Great Sci-Fi Novels 1: Asimov’s Foundation
One of my favorite sci-fi novels is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. I read it when I was fifteen. Foundation and Episode IV, the first installment of the Star Wars saga (1977), significantly influenced my decision to major in astronomy and pursue a PhD in the same field. Foundation was first published in 1951, and it’s the opening novel in Asimov’s highly influential series. The story is set in a far future where humanity has spread across the Galaxy. The protagonist, Hari Seldon, is a brilliant mathematician and the creator of “psychohistory,” a fictional branch of mathematics that predicts large-scale future events. Seldon foresees the fall of the Galactic Empire and the onset of a dark age lasting 30,000 years.
To mitigate this, Seldon devises a plan to shorten the Dark Age to just 1,000 years by establishing two “Foundations” at opposite ends of the Galaxy. The novel primarily focuses on establishing the first Foundation on the remote planet Terminus, populated by scientists and scholars tasked with preserving knowledge and advancing technological progress.
As the Empire crumbles, the Foundation faces threats from surrounding barbaric kingdoms. Through clever diplomacy, the Foundation’s leaders manipulate these external forces to guarantee its survival, often using the Foundation’s superior technology as leverage.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its exploration of historical cycles. Applying psychohistory enables Asimov to explore themes of determinism and free will on a galactic scale, offering readers thought-provoking insights into how civilizations rise and fall. The novel’s structure, composed of interconnected stories rather than a single linear plot, effectively conveys the vastness of the universe and the complexity of the forces shaping it.
While Foundation is a pioneering work that excels in its intellectual ambition, it has shortcomings. Some plot details may feel dated to the modern reader. For example, even though the story is set 12000 years in the future, most characters still use cash to pay for taxi fares. And on Trantor, the capital city of the Galactic Empire, any transport, including elevators, is still human-operated. A notable exception is Isaac Asimov, who predicted the existence of tablet PCs decades before the Star Trek TV show and the Apple iPad. And it’s fascinating that Asimov, writing in the Fifties, populates the Milky Way Galaxy with twenty-five million inhabited planets. Consider that exoplanets remained purely hypothetical until the first confirmed observation in 1995.
Indeed, Foundation often falls short in character development. Asimov’s focus on grand ideas and intricate plots sometimes comes at the expense of his characters, who can feel more like vehicles for philosophical discourse than fully fleshed-out individuals. The dialogue is often stilted and formal, lacking the emotional depth that might have made the novel more engaging on a human level.
However, Foundation can still appeal to science fiction fans due to its accurate world-building.
A compelling science fiction worldbuilding can’t be achieved without delivering some backstory at the novel’s beginning. This must be done as early as possible, without revealing too much or boring readers.
Asimov’s delivery of some backstory at regular intervals throughout the novel is particularly compelling. At the beginning of each chapter, a quotation from the fictional Galactic Encyclopedia provides valuable information.
Here are some examples:
Part I, Chapter 1:
HARI SELDON – … born in the 11,988 year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. […] Born to middle class parents on Helicon, Arcturus sector […].
From the ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA.
Part I, Chapter 3:
TRANTOR – … […] As the center of the Imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of generations and located, as it was, toward the central regions of the Galaxy among the most densely populated and industrially advanced worlds of the system […]. Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor… […].
From the ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA.
Part II, Chapter 1:
TERMINUS – … […] Located on the very fringe of the Galactic spiral, an only planet of an isolated sun, poor in resources and negligible in economic value, it was never settled in the five centuries after its discovery […].
From the ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA.
From these short lines, the reader can learn a lot about the tone and setting of the story:
- It’ll be about a Galactic Empire. The plot will unfold in a nation-state encompassing most of the Galaxy’s habitable planets.
In technical jargon, a Galactic Empire is what astronomers call a Kardashev Type III civilization, which is a “civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its galaxy” (M.M. Ćirković, 2015);
- It’ll be about a long-lasting human civilization. Isaac Asimov’s future human society survived the so-called Great Filter. As explained in the book Exoplanets by Michael Summers and James Trefil:
[…] there really doesn’t seem to be anything at all special about the way that life developed on Earth, and given the abundance of planets out there, there is no reason that complex life shouldn’t be quite common. On the other hand, from what we know about the process of evolution, we can expect the winners of the evolutionary game on other planets to be no more benevolent than Homo Sapiens. In this case, the [coming] Great Filter is easy to see. Once an aggressive, warlike species discovers science, they’re likely to turn their discoveries against one another and, in essence, wipe themselves out. […]
- It’ll involve interstellar and faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is loosely based on Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In his monumental work, the 17th-century English historian stressed the importance of Roman roads in ensuring efficient communications between the central authority and the dozens of provinces of an enormous Empire. The Galactic analog of Roman roads is, of course, hyperspace. Asimov was one of the first sci-fi authors to use this plot device to sidestep the long time required for interstellar journeys.
Find out more about relaying backstory to the reader in this post and this post.
