Foundation (Asimov, Isaac, 1951)Foundation is a large scale sci-fi epic, formed of 5 short stories, bound together by the framing narrative of the Foundation and its purpose in the future history of the human race.
In a faraway future, human civilization has been controlled by a Galactic Empire that has lasted for 12 000 years. At the capital planet of the empire, Trantor, a young mathematician Gaal Dornak has just arrived to take up employment from Hari Seldon, who has perfected the statistical science of Psychohistory, which allows the prediction of future events. In fact, Seldon's predictions show, that the empire is about to fall. Not immediately, but within the next 5 centuries, after which humanity will suffer dark ages spanning over 30 000 years.
The arrival of Gaal triggers an evolution of events, which lead into the arrest of both men, as the Empire has had it with the destabilizing predictions. Seldon has an ace in the hole, as he has devised a way to shorten the dark ages to a mere 1000 years. This plan is to collect together all the human knowledge into the Encyclopedia Galactica.
The imperial committee agrees to Seldon's plan, as they don't want any more visibility to him than necessary. They send him and his researchers to a back end planet Terminus, where the Foundation is formed to gather the encyclopedia. There is another Foundation as well, further away at Star's End.
50 years later, Terminus is a colony of scientists tinkering away with their massive task. The Empire's collapse has already begun, with planets surrounding Terminus ripping themselves out from the Empire and forming independent kingdoms. Many of these worlds have also regressed scientifically, as they have forgotten things like atomic energy and turned back on coal and oil.
The Encyclopedists are blind to all this, as they only care about their work. Only the mayor of Terminus, Salvor Hardin, understands that something has to be done before the strongest of the kingdoms, Anacreon, decides to take over the planet. He devises a plan of using the one thing Terminus has over others, nuclear power.
Despite this stabilizing matters, the board of trustees of Terminus are still doubtful of Hardin's new nuclear power-based politics. Luckily enough, the Time Vault of Hari Seldon's will open soon and Hardin decides to gamble by telling his opposers, that this time around, there will be a message from Seldon himself. It pays off, as this really happens. A hologram of Seldon's greets the people and tells them, they either have now successfully avoided the first of many crises on the way of shortening the upcoming chaos or died trying. He also tells that the solution to the crisis was, indeed, the use of nuclear power. He doesn't, however, want to reveal too much of the future. Seldon only states, that when the future crisis come, all of them will have only one possible and obvious solution and that is how they will recognize a Seldon Crisis.
For 30 years, Hardin acts as a mayor with great success. While the Foundation still is separated from the old Galactic Empire, they have considerable scientific leverage over their neighbours. They have turned the leverage of atomic power into a religion, which keeps the barbarous cultures at bay. But a new crisis is on the horizon when the nearby monarch begins to plan for overthrowing the Foundation. Things are not made any easier by the growing political pressure from a new political party, demanding a more direct approach towards barbarous civilizations of the nearby space.
Hardin's religious-political approach is, however, proven effective, when he again manages to prevent a Seldon Crisis. This is hammered even further by another appearance of Hari Seldon in his holographic glory.
Around 135 after the beginning of the Foundation Era, traders have become an important aspect of spreading the gospel of Foundations nuclear-powered Evangelion. Linmar Ponyets is just on his trade route when he is ordered by the Foundation to go to a nearby planet to see if he can spring out an imprisoned fellow trader, who in actuality is a Foundation spy.
Ponyets travels to Askonia, where he uses his skill in trading to help his old trader/spy friend go free. He also realizes why Gorov went to the isolated planet in the first place and manages to open up trade of nuclear goods to where it previously was impossible. This time around, there is no new message from Seldon, but this new venue of trading does open up a new party of power within the Foundation.
Around the year 155 F.E., a nuclear threat begins to loom over the Foundation. A group of trader ships have gone missing and the powers that be suspect, that a nearby Kingdom has managed to get their hands on nuclear weapons, as they would be the only way foundation vessels could be captured.
Master Trader Hober Mallow is sent to Korellia, where he is to conduct an investigation on the possibility of nuclear weapons. In the end, he manages to find evidence of the presence of the old Empire from Korellia. As a shrewd man, he uses this as a tool to gain more political standing, becoming the first of the Merchant Princes of Foundation. This solves yet another Seldon Crisis, allowing the Foundation to grow stronger.
As the first book is a series of novels set in different times, there are very few overlapping characters within the narrative. In fact, more than a character-driven narrative, Foundation works more like a history text. It doesn't present all of the things that have happened during the existence of the Foundation but focuses on the great crises instead. This isn't at all surprising, as the core idea Asimov had was to present the fall of a galactic empire in the similar fashion the Roman Empire fell.
So, the origins of the stories in mind, it makes sense that Foundation is not a story about a specific person, but a set of people in the turning points of the grand history of change. That really is the point of Foundation, to see what the crises Hari Seldon predicted to have in store for Foundation, and the seeds of the new Empire, he envisioned.
While the stories might seem small, the grand narrative, the sprawling epic that is the collapse of the Empire and the rise of the new one, is constantly weaved in the background. The people, who solve the crises know, that they are just mere specks in history, a small part of the grand prediction that goes forwards like a train.
Obviously, Seldon couldn't be 100% sure, that things would go as he calculated, but he was certain of one thing: if he'd somehow make sure, that every crisis would evolve into a point where only one option would be possible and thus ensure the age of barbarism and decay would last mere 1000-years. The Foundation covers only about 1/5th of the epic plan, so by the end, the journey is still just on its first steps.
There's one rather glaring aspect in the whole of the narrative of Foundation, that jumped at me. That is the role of women in the Foundation and in the Empire. Or, in other words, the lack of women almost altogether. I can recall only one prominent female character and even she was presented as a naive queen of a backwards planet, easily distracted by the scientific baubles handed out by the merchants of Foundation. All the important roles are deserved to men and women in this society are described mostly as housewives and homemakers, which is a very 1950s kind of worldview. In fact, as a whole, the whole of the educated world of Foundation, at least in the stories of the first book, feels very tied to the norms of the USA in the '50s and 1940s.
This isn't really that surprising, in the end, as the stories themselves were before collected into a book, written between 1943 and 1950. So perhaps it was, that Asimov, then still a man in his 30s wasn't aware of the sociopolitical changes happening in the world at large, paving way for women. Or perhaps he thought the readers of science fiction weren't ready for such things at the time. Whatever the reason is, the role of women does jump out from the stories. But for what it's worth, and it has been a while since I've read the sequel novels so my memory about this is a bit vague, the role of women will be stronger in the sequels.
So, perhaps with some hindsight, you could argue that the era of the Empire and the start of the Foundation were the real dark ages all along.
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