The Foundation Trilogy

One of my initial selections for the Science Fiction Book Club was The Foundation Trilogy, the classic series by Isaac Asimov. I was immediately enchanted by the first book. An academic named Hari Seldon has mastered the science of "psycho-history", which allows him to predict with almost pin-point precision the future actions of large groups of people--mobs, governments, countries, planets, etc. Seldon's analysis reveals that the millenia-old Empire is irreversibly doomed to fall apart several decades hence, so he gathers a team of fellow psycho-historians to develop a way to ensure that the period of "barbarism" between the fall of the current Empire and the rise of the Second Empire is as short as possible. To this end, he creates two "Foundations", one at either end of the galaxy, which he believes will shorten the interregnum from 30,000 years to just 1,000.

The first book tells how several generations of the First Foundation survive the break-up of the Empire, periodically undergoing "Seldon Crises"--crises predicted by Seldon, in which only one feasible option is available, and taking that step will further the goal of creating the Second Empire. The idea of psycho-history is quite original and interesting, as was the idea of story-telling that concerned itself with massive social movements as opposed to individual characters--it's almost like Marxist science-fiction.

The second book in the trilogy is about the Mule, a mutant with powerful super-human abilities that could not have been predicted by Seldon because psycho-history concerns itself only with large-scale groups of people. The Mule uses his abilities to take rapid control of the First Foundation and launch a search for the Second Foundation. I found myself mostly turned off by this book, as it has a completely different type of story-telling than the first. Also, the real identity of the Mule is supposed to be a major mystery, but I figured it out at the very beginning so the big reveal just didn't have much impact on me.

The third book starts out better. Although the Mule has been taken care of, Seldon's plans have been thrown well off course. Can the First Foundation or the (possibly nonexistent) Second Foundation get things back on track? Oddly, the last several chapters very much take on a "whodunnit" feel--except instead of constantly identifying and then discarding possible murderers, Asimov constantly identifies and then discards possible locations for the Second Foundation. I found it rather tiresome and the introduction of beings with mind control powers was an unexpected (and unwelcome) addition.