Foundation

You kind of have to approach this the way you’d approach a fable rather than a traditional novel, a handful of episodes years apart, each one solved by someone smart enough to see the mathematics of history playing out ahead of everyone else. I went in expecting a continuous story and got something closer to a thinkpiece with characters, and once I recalibrated for that, the book got a lot better.

The core idea holds up better than I expected for something this old, Hari Seldon predicting the fall and rebirth of a galactic empire through something Asimov calls psychohistory, which is really just statistics applied at a civilization scale, and the book spends real time on how that kind of prediction gets used to control a population, religion turned into a lever more than once. That part felt sharper and more cynical than I remembered science fiction from this era usually being.

Where it drags is the front half, dusty committee rooms on Terminus, a lot of talk and not much motion, and the book only really opens up once the action moves out into the wider galaxy in the second half. I noticed myself translating the old futurism as I read, swap in a woman here, swap in some plausible energy source there instead of nuclear power run forever, which is a tax every reader of Golden Age SF pays eventually and this book asks for more of it than most.

Magnifico the clown stuck with me longer than I expected going in, a genuinely well drawn character in a book that otherwise favors big ideas over people. I’m reading this as the first of a trilogy, and I liked it enough as a foundation, no pun intended, that I’m already looking forward to seeing where the Mule shows up to complicate everything.