Foundation

While it is best known for being the first book to introduce the concept of a "galactic empire," the real juice comes from the gradual revelation of a profound thesis: Epistemology and Persuasion Science are the most important academic disciplines of all. 

This was the inspiration for my own journey into those two fields and led to my career in Military Intelligence.

While these explorations are ultimately liberating, this liberation does not come without a cost. I found myself truly in the dilemma of Plato's Allegory of the Cave: I had to accept both the obligation to free minds and… show more.

This far-reaching story of the future of civilization has fascinated me since I first picked it up. The invention of a scientific discipline, psychohistory, upon which to design and plan for the rise and fall of civilizations across thousands of years. As a writer, this blew me away just from a planning and plotting perspective – aligning all these pieces to line up and fall into place has been a shining example to me of what can be accomplished by a superior mind.

Foundation was inspired by Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it shows. The series spans millennia, with dark ages and rediscoveries, civilization versus barbarism and naked imperial aggression. Asimov was not the first writer to create a “future history” (Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker predates it by more than a decade) but he certainly brought the concept to popular consciousness. Thought-provoking and dizzying in scope, Foundation remains a bedrock of modern science fiction. 

If you only know Foundation from its recent television incarnation, you might think it’s principally about cloned emperors and a young woman with psychic powers. But Asimov’s actual book, consisting of stories written when he was quite young, is about the attempt to found a kind of ark where a remnant of galactic civilization can outlast an imminent dark age. His heroes aren’t warriors, but include academics, politicians, and, in two of the five stories (“The Traders” and “The Merchant Princes”), merchants. These are buccaneering traders on the edge of civilization, who sometimes resort to blackmail, but they mostly use… show more.

Isaac Asimov was an author who thought out of the box. Foundation is one of the best science fiction series of all time. Asimov was insightful for the time he lived – mainly during WWII – and used the turmoil of the uncertainties of war to weave a much bigger story. Instead of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, you have a galactic war spanning a thousand years where Earth is a forgotten world. Asimov’s use of psychohistory to predict the future is spellbinding and pulls readers into his story and holds them captive until the last page. Surviving WWII enabled Asimov to… show more.

While the Foundation novels feel a bit dated now, Asimov’s vision of a sweeping galactic empire has influenced everything from Star Wars (Coruscant is basically a rip-off of Trantor) to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The series chronicles the fall of the old empire and the rise of a new one, and raises questions of fate vs. free will, historical inevitability, and the impact that individuals can have on the course of events much larger than themselves.

Foundation wasn’t my first Asimov story. On the contrary. My father enjoyed his books, and I tore through his library after discovering them as a teen. But what set Foundation apart from his other work and made it memorable for me was the concept of psychohistory — predicting how humanity would develop through rise, collapse, and rebirth. The idea fired up my own imagination and there is no doubt Asimov’s influence was key in helping me develop as a writer by sparking ideas about the rise and fall of empires, something that always fascinated me as an amateur historian.

I write fiction and so include Isaac Asimov’s series of seven books. Their importance in the science fiction tradition cannot be overstated. They birthed a number of major themes (robots, galactic empire, the future); their influence is undeniable (Star Wars, I Robot, the recent Apple TV series). Is there anyone who does not know the 3 Laws of Robotics? I’ve read them several times and am now on the last one he wrote, Forward the Foundation). Some argue the writing is poor (it’s true the first volumes are clumsy), but Asimov was 21 when he wrote… show more.