Book Notes : Foundation By Issac Asimov
- Another of the cult sci-fi books by Asimov
The premise of the stories is that in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon devises the theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the momentum of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which “the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little” to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. The books describe some of the dramatic events of those years as they are shaped by the underlying political and social mechanics of Seldon’s Plan
- Starts with Gaal Dornick, the biographer of Hari Seldon
- Talks about imperial coronation, so probably a monarchy?
- The Jumps → Wormholes, for instant travel
Childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child
Well, talk about relatable 😛
They seem to have flying cars, for one, and also tunnels. So I think the car moves through tunnels, like walls which have holes in them and each hole is a tunnel.
It seems a bit post-apocalyptic. Actually, it is. It is not post-apocalyptic, it is pre-apocalyptic. Because it predicts a crumble in the future. But yeah, it seems like hyper-loop’s inspiration.
The story is based in Trantor, which is the capital of the imperial government, which is like an intergalactic, multi-planetary, galactic empire. It has a population of 40 billion which is a lot, but all of these people work in administration because I think it’s a play on how mundane bureaucracy can get so that 40 billion people are in it just for the bureaucracy and all of them are dependent on other colonies of sorts for their daily needs agricultural things and stuff so they say that this makes it very vulnerable to I’ll show some forwarding to the fact that this actually happened and they were rewarded and stuff. And I think this is a play on… Maybe England and its colonies and how it fall later how it fell later or maybe even uh u.s who knows
There is no greenery, no soil, no life other than man, apart from the imperial palace which is in 100 square miles of natural soil and has greenery. So yeah, definitely apocalyptic. Or maybe not.
Actually, now that I think of it, the imperial nature might be for China because of the play on population and the economical destruction. I think since it is written from an American perspective, this might be referring to China. Because why would they be dissing on their own country after all? Or maybe they would be. I don’t know. I need to look this up.
They use tunnels, actually not tunnels, they have tunneled the ground so that they’re almost a mile below the ground level and they use the temperature difference, I think the geothermal energy for all the power needs and they just say they used to use atomic energy but now they just use this.
Seldon’s a chad
So they are trying to build a very giant encyclopaedia which captures all the information possible so that when the eventual fall of civilisation occurs humanity has access to all the knowledge it had in the past so that it can bootstrap it faster and the amount of suffering is greatly reduced probably like a thousand years instead of 30,000 years of suffering so that is what its plan and the rest of the book is how they go about doing that i think so now in the next chapter they are preparing to build that giant encyclopaedia on a planet called Terminus but there’s this one guy, I think some general or something or some king who wants to occupy Terminus because it has strategical importance and there’s some back and forth
I can just feel the generic distaste for anything other than science in the author’s writing. He’s like, science is the biggest thing and rest all these… Be it beuaracracy, civil force, military force, it doesn’t understand anything. It is, I can see why this inspired the hacker’s culture.
I think this new society which is called Foundation is having an internal revolt of sorts because initially it was just… And they want to create a normal society there. The scientists are against it. And there’s also the matter of protecting the foundation from outside attackers.
And I think Sheldon has already overlooked or predicted… .
Well, turns out the encyclopedia thing was a scam. And now they are just trying to fend off… Having a standoff based on that and later they established like a diplomatic solution in which they give their technical expertise to the kingdoms around and are able to survive for now.
Violence is the last refuge for the incompetent
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtelty
One overarching theme in this book is that of, I think, statistical predictions. Anyway, so what they’re proposing is that it is possible to predict the future based on a theory of mass behaviour, how masses act, but only if the masses are not aware that they are being observed.
So there’s this one guy in this who is sort of trained in psychology, he sometimes tries to analyze things. Things which are going on and other than that also, he said that in the moment of crisis There would be only one possible solution And one obvious way to go, which is a way to reduce any deviation from the predicted path.
So, he keeps on letting things go by until there is exactly one possible… solution or one possible plan of action in the face of crisis. Pretty cool.
This book reminds me so much of the three body problem because it has these awesome moments where shit just changes in like a page. And I mean in this section the guy Haradin was he’s also almost chad like Seldon. I don’t know if seldon is the inspiration for Sheldon. Sheldon and Sheldon sound very similar. But anyway, he did an UNO reverse on the guys who were invading their planets. Basically, he gave them his technology, but he gave them under the guise of a religion. He created a religion from the technology.
and like he indoctrinated and created a dogmatic religion around it and once he had that cult following he just It was like a soft takeover where he overtook the military by through And it is interesting to note how much that is related to Christianity.
They say because Seldon did not know the individual heroic actions that anyone would do. He betted on more macroeconomic factors, so he betted on the macroeconomic forces that will emerge and solve the crises. In the first case, it was some sort of technological advantage.
In the second case, it was religion. They converted the other, the enemy, to the missionary approach and the third, I think it is trade. They will… Survive by offering trade to the partners. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. So the Person who planned this all planned not on the individual heroics of people but on Statistically predictable economical forces.
Pretty cool.
So yeah, the book ended with the third crisis, which was to be solved using trade. Their daily technology like the ovens and stuff would fail and they wouldn’t want to do that and it turned out to be true It is actually A bit similar to the first one, the first one was also technology related and I think the last one was also technology related.
They just wrapped it more in the sense of trade instead of technology. The first one was purely technology based. There was no trade there. The second one was religion-based. The third one is trade-based, but that trade is only enabled due to the technology they have.
Originally published on Medium.
