Vintage Science Fiction Month

 Berthold Gambrel reminded me that this is Vintage Science-Fiction month. He chose Childhoods End by Arthur C. Clark. 

I thought about it and came up with Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.

They were originally written as a series of short stories in science fiction magazines from 1940-52.

What Asimov created in these stories was what he called Psychohistory. The combination of psychology, mathematics and history to predict the future.

It is from these stories I truly understood the purpose of history. It's not just stories about people who died centuries or millennia earlier. History is our Chrystal ball to understand the future. Think of your credit history, life insurance actuarial tables and driving history. How empires rise and fall, political systems change from monarchy to dictatorships to democracy to republics. You can predict the cycles. It's not that history is forgotten it's that each generation thinks they are coming up with something new and better than what their parents and grandparents had. Hegel's Dialectic.

In Foundation Hari Seldon predicts the collapse of the Galactic Empire resulting in a dark age that will last 30,000 years. Then a second empire will emerge. The first four short stories were compiled and put in book form in 1951. 

Foundation and Empire was released in 1952 and Second Foundation came out in 1953. Later Asimov would write prequels and sequels to the series.

Selden proposes a plan that will shorten the dark age from 30 thousand to just one thousand.

A foundation is created, and plans are put in place to follow the teaching of Seldon.

The first foundation is set up on a small solar system far from the center of the Galactic Empire. This solar system would then start reconquering what was lost. 

 Seldon predicts certain phases of the collapse and how to mitigate the damage. He makes videos that at certain times of crises he tells his followers how to handle the crisis.

 In Foundation and Empire, all is going as planned until something strange happens. A man conquers the galaxy by psychic powers that makes everyone like him.  

When the foundation meets to see Seldon's prediction his video mentions a possible civil war. The man referred to as "The Mule," is an aberration. There is no further planned future for them from Seldon anymore.

When the Mule dies things go crazy, but the First Foundation clings to the hope that Seldon prophesied there was a second foundation on the other side of the galaxy.

The third book is about the search for this mysterious second foundation and it has an ironic ending.

The whole trilogy is a retelling of the fall of Rome, and the dark ages that followed. The foundation solar system is good old England. I liked the Mule as he inserts Charlemagne into the story. 

While the Galactic Empire is slowly falling apart it encounters the first foundation and the general in command of the forces of the Empire can't understand how this pimple of a solar system keeps beating his forces. He's referring to the Byzantine Empire and Belisarius, but when I was reading it and then gave it to my father, we both likened it to Vietnam.

It's still a great read.