Feb 21, 2007 02:22 PM
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(Updated Feb 21, 2007 02:27 PM)
The Milky Way, our home galaxy. Close to its centre lies the densely populated world of Trantor, and on it the Imperial Palace whose arms once extended to the far reaches of the Galaxy, controlling each of the twenty-five million worlds inhabited by Man. With its enormous dome-covered steel structures, with a metropolis that stretched underground so deep that it held 45 billion human inhabitants within it, and with a reputation of being the political and administrative center of the Galactic Empire, it was no surprise that Trantor bustled with activity every second of the Galactic Standard Day. Maybe it was this constant machine-like race to keep up with the pressures of controlling a galaxy that lulled Trantor and its people into a false sense of calm and security. No one would have believed it then, but The Galactic Empire was falling. And one man saw it coming – Hari Seldon.
Armed with his predictive psycho-mathematical science called psychohistory, Seldon works out that in three hundred years time the Empire will collapse under its own weight and thirty millennia of anarchy will follow. So he proposes that all the knowledge contained within the walls of the Imperial Library be transferred to Terminus, a small world near the outer rim of the Galaxy where he establishes a small haven of technology called the Foundation. He assures the people of Trantor that this is the only way to compress the thirty millennia of anarchy into one single millennium.
The Foundation Trilogy consists of three books – Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. In Foundation, we first meet the ‘Seldon Plan’, the name given to the plan charted out by Seldon as he expects the Foundation to follow along with the major crises marked. It is left to people like Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow to guide the Foundation out of the tunnel, each time confirming the predictions made by the Seldon Plan. At the end of the first three crises, with the Galactic empire having disintegrated into a bunch of barbarian kingdoms and with Terminus holding the reins to all technological advances made in the Galaxy, it seems – to the people of Terminus and to everyone watching – that the Seldon Plan is well and truly on its way.
In Foundation and Empire, we see the Foundation slip away a little with internal corruption, a weak leader and a very loosely connected traders’ network extending to the different worlds of the Galaxy, acting as the main source of the Foundation’s power. In addition to this, an external threat appears in the form of The Mule, a man with advanced mental powers that enable him to control the emotions of people around him. Using these, he manages to turn certain parts of the Foundation against it and starts to build a large army to attack it and take over as leader, which he eventually does due to the complacency of the Foundationers and their blind faith in the prophetic powers of the Plan.
In the second part of the book, we meet Bayta and Toran Darrell of Haven, a world with desperate need of military help from the Mule. The couple set out to seek help from the Mule but as a result of some unforeseen events end up as companions to Ebling Mis, the greatest psychologist of the Foundation, as they travel to Trantor in search for the elusive ‘Second Foundation’ that Seldon set up along with the first. But while the first Foundation was established with a lot of fanfare and publicity, the location, and indeed the nature, of the second was shrouded in mystery. What can Ebling Mis learn of the Second Foundationers at the University of Trantor? What does ‘Star’s end’ mean? And what role does the clown Magnifico play in his discoveries?
In Second Foundation, the Seldon Plan faces another serious threat as the First Foundation locks horns with the Second by inventing a device that resists mental manipulation. Using this device, the First Foundationers find a few mentalics on Terminus itself and destroy them, imagining that to be the end of the Second Foundation and rationalizing to themselves that Seldon must have set both Foundations at one place. But some of them are not convinced, like Arkady Darrell, grand-daughter of Bayta and Toran, who follows her father Homir Munn in his attempt to find and destroy the Second Foundationers. After a few interesting twists, she finds herself back on Trantor with the friendly farmer Preem Palver and his wife, with whose help she solves the mystery of where the Second Foundation is located.
There is something about science fiction that tingles the spine. I think it has got something to do with the sense of wonder that accompanies scientific pursuits; the same tingle you feel when you see an airplane take off, when you witness a spaceship launch, when the letters you type on a keyboard magically appear on the screen before you, and when you let yourself loose within the environs of your imagination, whether it is covering interstellar spaces with a single hyperspatial Jump or blasting open a bug-eyed monster on Europa. It is that sense of wonder that science fiction aspires to stimulate, and when someone is as imaginative as Asimov, and tries as honestly as he does to make his fiction as truly scientific as possible, and can spin a yarn as well as he does, it is not hard to lose yourself in the universe he describes, the worlds he portrays, and most importantly, the endearing, everlasting, almost immortal, but ultimately human stories he relates.
People who see similarities between the Foundation trilogy and Star Wars can be forgiven, but let me warn you, you won’t see two stories that are more different from each other. Foundation, unlike Star Wars, is surprisingly devoid of violence and sticks to the Asimov’s style of telling stories about “characters, not heroes or villains”. So give this one a go, irrespective of whether you like science fiction or not, because I seriously believe that this trilogy is very close to being the best story ever told in any genre, and I suspect you will believe me too, when after reading the last page of Second Foundation you just cannot help but feel like going right back to the start and reading it all over again.
