CS 485 Book Report: Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov Jake Anderson Who is Isaac Asimov? Isaac Asimov was born in the town of Petrovichi in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. He traditionally celebrated his date of birth as January 2, 1920, but there are no accurate records and as such he may have been born as early as October 14, 1919. The official record was temporarily changed to September 17, 1919 by his mother in order to get him into school earlier, but he insisted the record be changed back when he became aware of this several years later. On January 11, 1923 his family left the Soviet Union, arriving in New York City on February 3 of the same year. During his childhood, Asimov lived in the Brooklyn section of New York, upstairs from a family operated candy store. Between 1923 and 1936, the family sold three such candy stores, each time moving to nearby locations to open a new one. Asimov started working in the candy store at nine years old because his mother was unable to work due to her third pregnancy. After a rapid advance course in junior high school, he attended Boys High School, graduating in 1935. He attended City College for a few days, then Seth Low Junior College. After Seth Low was shut down, he attended its parent institution, Colombia University, where he graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry in 1939. After some difficulty getting accepted to the program, he continued his education at Colombia, getting his M.A. in 1941, then his PhD in 1948 (with a gap from 1942 until 1946 due to World War II). After this, he worked as a biochemistry instructor at Colombia until July 1, 1958, when he became a full-time writer. Asimov began writing at age 11, with The Greenville Chums at College. Though he stopped after recognizing he didn't know what he was talking about, he decided to take himself seriously as a writer when one of his friends asked to borrow what they thought was an existing book after hearing Asimov's summary of the first few chapters he'd written. His first published writing was a humorous essay in his high school's newspaper, written in a creative writing class that almost convinced him to give up on writing. Subsequently, his first published story was “Marooned Off Vesta,” published in the CS 485 Book Report: Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov Jake Anderson March 1939 edition of Amazing Stories. Later, his most known works are the Foundation series and the Robot series. The latter contained Asimov's now-famous Laws of Robotics, based on the insight that humans would design robots with safety restraints, as they would any other tool, and the primary safety restraint on an intelligent being is its ethics. He also wrote many other works in various genres, including The Gods Themselves (science fiction), The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (short story collection), Murder at the ABA (mystery), The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (humor), and Asimov's Guide to the Bible. Asimov lacked religious beliefs; he considered himself a Humanist, someone who believes that human beings are responsible for all of both the good and evil in the world. As such, he was strongly opposed to creationists and pseudoscience, although he had no distaste for genuine religious feelings in others as long as it was not used as an excuse for ignorance and bigotry. Despite his works often involving interplanetary space flights, Asimov himself was acrophobic and terrified of flying. He also hated being called by nicknames, or having his name mispronounced or misspelled. He died on April 6, 1992 due to liver and kidney failure, complications from an HIV infection he contracted in 1983. Main theme of Foundation The overarching theme of the Foundation trilogy is the triumph of technology and civilization over savagery and chaos. It begins with a prologue focusing on Hari Seldon, a psychologist whose study of psychohistory enables him to predict the broad strokes of future events with a high degree of accuracy. Using these methods, he predicts the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, and is sentenced to be executed as a result. Before his execution, however, he arranges for the establishment of two colonies on the far edges of the galaxy, in order to reduce the era of barbarianism from following the Empire's fall from 30,000 years to a single millennium. These two colonies each become a Foundation. Following this introduction, the trilogy is episodic and centered around what is referred to as a “Seldon crisis:” significant events in the history of the Foundation, predicted by Hari Seldon. Seldon CS 485 Book Report: Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov Jake Anderson himself would appear via recorded message to the people of the Foundation before or after each of these crises, either to provide a hint on how to properly endure or to provide praise for having already done so. Either way, the Foundation was a colony of scientists (specifically physical scientists, not psychologists like Seldon), and its victories primarily achieved by means of leveraging superior technology in novel ways, such as by establishing itself as a religious center for nearby barbarian civilizations, or by taking control of a kingdom's economy through trade. Over time, however, the Foundation grew lax, considering all its victories all assured by Seldon's precognition, and put little effort into identifying or engaging impending threats. One such threat was the encroaching army of a man known only as the Mule, whose mounting victories were by and large ignored by the leadership of the Foundation. As his fleet came to their doorstep, Seldon appeared once more, but to applaud the Foundation on the successful resolution of a civil war between the ruling and merchant classes; a civil war which had not occurred. The studies of psychohistory could predict the paths of societies, but not of single men; the Mule, a self-made conqueror and mutant with power over the emotions of others, was a blind spot in Seldon's foresight, and conquered the Foundation with ease, leaving a small group of refugees to seek out the Second Foundation on the opposite end of the galaxy. The Mule would also seek out the Second Foundation, out of fear and paranoia over the threat they represented to his rule, and after noticing some of his converted subjects having their behavior subtly altered. This quest would prove to be his undoing; although he and his men located the Foundation, they were expected, and the Second Foundation had him outplayed at every turn. There was a brief battle of minds between the Mule and the First Speaker of the Second Foundation, but defeat and despair rendered the conqueror vulnerable to mental adjustment, allowing the Second Foundation's leader to pacify him. This reveals the nature of the Second Foundation; while the first Foundation focused on CS 485 Book Report: Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov Jake Anderson physical sciences and building an empire, the Second Foundation existed to preserve and further progress Hari Seldon's studies. As a result, they had not only fine-tuned his thousand year plan, but also refined and trained his greatest achievement, depicted as a form of telepathic communication similar to that of the Mule, but obtained through study and training rather than by accident of birth. The ultimate goal of the Seldon plan, then, was for the first Foundation to create an empire, and for the Second Foundation to create a class to rule over it with their mental powers. However, its intervention in the Mule incident was itself a violation of their enforced secrecy, and instilled in the first Foundation a curiosity about the revival of psychology, both powerful disruptions to the Seldon plan, leading to conflict between the two Foundations. The conflict between the two Foundations was bloodless, a matter of tactics and espionage between overlords who did not want to be found, and rebels who did not want to be seen searching. The Second Foundation was known to be able to predict and plan for the actions of civilizations, but individuals at a vastly weaker scale, and even so the people of the first used the knowledge to act not as expected. Ultimately, however, the Second Foundation wins, their trump card in fact being a teenage girl who the Foundation believed was their own wild card. Using intelligence she provided, they feign defeat and let the first Foundation believe they were defeated and gone, so at the end of the trilogy it appears that Seldon's plan is effectively in progress; science has triumphed over the chaotic, the archaic, the unforeseen, and even rebellion of a sort. Technology in Foundation For a science fiction trilogy, Foundation contains relatively little technology specific to it. It has a number of common elements of the genre, however, including faster-than-light space travel and directed energy weapons. More interesting than the technologies that are used, however, are the technologies that comprise the setting: advanced atomic power, and the science of Asimov's psychologists. CS 485 Book Report: Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov Jake Anderson Not especially much is said, specifically, about the atomic power in Foundation. Like the other futuristic technology in the series, its presence is treated as mundane and commonplace, especially in later chapters. However, some knowledge can be derived from given information; for instance, at one point the atomic power supply for a personal shield generator is stated to be roughly the size of a walnut. Since nuclear fission depends on the concept of critical mass, it seems likely that during the time of the Empire, nuclear fusion was mastered and put to work in everything from starships to personal fashion.