Foundation

by Isaac Asimov

The novel Foundation by Isaac Asimov is a science fiction story set in a future when humanity has expanded across the galaxy into a universal spacefaring empire. Although the setting is that implies soaring human achievement, it’s actually a story about civilizational decline and how to survive it. In the universe of Foundation the once-glorious Galactic Empire is descending into political chaos. Losing control of its constituent parts, it lurches from grandeur to barbarism – with its past technological achievements fast reverting to myth to the billions living on the periphery. Amid the chaos, a small group of scholars is tasked by the imperial center with maintaining a record of humanity’s collective intellectual achievements so that they can form the basis of a future revival. They are cast off to a small, isolated planet where they perform the work of maintaining this grand encyclopedia.

Asimov published the first volume of the Foundation series at the height of the Second World War. That was a period when humanity felt itself at the height of its material powers, yet was unable to prevent its own plunge into savagery on a moral level. Asimov was a Jewish-American writer who must have felt this pain acutely. His novel is based on an idea of a noble minority of scholars preserving knowledge in their vast encyclopedias, while trying to keep their heads down from the violence of the broader world. The reader cannot help but be reminded of the culture of Orthodox Jewish scholarship that was very much like this, and which I suspect Asimov took in part as inspiration. World War II felt like a period that humanity could really lose all the hard-won gains of science and civilizations in one giant fireball of self-destruction. His story must have felt cathartic, or even prescriptive, at the time.

I love science fiction even though I don’t make as much time to read it as I should. I picked this up on an old recommendation of a friend and was glad that I did. Asimov was a talented writer who succeeded at the author’s goal of immersing the reader in an entirely different world.