The Limits of Imagination

How Isaac Asimov's Foundation illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of science fiction as a genre

Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. Narrated Scott Brick. Random House Audio, 2010.

Premise and Plot: As a fan of science fiction (and having tried my own hand at it myself, though with very limited success), I am a bit late to the game when it comes to the grandfather of all space operas: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Outside the circles of dedicated science fiction nerds, I would imagine that this work is little known today. However, given that Amazon’s new series of the same name might spark a revival of interest or at least familiarity with this work, now seemed as good a time as any to acquaint myself with the literary vision that, as much as any other, turned popular imagination to the skies and envisioned humanity’s spread beyond, not merely the earth, but the solar system. Given the proliferation of thinkers and entrepreneurs such as Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk who see the future of humankind as inextricably linked to its ability to colonize the stars and the debt (conscious or unconscious) that these interstellar visionaries owe to the imagination of Mr. Asimov, it is well worth considering the work (or, more precisely, series of works, of which this is the first) that gave that imaginative vision its archetypal expression.

As one would expect for a space opera, Foundation takes place on a truly mind-boggling scale, where distances are measured in terms of parsecs, regions in terms of planetary systems, and populations in terms of quintillions (or approximately one billion times the total population of the earth today). The scene is set some 10,000 years in the future, where humanity has successfully colonized systems across the galaxy, and all these are united together under a single galactic empire ruled from the capital planet, Trantor. However, the empire is in decay. Hari Seldon, a brilliant scientist who has perfected the science of psychohistory (the ability to precisely predict the future course of human actions by mathematically calculating the variables that determine human action in the same way that an astrophysicist can predict the life cycle of a star), has discovered that the empire is on the verge of collapse, and that this collapse will precipitate a new Dark Age that, unaltered, will last for 30,000 years. However, his calculations also reveal that this Dark Age can be shortened to one thousand years, if there can be a repository of human knowledge that would provide a springboard for the return of science and enlightened rule in a second Galactic Empire. Accordingly, Seldon establishes the Foundation. Nominally, the Foundation is a collection of encyclopedists exiled to the remote planet Terminus (whose name, appropriately, means “end”) to catalogue and refine all human knowledge into a single compendium. Practically, it is to be a planetary time capsule where generations of scientists live and die, transmitting knowledge to their successors (much like the painstaking monastic copyists of medieval Europe) until such time as that knowledge can be put to good use and a new, interstellar Renaissance can emerge.

Originally published as five separate short stories, Foundation provides five separate snapshots of the development of this narrative universe over the first two centuries of its millennium-long trajectory. The first part—“The Psychohistorians”—lays the framework and background for the rest of the story by introducing the key concepts (such as the Galactic Empire and psychohistory) and the key characters (such as Hari Seldon) that undergird the rest of the narrative. The second part— “The Mayors”—picks up the story fifty years later, as the power of the Galactic empire has already disintegrated to the point that the Foundation must exercise effective independence, using its scientific knowledge to play its neighbors off each other to deter them from annexing the Foundation itself. By part three—“The Mayors”—the Foundation has developed a religion that it inextricably links to its scientific and technological prowess, and uses a caste of technician-priests, who are able to operate the Foundation’s technology but wholly ignorant of its theoretical basis and taught to attribute its power to the workings of a great “Galactic Spirit.” In parts four (“The Traders”) and five (“The Merchant Princes”), economics and avarice replace credulous faith as the basis for the Foundation’s control and expansion into more and more star systems as even those who are resistant to abandoning their ancestral religions (and, more importantly, ceding political power to the missionary-priests of the Galactic Spirit) are unable to resist the lure of the shiny new atomic-powered toys that the Foundation offers to brighten their dull provincial lives.

This being the first book of a trilogy, the story somewhat abruptly ends here.

Analysis: Isaac Asimov was not the originator of popular science fiction; I would grant that distinction to Jules Verne, whose works like From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or Around the World in 80 Days—works which first hit home to the popular imagination the intoxicating idea that science meant that anything was possible. A generation later, HG Wells turned science fiction into the vehicle for an all-encompassing worldview— almost a religion (which CS Lewis delightfully referred to in his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” as “Wellsianity”)— which became the forerunner of much of contemporary secular humanism, in which the unconscious, impersonal hand of scientific progress, rather than any God or notion of the supernatural, is the prime mover.

However, if Verne and Wells are the patriarchs of the science fiction genre, at least as we know it today, I would hold that Asimov is its father. And of all his works, Foundation is appropriately named, because this work (or, more accurately, compilation of works) laid the foundation for much of the science fiction (and especially that sci-fi subgenre the “space opera”) that has succeeded it over the intervening 75 years. If it is not today as well-known as its descendants like Star Trek and Star Wars, these usurpers nonetheless owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the scope of the vision presented by Asimov that made their variations on this original theme possible.

As the foundation of a literary tradition in itself, Foundation is worth considering at length, for it illustrates both the strengths and limitations of the genre, and of the human imagination. One of the most striking features of the universe in Foundation is how very familiar it looks—and how much more familiar it would have looked to a reader in the 1940s and 50s. The capital city of a galactic empire, in spite over ten thousand years of technological progress and its population of forty billion inhabitants, is essentially a bigger, better version of 1950s urban planning. People still make calls from payphones (though the phones have telescreens). People still take taxis with human drivers (though said taxis can fly). People still read physical newspapers and pay for these papers with metal coins. In this, Foundation demonstrates the limits of the human imagination that Asimov, in spite of his visionary brilliance, was unable to transcend.

We are not nearly as imaginative as we fancy ourselves to be: we just recombine phenomena that we already know and then project them onto a bigger screen. The trouble with science fiction is that, no matter how large a screen we project our imaginations onto, the projector—our imagination—remains the same size. Consequently, the bigger the screen, the fuzzier the picture. In a work of science fiction, one may visit dozens of planets or times or even alternate universes; however, each one taken as a whole has no more color, variety, or character (and often a good deal less) than would be contained in a single London neighborhood in a Dickens novel.

If this inability to transcend the familiar is the great weakness of science fiction, however, it is also its great strength: the chance to recognize and interpret our present circumstances in a different light. Science fiction is to a largely desacralized age what Pilgrim’s Progress was to a pious one: a chance to understand the metanarrative of individual life and collective history through a concrete story. Thus understood, Foundation is less a story about a potential future than it is a mythology of the present—a materialistic mythology in which the forces of religion and superstition, greed and acquisitiveness, are all simply tools to be marshalled by the at times unscrupulous but nonetheless enlightened scientists of the Foundation as the necessary, noble lie in order to preserve the spark of reason in an age of darkness.