Trusted knowledge is stored in physical media (including actual books) kept in Library of Babel-like memorizer facilities.