Saturday, 5 January 2019 07:57 pm
Book Review: Foundation and Empire
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deckardcanineMan, I don't think I even had a LiveJournal account when I read Isaac Asimov's first Foundation book. I didn't like it much at the time, because (1) there were no major female characters, (2) several of the names distracted me with awkwardness, (3) it seemed to vindicate building a religion on known lies and tricking people into following it, and (4) it made one man look way too brilliant -- or blessed with luck by his creator. Nevertheless, after enjoying Asimov's robot stories, I thought I'd have another go at this series.
In Foundation, set tens of thousands of years from now in an all-human Galactic Empire, there was a social science known as psychohistory, whose practitioners calculated the probabilities of grand-scale societal events. The reputed best psychohistorian, Hari Seldon, predicted the decline of the Empire and launched the Foundation to preserve some civilization and minimize the length of the dark age to follow. F&E, the immediate sequel, is set about 300 years later, by which time psychohistory is a lost art but Seldon provides some posthumous guidance. In the first half, the Empire is still big enough to threaten the Foundation (largely forgotten by outsiders until ambitious General Bel Riose gets intrigued) but doesn't have nearly as good technology. In the second half, the Foundation has come out on top but then faces a stronger threat from within. Could it prevail and persist only to fail its purpose?
As my broad outline implies, there is no one protagonist. The second volume doesn't cover nearly as long a period, but it still shifts the focus a lot among politicians, scholars, traders, soldiers, and servants. I don't feel like naming all the focal characters, because their personalities are rarely all that interesting. I think my favorite is Ebling Mis, a blunt, impatient, tyrant-defying scientist prone to expletives like "ga-LAX-y" and "unprintable." (This is a story where people talk of "the Space Fiend" and other concepts or turns of phrase that must not have been played straight since the '50s.) After that, there's "Magnifico," a renegade clown with a few dichotomies: He acts dimwitted, timid, and humble yet improvises flowery language and half-seduces a married woman, Bayta.
I'm happy to say that all my objections above have been at least partly addressed this time around. For starters, Bayta gains a good deal of attention. While she doesn't show any particular talents, she is unusually caring and figures out the twist before any other character -- or me, tho I was getting there. It's a good twist, BTW, and I appreciate how she foils the scheme.
The names, while still mostly unused in the real world, are easier for me to swallow. They're not as ugly as "Gaal Dornick" or unintentionally suggestive like "Wienis." I don't know whether Asimov put more thought into them or just happened on better ones.
The religious factor isn't looking so beneficial anymore. After all, discouraging people under your rule from gaining certain knowledge doesn't exactly help keep that knowledge alive. It comes as no surprise that as the Foundation gains power and population, it resembles the decadent Empire more and more.
In retrospect, I'm not sure what annoyed me most about Seldon appearing to be right all the time. It's bad for reader suspense, even if individuals have no assurance of their own safety within his unstoppable plans (again, these guys get too little attention for me to really care about them). It nearly ignores the fact that a 92% probability is not a 100% certainty, so I'd expect his string of predictions, however low on detail, to get increasingly inaccurate long before the end of his millennial agenda. Finally, for all the apparent predictability of the masses, I don't believe for a moment that inspired individuals cannot change the course of history in a significant way. Heck, that's exactly what Seldon himself set out to do by starting the Foundation! Was he so arrogant that he assumed nobody else would ever come close to his level of influence? It occurred to me that Asimov's early Soviet background may have shaped his view of humanity.
Imagine my relief when one of Seldon's cocky recorded messages proved incorrect, causing the general faith in him to crumble rapidly. And we have a single man to thank for it! Unfortunately, it's a mutant with at least one superpower, suggesting that Asimov still didn't believe in sufficiently influential normal humans. He's not on par with the Lord Ruler from Mistborn: The Final Empire, but he can still affect lots of people at once.
In fact, it might have been better for the Foundation if he were more like the Lord Ruler -- not in immorality so much as in immortality. He has the halfway-honorable goal of ending the dark age well ahead of schedule, but if he dies without a comparable successor, the dark age will resume without a proper Foundation to mitigate it. Of course, if he does manage to have superpowered progeny, it'll be bad news for the mundanes.
The ending indicates that while Seldon may not have counted on the present scenario, he did have a backup in the works. I can accept this. A smart guy recognizes his limitations, and it's only so far-fetched to think that he lived long enough to set Plans A and B in motion concurrently.
Deceptively titled threequel Second Foundation sits on my shelf. I'm not about to get rid of it. This series has gotten intellectually stimulating, if still kinda low on action, and I am curious to know how it pans out someday.
Now I've started John Abercrombie's The Blade Itself. Considering how miserable the focal characters are at the start and how much grit is promised for later, it's pretty enjoyable so far.
In Foundation, set tens of thousands of years from now in an all-human Galactic Empire, there was a social science known as psychohistory, whose practitioners calculated the probabilities of grand-scale societal events. The reputed best psychohistorian, Hari Seldon, predicted the decline of the Empire and launched the Foundation to preserve some civilization and minimize the length of the dark age to follow. F&E, the immediate sequel, is set about 300 years later, by which time psychohistory is a lost art but Seldon provides some posthumous guidance. In the first half, the Empire is still big enough to threaten the Foundation (largely forgotten by outsiders until ambitious General Bel Riose gets intrigued) but doesn't have nearly as good technology. In the second half, the Foundation has come out on top but then faces a stronger threat from within. Could it prevail and persist only to fail its purpose?
As my broad outline implies, there is no one protagonist. The second volume doesn't cover nearly as long a period, but it still shifts the focus a lot among politicians, scholars, traders, soldiers, and servants. I don't feel like naming all the focal characters, because their personalities are rarely all that interesting. I think my favorite is Ebling Mis, a blunt, impatient, tyrant-defying scientist prone to expletives like "ga-LAX-y" and "unprintable." (This is a story where people talk of "the Space Fiend" and other concepts or turns of phrase that must not have been played straight since the '50s.) After that, there's "Magnifico," a renegade clown with a few dichotomies: He acts dimwitted, timid, and humble yet improvises flowery language and half-seduces a married woman, Bayta.
I'm happy to say that all my objections above have been at least partly addressed this time around. For starters, Bayta gains a good deal of attention. While she doesn't show any particular talents, she is unusually caring and figures out the twist before any other character -- or me, tho I was getting there. It's a good twist, BTW, and I appreciate how she foils the scheme.
The names, while still mostly unused in the real world, are easier for me to swallow. They're not as ugly as "Gaal Dornick" or unintentionally suggestive like "Wienis." I don't know whether Asimov put more thought into them or just happened on better ones.
The religious factor isn't looking so beneficial anymore. After all, discouraging people under your rule from gaining certain knowledge doesn't exactly help keep that knowledge alive. It comes as no surprise that as the Foundation gains power and population, it resembles the decadent Empire more and more.
In retrospect, I'm not sure what annoyed me most about Seldon appearing to be right all the time. It's bad for reader suspense, even if individuals have no assurance of their own safety within his unstoppable plans (again, these guys get too little attention for me to really care about them). It nearly ignores the fact that a 92% probability is not a 100% certainty, so I'd expect his string of predictions, however low on detail, to get increasingly inaccurate long before the end of his millennial agenda. Finally, for all the apparent predictability of the masses, I don't believe for a moment that inspired individuals cannot change the course of history in a significant way. Heck, that's exactly what Seldon himself set out to do by starting the Foundation! Was he so arrogant that he assumed nobody else would ever come close to his level of influence? It occurred to me that Asimov's early Soviet background may have shaped his view of humanity.
Imagine my relief when one of Seldon's cocky recorded messages proved incorrect, causing the general faith in him to crumble rapidly. And we have a single man to thank for it! Unfortunately, it's a mutant with at least one superpower, suggesting that Asimov still didn't believe in sufficiently influential normal humans. He's not on par with the Lord Ruler from Mistborn: The Final Empire, but he can still affect lots of people at once.
In fact, it might have been better for the Foundation if he were more like the Lord Ruler -- not in immorality so much as in immortality. He has the halfway-honorable goal of ending the dark age well ahead of schedule, but if he dies without a comparable successor, the dark age will resume without a proper Foundation to mitigate it. Of course, if he does manage to have superpowered progeny, it'll be bad news for the mundanes.
The ending indicates that while Seldon may not have counted on the present scenario, he did have a backup in the works. I can accept this. A smart guy recognizes his limitations, and it's only so far-fetched to think that he lived long enough to set Plans A and B in motion concurrently.
Deceptively titled threequel Second Foundation sits on my shelf. I'm not about to get rid of it. This series has gotten intellectually stimulating, if still kinda low on action, and I am curious to know how it pans out someday.
Now I've started John Abercrombie's The Blade Itself. Considering how miserable the focal characters are at the start and how much grit is promised for later, it's pretty enjoyable so far.