Second Foundation (and eBooks, oh my!)

The third part of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy wraps up the events of Foundation and Empire, and then jumps to yet another timeframe to wrap up the series. I had expected some kind of dramatic end to the series, but in a way it kind of fizzled. In Foundation we were introduced to Seldon's Plan, which involved setting up the Foundation, a small group of bright folks that would weather the collapse of the Galactic Empire, and which would inevitably lead to the creation of a Second Galactic Empire within a thousand years. The story jumped across the centuries that followed, and it felt kind of natural to assume it would end with a somewhat triumphant establishment of the Second Galactic Empire. But it was not to be, and I couldn't help but feel a little let down. I assume this is why Asimov jumped back on the horse thirty years later in the 1980s, and wrote Foundation's Edge, a followup to the original trilogy. I'll probably have to read that at some point, to get some kind of closure.

This third part of the series gets a little wooly, examining the mental powers of the Second Foundation folks, and how (or whether) they control events throughout the galaxy by manipulating people with their Enormous Brains. Asimov seems to be positing that with a sophisticated understanding of statistical psychology, one would develop the ability to control the brains of others. I don't think I enjoyed this as much as the previous two for that reason. Otherwise, it was very much in the model of the first two books. Reasonably shallow, relatively interchangeable characters, but a vast scope of space and time, and a strong sense of destiny (Asimov's twist being that it's destiny in the scientific, statistical sense, not a mystical, teleological sense).

Interestingly (for me, at least), halfway through reading Second Foundation I switched over to e-Reading. I grabbed a copy of Second Foundation from the interwebs (I don't really consider this kind of format-shifting to be piracy in any relevant sense), set up Calibre, converted it to an appropriate format, and read the second half on my iPad. It was Erica Sadun's article on TUAW that pushed me over the edge, prompted me to give it another try. I think I'm a convert. I think it'll also mean I get more reading done. My iPad goes most places with me, whereas whichever dead-tree novel I'm reading generally sits at home, on my bedside table. So there's just more opportunities to read a chapter. What this will mean in terms of getting PhD work done will be an interesting question; but I usually only do PhD work in time I specifically set aside of the purpose - I find it hard to get anything productive done study-wise in those little gaps of waiting time, or when surrounded by kids, or when cooking, or the myriad of other things where I find having something to read in amongst frequent distractions would help pass the time pleasantly.

Foundation and Empire

As was to be expected, the plot has thickened in the second book in Asimov's Foundation series. The Foundation is very successful, but an unexpected adversary, The Mule, turns up, and threatens to overthrow the Foundation. Exciting things unfold.

As Krin pointed out in her comment on my post about Foundation, the way technology is handled in the books is interesting (or off-putting, depending on how you take it), from a retro-futuristic perspective. It's all about the "atomics" - all the cool advanced tech developed by the Foundation is atomic powered. Miniaturization is key - it's what makes the Foundation's tech way better than that of its opponents. And computers basically don't exist. It's an interesting window into a time when information was scarce, and even authors like Asimov didn't imagine a future in which technology would bring about an information-abundant world like ours is today. The plot of Foundation and Empire occurs when the Galactic Empire is in the last stages of its collapse, and people just don't know what is happening on the other side of the galaxy. I found it hard to comprehend; that people aren't able to just go and look that stuff up. A novel written today, even if it didn't allow for hyperspace communication, would have the traders (who can cross the galaxy in weeks with a series of hyperspace jumps) carrying CDs full of data about what's going on around the wider galaxy, which would then get bought and cheerfully uploaded to local planetary editions of wikipedia.

But, it was written in 1952, and Foundation is a look at the future as envisioned then. In other aspects, it still holds up, and it's interesting to see echoes of other science fiction in here - certainly, I can see some of its influence in Iain Banks - the space-opera-ness, and the wide whole-of-galaxy unfolding-history feel of the story. There are a surprising number of people and place names I recognise from the Star Wars series (plus the whole "Galactic Empire" thing (oh, and Trantor, the city-planet, basically identical to Coruscant)).

Foundation

Every once in a while I look at my bookshelves, and think "OK, it's time I read ", and with weary heart I pluck it off the shelf and haul it upstairs to start reading. Often, the classics are hard going - written for a different time, written without the mass market in mind, but good for the mind - they're the Brussels sprouts of novels. Such were my feelings when I decided to read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's undoubtedly one of the greats, but as a sci-fi novel written in the fifties I was expecting a slow-going, cardboard-charactered read.

Foundation turned out to be a nice surprise. The characters are disposable and cardboard, but the story is rich and deep, and spans a scale of decades, across an entire galaxy. It starts with a scientist who is the greatest Psychohistorian ever, studying psychohistory, the science of predicting the big-picture future (this was written thirty years before chaos theory was invented, so at the time it was written, it was possibly scientifically credible). He realises the galactic empire is crumbling, and starts putting things in place to ensure humanity won't go into a 30,000 year dark age. The Foundation series is the story of what follows, with the first book broken into five sections, each with a mostly different cast of characters, set decades apart.

Each section works well, and it's enjoyable to see the history unfolding. It's also interesting to read in terms of the groundwork it laid for science fiction as a genre. It's certainly worth a read, and I'm following it with the rest of the original Foundation trilogy.