Book Review: Foundation

Isaac Asimov’s masterwork. Hot take: the TV show is better. There may be spoilers ahead.

I’ve probably done this in the wrong order. I watched the Apple TV+ adaptation’s first season (and made comment on it here) before starting to read the book. I’ve had the book for a little while though - I bought it before the TV series came out in September, but TBRs are a funny thing like that. All it really means is that this review will have a short section of comparison to the show, seeing as I first gave my views on it without having read the book. Now that I have, I understand the stark contrast between the two from a first-hand perspective, and I have some thoughts that I’ll put together after the review of the book itself. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is held to be one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, it spawned the concept of the Galactic Empire and was highly influential for almost everything that came after it - including Dune. This is a long one, so strap in.

And I’d just like to preface this with: this is my opinion only. If you enjoyed the book, got something out of it and totally disagree with me, that’s fine; no judgment on you. Plenty of people love this book, and plenty don’t. This time I fall into the latter.

Blurb

The Galactic Empire has prospered for twelve thousand years. Nobody suspects that the heart of the thriving Empire is rotten, until psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses his new science to foresee its terrible fate. Exiled to the desolate planet Terminus, Seldon establishes a colony of the greatest minds in the Empire, a Foundation which holds the key to changing the fate of the galaxy. However, the death throes of the Empire breed hostile new enemies, and the young Foundation’s fate will be threatened first.

Review

Just like with I, Robot, Asimov’s Foundation is really a collection of short stories - five in this instance. It’s a format that’s pretty common for the time it was written: science fiction stories were largely published not as single complete works but as serials in magazines, and so they needed to be on the shorter, snappier side of things. It’s only later that these stories were collected into a single bound edition and sold as novels. Each of the five stories details a significant era in the history of the Foundation as it faces crises mathematically and psychologically calculated to lead it inexorably to the formation of a new Empire after the old has fallen. These involve stories of how the Foundation establishes itself on the planet Terminus first as a scientific outpost, and then going through several metamorphoses to prevent it from being overtaken by its “barbaric” (hmm.) neighbours.

Wait… are they mathematicians or psychologists? The book seems to start off with Seldon as a mathematician and then goes onto refer to him as a psychologist throughout all the other stories. Weird.

The fall of the Galactic Empire as explored by Asimov is based around the history and fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a great concept, as with all of Asimov’s work - very high in concept indeed, for its time - but as a thoroughly modern reader, I couldn’t help but feel it was all rather… simplistic.

What do I mean by “simplistic”? The reason we’re given for the fall of the Galactic Empire is stagnation of thought: the entire galaxy has basically forgotten how the 50,000 year old technology of “atomic power” operates - a crucial technology for their very survival - and instead of training more people to reclaim that knowledge, they ignore it and restrict the use of the technology to the core worlds (and have maintenance people constantly doing minor repairs on power plants that are falling apart because they only know how to use it empirically). The consequence is that entire star systems essentially regress to an early 20th Century level. And the reason for all of this is because the nobles of the Empire have forgotten what the scientific method really is, and nobody is bothered about doing any new scientific research. They only want to catalogue the old.

An entire galaxy. Hundreds of thousands of planets. Quadrillions of people. And everyone’s simply forgotten how to do science? Come on.

Countless works have elaborated on the foundation (pun intended) Asimov laid here over the years. Galactic empires have been a staple for large-scale epic sci-fi for decades now, and I daresay they’ve refined the concept. We have more believable politics and motives, more complex machinations, and deeper analyses in later works than here right at the start. The politics that led to the rise, and then the resistance that preceded the fall of the Empire in Star Wars, for instance, is far more engaging and believable than the reasons given in Foundation. It is perhaps because Asimov frames the concept of an empire as a largely good thing: sure the current Galactic Empire is rotten to the core due to corruption and stagnation, but we only need to do it right next time around. Whereas in more modern works, a true empire (under a single absolute monarch) is pretty much universally acknowledged as a bad thing: a force for the evils of conquest and indigenous erasure.

So, in all, I don’t think the version of the Empire Asimov has in Foundation holds up today. I mean Frank Herbert’s Dune, written only 14 years later, does it a lot better.

Also, I know this is endemic of the genre in general (most egregiously in Star Trek), and something we’ve begun to move past now, but we have a failure of worldbuilding in that planets are treated as though they are small nations or settlements. It’s much easier to manage a world when it has only one type of people on it and is administered from one central place, but across an entire planet it’s not very realistic. Terminus, the planet of the Foundation itself, is excused from this, because the Foundation literally is a small settlement on an otherwise barren and inhospitable world lacking in resources. The other planets of the outer reaches - Anacreon, Smyrno, the other two of the Four Kingdoms, and Korell? No. Not excused. It’s possible the problem here is that Asimov was trying to apply the fall of the Roman Empire to a vastly upscaled civilisation, to the point where I think a lot of that stuff falls apart. Controlling lots of planets is a different creature to controlling and administering several countries on one planet. If you can only just barely do the one with a centralised totalitarian regime, there’s no way you can do the other.

The Foundation’s growth isn’t particularly believable either. I can buy that it starts as a small settlement focused wholly on creating the Encyclopedia Galactica, and that it needs to leverage its bargaining strength as the only atomic power in the sector to stop itself being invaded by the Kingdom of Anacreon, but later on it turns science into a religion and rules through it and… what? It kind of lost me at that point. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief any more after that.

Let’s move on to characters. Asimov is not good at characters. I’ve been told he’s better at it in later books, but these early works really do just treat characters as entirely inconsequential. One of the main reasons Foundation is not engaging to me as a modern reader is because there’s zero attention paid to the people in the story. Couple this with the fact that the five stories are short and they each represent a significant jump forward in time and a brand new set of characters, by the end I didn’t know or care who anyone was, aside from Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin. Even then, everyone has essentially the same personality - the main characters in each story are shrewd, businesslike, intelligent, logical and project this air of professionalism akin to MPs in the House of Commons pretending to be gentlemanly. They all chomp cigars and outwit their opponents. The differences between them are very minor. By contrast all of their opponents are framed as stupid; angry, lumbering oafs that are easily outwitted by applications of simple logic.

The prose lacks in any meaningful description, and the setting of each story is essentially in a meeting room or an office. It involves people: dignitaries, mayors, boards of trustees etc… sitting down in formal meetings and talking - all except the last story, The Merchant Princes, which does have changes of scenery at least. It all makes for very dull reading. There’s snippets of action here and there that hint at the potential of the story, but overall the execution feels like a rough outline. This is the skeleton of a story. With actual character development, engaging imagery and heavy edits, this one book could be expanded into a five-part series of 100,000 word novels (and that’s forgetting the rest of the series).

As it is, if you took the characters out and presented Foundation as an essay, it would make more sense.

I enjoyed parts of the book for its ideas, and for the inkling of greater things that poked at my imagination - Derelict Imperial Cruisers, threats of war and the fear of retaliation from the Empire. Some of the characters were okay. Salvor Hardin and Hari Seldon were decent, for instance. My favourite story out of the lot was The Mayors - the third - where Mayor Salvor Hardin prevents a war by showing just how much the Foundation has infiltrated the hearts and minds of their entire society. But overall, it doesn’t hold up, and I won’t be prioritising reading further in the series. There’s a niggling curiosity in the back of my mind to see where the Foundation goes after The Merchant Princes, so I may read the next book at some point, but it won’t be for a very long time.

Oh, and something that made me laugh, that’s absolutely indicative of its time: The first mention of a woman character is on page 186. We see her all of twice, though she does hold significant political influence - she was quite interesting, actually. But the book is only 231 pages long! There’s also the preponderance on ATOMIC EVERYTHING. I’m sure modern writers will be laughed at in 100 years time for our quaint ideas about far future technology, but it was nonetheless amusing to read the idea that literally everything in Asimov’s future is powered by atomic generators. From spaceships to personal shields, to weapons and dishwashers and even women’s clothing accessories. It’s a good thing Asimov assures us they’ve cured cancer 50,000 years from now.

But there’s also the idea that Asimov didn’t think beyond the miniaturisation of atomic power. He has a character state that atomic power is a fifty thousand year-old technology. Surely a Galactic Empire that’s been around for 12,000 years, 50,000 years from now, would be using something other than nuclear fission - which is undoubtedly the type of “atomic power” Asimov is talking about here, given it was a new thing at the time he was writing this. Only seventy years on, and we’re so close to having viable nuclear fusion power. Tens of thousands of years in the future I’d expect us to be a lot further on than that (and we’d need to be, if we’re to travel the stars and become a galactic civilisation).

There’s weird errors in the version of the book I’ve got as well. I don’t mean the odd typo that’s slipped through, but a character in the final story called Sutt is routinely and erroneously referred to as “Sun”. I thought at first it was just an expression the characters were using (like “great galloping galaxies!” - that one made me laugh, legitimately) but as I read on, it definitely seemed like they were using Sun as Sutt’s name. Very odd.

Comparison to the Apple TV+ Show

Okay, so if that didn’t already make you mad, this part might. I think the Apple TV+ adaptation of Foundation is better in every conceivable regard than the book. It has the outstanding visuals, it has the reworked characters, it has the heavy edits to the plot and pacing, villain motivations and gives a much better reasoning for the decline and stagnation of the Empire. Most importantly I think it still carries the heart of the book, it just does everything better.

The first season only adapts the first two stories in the book: The Psychohistorians and The Encyclopedists, and maybe borrowing a bit from The Mayors. The thing is, there’s not a lot that happens in the first two stories. They’re much lighter on details than the rest. This is proven by the fact that the TV show adapts the first story in its entirety in the very first episode. From there, it diverges, and spends the remaining nine episodes loosely adapting the story of the second. The show keeps you invested in the characters it introduces though. In the book, Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick are long gone by the second story, but in the show, they have their own expanded storyline. Salvor Hardin’s character as well, while very different from her male book counterpart, still carries the essence of his personality.

The book purports to be about the administration and fall of the Galactic Empire, but we never see anything from the perspective of the Empire itself. We spend all our time in the Periphery - the outer reaches of the galaxy, on Terminus and its neighbouring systems - and only at the very start, and near the very end, do we see anything of the worlds that are still part of the dwindling Empire. The show remedies this with the addition of the absolutely fantastic Genetic Dynasty storyline, where we see the difficulties faced by the tripartite Emperor himself - a concept that is not in the book at all.

Yes there’s more exciting action, pew pew fighting, explosions and emotions running high in the show, and less cold applications of logic. But if the show had adapted The Encyclopedists faithfully, it would have been awful. The endless board meetings and talking through issues that you never actually see would have been mind-numbingly dull. So, for all its flaws, I think the TV series isn’t just doing a good adaptation of Foundation, but is completing it by putting flesh on its bones and breathing life into it.

Those are my spicy thoughts on Foundation. As I said above, if you like the book, that’s cool too. It just wasn’t for me.