Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

This is where it all begins: the first one in a long string of books connecting some of the very best works of science fiction ever published. Seeing that Bantam is reprinting them in hardcover, I couldn't resist the purchase and the inevitable re-read. Perhaps in the absence of anything else that compares to Asimov's writings, I'll just have to make my way through all the Foundation, Empire, and Robots novels again. And that would, I'm sure, be just as exhilarating as reading them all for the first time.

Foundation sets the universe for long-range explorations into a fictional science called psychohistory and into how the human race eventually would spread throughout the entire galaxy. The book is divided into five inter-connected stories: The Psychohistorians, The Encyclopedists, The Mayors, The Traders, and The Merchant Princes. The stories do form a whole evolving from the first to the next painting the picture of a sequence of events from the detection that humanity was about to revert to barbarism to the machinations of a group determined to not allow all the knowledge developed by the race end up lost for millenia.

The first story serves as a brief introduction to the science of psychohistory and its creator, Hari Seldon. We are told that this science evolved from the social psychology, the statistics, and the history of large populations. The framework allows one to plug into a mathematical model a socio-historical context and track (or forecast) its evolution through time. This story whets one's appetite for more details on Seldon, on Trantor (the planet at the center of the Galactic Empire), and psychohistory. It can be quite unsatisfying in that for as soon as the background for the Foundation universe is set up, the story ends and we're moved along to another set of characters, in a far off place, and in a very different predicament. The patient and faithful Asimov reader, however, should note that the story comes back full circle to this very point in Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, Asimov's final novels before his death.

The gist of the novel as a whole is that the psychohistorians are able to predict that the advanced Galactic Empire is about to come to an end. Sectors of the galaxy, or planetary systems alone, are about to break away from the Empire, starting a processes of constant fighting and of the decay of science and innovation. Eventually, the bulk of the knowledge produced at hard pains by the human race could be lost and a dark age encompassing many millenia would ensue. Psychohistory, however, can also foresee a set of actions, which carried out with precise timing, could potentially reduce the length of this dark period in history. The five stories carry the reader along the events in this "master plan" to put humanity back on track. Each story showcases the applicability of a different "force" to promote the evolution of the plan (political, religious, commercial, or diplomatic) well-tuned to the correct historical moment.

No honest enthusiast of good science fiction should pass up this book, or this series. This is really "creme de la creme".