Important: while I’m only talking about the Foundation books in vague details here, I will end up summarising a number of key points through the whole series. If you haven’t read them, and intend to, I recommend not reading this post, yet.
Here, at the start of the third TV series of Foundation, I’m actually talking about the series of short stories and novels on which the TV show is based. The TV series takes its leave of the source material in many ways—most of them necessary to produce something watchable in 2025. For example, you don’t get a female character in the novels for a very long time, and you have to wait until the second book to encounter one that Asimov names. Also, atomic ashtrays no longer represent the pinnacle of technological advancement.
The Foundation series of books starts with a collection of short stories about the titular Foundation; indeed the first volume consists of stories that had already been published elsewhere, and which are intended to be read separately but describe events in the same timeline.
Hari Seldon comes up with the field of psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that explains human activity collectively without explaining how any individual acts, in a similar way to how statistical thermodynamics tells you the behaviour of heat transfer in a system without describing the story of a single molecule.
This psychohistory predicts that the great Galactic Empire will crumble, causing millennia of human suffering—or a single millennium, if the Foundation intervene and guide the creation of a new society, using the calculations of psychohistory as a blueprint. Seldon runs the maths, and identifies a number of crisis points that this transition will go through, recording talks for the Foundation to play at the times when these crises occur.
So far, this sounds incredibly Marxist. The Empire takes the place of, well, imperialism, grand in its reach and advances but ultimately destined to destruction through its own contradictions. Psychohistory represents historical materialism, a scientific examination of the currents of history that identifies how these contradictions lead to the collapse of imperialism and set out the blueprint for a transition to a just society. As in Marx’s XVIII Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, there are no great men of history, “they do not make [history] under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Though as Napoleon was seen by some (other than Marx, obviously) as the Great Man of European history, so the Mule disrupts the statistical flows of psychohistory.
Then things take a turn, presumably because Marxism fell out of favour (to the extent it ever was in favour) in the America in which Asimov spent most of his life. From Foundation’s Edge onwards, even the Foundation’s psychohistory isn’t the end goal of society, but a Gaia-esque shared consciousness in which all of humanity participates. In its presentation, we learn of this as a sort of harmony-of-nature, in-tune-with-the-universe gestalt existence that sounds very much like a utopian way out of the struggles and conflicts of human existence, and the climatic destruction of a species that doesn’t take its home planet seriously.
Utopian, that is, until we learn the final revelation that Asimov wrote to tie all of his great science fiction series together, in the fifth (and chronologically final, though two prequels follow on) novel, Foundation and Earth. That is, in modern parlance, that the whole lot—the creation of psychohistory by Seldon, the Foundations, and Gaia—were put in motion by what we would now call an Artificial Intelligence, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw. It was Olivaw’s drive to create a better galaxy for humanity that led to the events of the preceding novels, and his vision of how that world should work that culminates in Gaia and the shared consciousness.
The interpretation of this point has probably shifted a lot in the intervening decades, and we even see that shift in other science fiction works. Through Asimov’s Robots series we see AIs as generally benevolent servants of humanity, programmed to do the right thing even if sometimes the programming leads to some surprising events. The main enemy of progress in that series isn’t the robots themselves, it’s the inability of most people to accept that they can exist and work alongside humans. If the spongy, platinum-iridium positronic brain of a robot comes up with the idea of Gaia, then it must be a good idea.
However, fast-forward to the present day—pausing to watch the horrors of the Cybermen on Doctor Who, the Borg on Star Trek, the Matrix, and most episodes of Black Mirror—and we’d have a very different take on “computer decides that the best outcome for humanity is to remove individuality and for everyone to be connected in a shared consciousness.” How often is individuality seen not as a weakness, but as the very point of humanity? Would Asimov add yet another denouement to the Foundation series today? Would he perhaps go back to the original outcome of psychohistory, and the triumph of intellectualism and careful thinking over demagoguery; or would that conclusion be too technocratic for today’s readers?