Foundation

I like boiling things down. It makes good chicken stock, and it simplifies communication. A few months ago I described Dune as being essentially feudal land battles in a desert archology with giant worms, and I've similarly treated books like Dracula, The Three Musketeers, and The Lost World in a sentence or two. Boiling the essence of a book down to a few words does not summarize it effectively, and should not be construed as descriptive regarding all the possible themes and subjects, but I find it a useful tool for stating my feelings toward the book while also giving an idea at the central premise.

I have tried to think about how I might boil Foundation down into such a statement, and I've arrived at the conclusion that I can't. Is the book about science? Of course. Is it also about politics, communication, personal responsibility, economics, and education? Also yes. Is it a sci-fi epic dealing with galactic-scale mayhem and an intimate conversation between two close friends? Yes and yes. It probably doesn't help that my own personal feelings for Foundation cannot be easily stated. I love the book, but I don't lightly recommend it. I respect the universe and the mind that created it, but I don't wish there were somehow more. It's complicated in every facet that I look at the issue from, and so it is with the intent to convey a sort of reverence combined with the understanding that we're talking about something huge here that I arrive, finally, at the best version I can manage of a boiled-down summary;

Foundation is about the future.

So what am I talking about? If you're confused because you'd never even heard of Foundation before a few months back when Apple started advertising an adaptation for it on their streaming service, don't worry. I'm sure you're not alone. Foundation is the book-published form of a number of short stories written by Issac Asimov, who is in his own way the father of modern science fiction. Standing on the backs of authors like Wells and Verne, of course, Asimov turned a futurists eye to the society he lived in and took a stab at telling stories he imagined might eventually come to pass. He tried to predict the path of humanity to the stars, and wound up creating a whole slew of speculative science as a result that inspired future writers and scientists alike. Foundation is just a piece of the many, many seminal works he wrote.

And no, I suppose I don't mean that it is literally about the future of earth. This isn't a statistical analysis attempting to predict upcoming events, though the book should probably be required reading for anyone going into statistics. What it is about is the future of humanity. When faced with galactic issues, when looking at things like the end of a civilization, what does humanity do? How does it react? That is Foundation, the story of how the human species might react to a broad array of conflicts.

That story is told through the medium of science, of course. If you've read my musings on the subject, I'll specify for you; Foundation is hard sci-fi. It is, by the ruler I arbitrarily defined in that post, the hardest sci-fi I can imagine. See, the science through which the story of Asimov's humanity is told isn't really a science at all. It's the father of all science.

It's math.

Psychohistory is a fictional branch of mathematics Asimov postulated for his Foundation books, and it is essentially an advanced form of statistics that is capable of predicting the outcomes of events on large populations over extended periods of time with uncanny clarity. This psychohistory is the lens through which Foundation's story is told. I know I just lost some of you right there. Even Steven Hawking, an actual theoretical physicist and mathematician, avoided talking about math in his books as much as Asimov talks about psychohistory in Foundation.

Of course it doesn't seem unapproachable to me. Once you understand that psychohistory enables some foreknowledge of the large scale events of a galactic populace, the stories that unfold concerning that populace are incredibly engaging and thought-provoking. The way those stories explore the effects of social forecast were remarkably prescient, and might feel a little familiar today. And for all the talk of math, the book isn't nearly as unapproachable as it might seem at first blush. Foundation is one of science fiction's finest works for many reasons, and I feel like at its heart this story about the future is one that everyone should try to understand, if only for what they might learn about themselves through the process.

There are lessons about humanity here that we should internalize. Because if individuals and societies were to internalize them, strife and internal conflict would fall by the wayside. This is what good science fiction is best at, and to me very few things are as good at it as Foundation.

It's almost like you could build something on this thing.