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Jennifer wrote: "Geezer, I can tell you that they did not mention the true location of Second Foundation in the prequels...."

That's surprising. Without benefit of having read the prequel's, that sounds like a neat trick. The whole idea of a prequel is to explain how things got set up, no? It just seems so logical to me that any sequel must spoil the surprise.

Jennifer wrote: "The whole point of Second Foundation was to help push society along according to the Plan, because having the Plan alone wasn't enough. Even Second Foundation, though, was a part of Asimov's and Seldon's greater plan..."

Yeah, I get that the second foundation was a hidden force to correct for any variations. In the sequel novels, Asimov explores them a little further, explaining how they keep extensive psychohistory charts of possible events and guide things along the "proper" path.

Given they have those extra powers, that's quite a lot of faith Seldon placed in the second foundation to remain a benevolent force in the galaxy. (Coming soon, another sequel, Rogue Foundation. :)


Jennifer wrote: "...Dune. I don't know why I read so many of those cursed books by Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert,...."

It's like going to see new Star Wars movies....? One just can't help oneself. :)

Which is why I don't think the real goal was to create a ruling class. I think he was looking at the developing empathetic psychic development and possibly thinking that it would make mankind more benevolent toward each other. I think that maybe the idea is that if you can psychically empathize with mankind, the traditional hierarchal government isn't necessary. I think that's what Asimov was demonstrating with Gaia. His character Seldon foresaw some of this, but I don't think he conceived the extent of Gaia.

I got the impression that it was his real goal because the prequel discusses the true nature of Second Foundation and why/how it came about. So Seldon had an idea of the possibility for the psychic nature of mankind to expand. But he didn't want to interfere overly much with the natural course, and set upon them the idea of becoming the guiding force for the Plan and eventual ruling class of the new world order.

Which is half true. They do guide the Plan. And their developed psychic abilities help bring about a new world order, but they aren't rulers. Because Gaia is egalitarian.

I think that there are some stories worth reading as add-ons to Asimov's Foundation Universe, but only after you have read the Asimov stuff. The fillers and speculators would probably denude the tale of some of the... (spoiler) Azimov puts into Seldon and the books' set up. I'd suggest the Origanist by Orson Scot Card and the first of the Second Foundation Trilogy (Foundation's Fear). I wasn't disappointed by them. They differ substantially from Asimov's writing, though the heavy influence is clear, particularly with regards to Azimov's other works (i.e. not Foundation, book 1), like 'Runaround' etc. Both works are also very different in terms of the cultural differences between the writers (1940s vs 1990s for example). Whilst I'm touching the three laws, I'd also recommend the trio of entertaining Roger MacBride Allen stories: Caliban, Inferno and Utopia. Again not Azimov, but I think worth a read in their own right.

I've read plenty of interesting contributions here. Thank you all for sharing.

It's difficult for me to comment on just Foundation, since all of the Foundation works (Azimov's at least) are tied together in my mind. That disclaimer in place, I'll try.

I really like this book, and I'd call it a book rather than a collection of short stories: because that is the only way I've encountered it; and also, although there are significant time and situational skips between some of the chapters (stories), they have a common plot thread and back story that should make most authors proud. The main reasons that I like it so much are, I think, the simplicity of the story and its unflinching paean to intellect.

I can see how Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could be a source of inspiration. I can also see historical influences within some of the important assumptions about human behaviour. Particularly in the loss of engineering expertise, religion and trade. I like Asimov's cerebral leaders and though I think he overplays the contrast between the bright (Foundation) leader and the dull antagonists, the binary confrontation of intellects makes situational resolution swift. (I hesitate to add, but being subservient to my brain, the intellectual victories have a strong emphatic resonance) The clash of intellectual imparity also means that we are readily able to fill the blanks at the end of most of the climaxes, without wondering 'what if' too heavily. There is a rhythm to the chapters that begins about chapter three or four that makes reading compelling. Having read it a couple of times now I don't have the same responses that I did the first time. However, I remember that when I first read it: at Chapter One, I wondered what the fuss was about; at Chapter Two, I wanted to know what would happen; at Chapter Three and Four, I realised what the fuss was about and didn't stop reading (except for school) until the end.

Psychohistory, was a wonderful device. Remembering the wonders of thermodynamics and that physicists are already modelling populations, including people and the stock exchange, why not throw in an understanding for the psychological motivations of historical events and then develop a statistical discipline to cover future eventualities. Wait... can we deal with the weather forecast too?

I would really recommend Foundation to anyone interested in SF or even those who are not complete fans of the disparate label. It is an easy read and other than the first chapter the technology and SF speak do not intrude on the story to any great extent. (I'm not denying that technomantic entities aren't decisive plot elements, they are... they are just not as overly intrusive as with most of the SF I've read lately)

I can go on praising Foundation, but I've noticed more people respond to me when I'm picky about the little things. Here goes with two of them...

i)
There is only one female character in the entirety of the novel. Her importance as a character is only by virtue of her father's power and possibly an assumption of hetrosexual matrimonial relations projected into the future. As a character her personality is unmemorable, or rather inseparable from a particular off-the-rack daughter of important faction leader stereotype. With regards to her purpose, she demonstrates: a power relation and politic between an antagonist and secondary baddy that could have been achieved to the same extent by a one liner from almost any character.

Housewives! Not only does this terminology remind me of the unfortunate choice of term employed by the House of Lords in Reckitt & Colman Ltd v Borden Inc (1990), (perhaps it was the fault of the survey language) it's context smacks of similar prejudices towards discernment by that gender specific homemaker. As I see it, for all the celebration or identity given to their existence, except for an implicit procreative explanation, women might as well not exist in Foundation. That is just so wrong!. " What do you expect? A housewives' rebellion?" (Foundation, V.18.)

ii) (this one has already been mentioned here, but I'd like to get in my ha'penny)
Losing technology in the future will not be quite as easy as misplacing the few hand transcribed copies of Vitruvius's De Architectura, or Sextus Julius Frontinus's Strategemata and De Aquaeductu, etc. We now have multiple instructional databases that become increasingly smaller and interactive. There is also a proliferation of teaching platforms. What happened to these reference sources? I felt that Azimov was too blasé in his assumption that technical expertise would degenerate to the level of the have-nots. Throughout the entire Foundation I wondered how such a thing came about. These thoughts were compounded by the continuance of the technological capability of the Foundation. I can accept that there would be knowledge disparity between the Foundation and the have-nots, but to this extent? I thought of a few explanations, the difficulty is in mentally imbuing them with the same credibility they would have had if Seldon had encountered them in his calculations and found them too difficult to counter except through isolation of the Foundation and in particular its data collection or redaction methodology.

Adam wrote: "There is only one female character in the entirety of the novel....

Housewives! ..."

But this is a story from pre-World War II, and that was pretty typical of female characters in science fiction. (Women are wives and girlfriends who occasionally require rescuing by big, strong, brave spacemen.) This hasn't entirely gone away, but it's improved some.

The only female Asimov character I can think of is Susan Calvin from many of the robot short stories.

"Housewives" was a perfectly acceptable term (and largely reflected reality) into the 60s & 70s.

Even through the 70s, a number of women writing science fiction disguised their gender behind male or ambiguous pen names, since science fiction fandom was almost entirely male and apparently a woman's name on the cover turned us off.

Adam wrote: "Losing technology in the future will not be quite as easy as misplacing the few hand transcribed copies....
I felt that Asimov was too blasé in his assumption that technical expertise would degenerate to the level of the have-nots...."

I think this is plausible. Technology is more than just information, equations, diagrams and instructions. It involves a complex web of supporting technology. Cut out a few pieces of the supporting infrastructure, and the whole edifice begins to collapse. Our economic world is geographically interdependent, with components from the US, Asia, Europe all intermingling in the technology we use every day. Now imagine that on a galactic scale, with thousands of planets each contributing specific raw materials or manufacturing specializations, and then imagine that suddenly you're cut off from all of them. Even when we think about building things from scratch, were used to being able to get all the components in tools without having to make those from scratch.

There's a BBC TV series from the late 70's, "Connections", produced by technologist/historian James Burke, which is also available in book form, (Connections, 1978). In the first episode/chapter, "The Trigger Effect", Burke uses as a starting point the , and asked the question what would you do if the power didn't come back on? How could you make do without the technological web that supports the modern city? (If you can track that BBC series down somewhere, I recommend watching.)

NASA tells us they have no idea how to make a Saturn V rocket or Apollo capsule to go back to the moon.

There are some time-travel science-fiction stories that drop someone from the modern era back into a more primitive time, where they discover that most of their modern knowledge is inadequate for being able to cope with the current technology.

Jennifer wrote: "(view spoiler)[Asimov had a vision for Gaia. (...cut...) He convinced Second Foundation his goal was for it to rule the new empire, but it was really to push mankind's evolution so that a ruling class would not be necessary. He was a dirty communist ;)! (hide spoiler)]"

I really hated that (view spoiler)[Gaia thing of his. It was too much new age stuff for my taste (hide spoiler)]. I actually enjoyed your political interpretation. :)

Fredrik wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "[spoilers removed]"

I really hated that [spoilers removed]. I actually enjoyed your political interpretation. :)"

I was a little shocked when I realized where he was taking it and disappointed, too. I mean, I like the idea of (view spoiler)[ a Gaia connection, but I wasn't impressed with it as the resolution to Foundation. But maybe there were hints toward this sort of commune society that I just didn't pick up on earlier. It makes sense that Daneel, as a robot, would see it as the cure for saving humanity, I think. (hide spoiler)]

And thanks.

Edit: Now that I think about it, Asimov's disparaging view toward religion kind of points toward it. (view spoiler)[ Communism and religion don't mix well, after all. And it was the religion the escalated Foundation to a ruling society doomed to fail. I'm not sure if he was saying that theocracy is ineffectual or if he was associating religion with hierarchy in general, though. I think the former rather than latter; and the point was that hierarchy will fail, especially when religion is intwined. I think he also recognized that communism simply won't work with mankind as is, but a mental link would lead to a commune society. (hide spoiler)]

Despite its radiant good will for the proletariat, Communism always has an elite or ruling class. When you put people in power regardless of expectations and give them an army, with no counterbalance from a separation of powers and a strong constitutionally binding set of principles, those people tend to like their privileges and decide to stay in power. I think Seldon was aiming much higher than Communism...

Alright I'll be convinced regarding technology. There are lots of explanatory vehicles for the loss of technical know-how and I don't mind Azimov having this immense regression amongst the non-Foundation, but I'd still have preferred some reasoning being given. Perhaps Seldon attracted all those skilled in the necessary arts to his Foundation, and that's what I imagined happening.

I thought of the Foundation as a type of epitome university/technical community where all knowledge (except Psychohistory) and technical know-how was gathered (with a goal and context that encouraged sharing), and thus by its very concentration was developed.

But when that vision is raised I start to wonder why would a State, sufficiently paranoid to have empowered secret police, be happy to exile that concentration of knowledge and expertise to the fringes of its grasp without retaining some method of direct control.

Let me put it in another way, if you are the government and the leader of a subversive group wishes to gather all of the military knowledge and no-how to build the apparatus together, wouldn't you want to have a direct safeguard. Ok, so Trantor is a long way out and metal poor, but what is there to stop that centre from secretly moving elsewhere or communicating its subversive outlook and dangerous technology elsewhere. I'd have expected the Empire to have at least put a 'fence' about it or placed a force back representative on the ground. One can go on speculating and counter speculating. Perhaps, the Empire had existed so long and controlled all the channels of production that the people in power could not envisage rebellious fractions, but that being the case why did it have warships etc... Perhaps Seldon had calculated all of this and chosen some secret police amongst his employees...

Thank you for the reference, I will see if I can find it.

On the gender equality issue I still feel obliged to rattle the trivial point critiques again.

I admit weakness in not wanting to emphasise with a non-fictional society that failed to appreciate women as human beings equal in rights to men. I whole heartedly agree with Mill (both of them) that equal participation of women in the moral and intellectual advancement of humankind is desirable. The 1940s were a little bit before my time, and perhaps my opinions are too heavily influenced by my upbringing and familiarity with a little equality writing. Such texts as the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Subjection of Women were around. Women gained the vote in 1920 in the States, though don't hold me to that it's just a date I remember. In the UK it was effectively 1928, although female university grads and women property owners over 30 could vote from 1918. (Representation of the People Acts 1918/1928)

Since SF is also a space for pioneering new terrain and exploring new ideas, as well as just telling 'riveting' yarns, the choices an SF writer makes should (my opinion) be seen as either deliberate, or neglectful. Deliberate because the writer is telling us something about their opinions and philosophies or asking us to contemplate something. Neglectful in the sense that the writer did not place due care and attention in what they were writing about. Transferring a culture, that as an external observer I think of similar to that portrayed in Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 production of Rebecca, millennia into the future is either a statement of no interest in changing the status quo, or neglectful in not having thought about the issue. Of course the writer has other pressures, such as selling books. For example, having a main character or political leader as a woman might have been detrimental to sales and acceptance. For some writers at the time, mostly women, taking a male nom de plume was required by some publishers. Nope, I'm not going to let Azimov off, this book's contents were published between 1942 and 1950. (By the way, I'm not arguing for Victorian era cloned writing either.) However, I'm also going to add, in Azimov's defence, that it could just be an issue of probabilities rather than statement or neglect.

Adam wrote: "On the gender equality issue I still feel obliged to rattle the trivial point critiques again.

I admit weakness in not wanting to emphasise with a non-fictional society that failed to appreciate w..."

idk, I thought it's common knowledge that most pre-new wave sf written by men (as well as a large percentage of post-new-wave ones) are pretty messed up wrt. gender issue in today's standard.

Yeah, I don't think he was really aiming for communism. But I do think he saw the potential benefits of a commune. But I don't think it would really work in the real world, but Gaia brings it to a new level.

Jennifer wrote: "... potential benefits of a commune. But I don't think it would really work in the real world,..."

I know far too little about communes, but as an unenlightened keyboard batterer, I see that sort of intentional selective group would make sense for colonies that had a small populations, providing that selection was possible. Within SF there are all sorts of handy DIY tools for ironing out real life's problems. What problems in particular do you think would be a problem for the functioning of communes in the future?

Personally i was not to thrilled with the idea of Gaia. That sort of hive mind is not the future I would want for my descendants.
But as there seemed to be no better option I agreed with
Golan Trevize's choice.

A personal story....when i was a kid The Foundation Trilogy made a HUGE impression on me. So much so, i sat down and wrote the Good Doctor a letter begging him to finish the series...he actualy wrote me back...it was only a one-line response, but IT WAS IN HIS OWN HANDWRITING....i dont think i was ever happier than when i opened that letter. He told me he would like to, but he just didnt have the time.

maybe if star-struck little fans like me had left the poor man alone to his work it would have been done sooner....i wish we still had him with us...

On the whole free-will thing...

I agree with G33s3r's points above about outliers & such. History is full of turning points that could have seriously changed things. Although I appreciate Asimov's concept of sample size, there are just too many variables at play to make accurate predictions. No society will ever be stagnant enough to be that measurable, to say nothing of natural phenomena that impact events.

And yet I love this series, or at least the core trilogy. I think I experience them as fun little logic puzzles. And the Mule is one of my favorite characters in all of SF. The sequels get progressively crummier, and I absolutely hate the ending of the last one. I felt like it completely devalued everything that had gone before it.