One computer-like device that does show up in the trilogy is the Second Foundation’s mysterious Prime Radiant, which is used over the centuries to track the progress of the Seldon Plan for re-establishing civilization.
How many people, even scientists like Asimov, could foresee how vital computers would become in business, industry, transportation, even everyday life, only 50 years later? The computer finally does appear in the sequel, “Foundation’s Edge,” written in the 1970s. The most obvious lack: Here is a galactic civilization that has had hyper-space travel for thousands of years, yet has virtually no computers! Scarcely a mention in the entire first three novels. His future universe is missing elements that are de rigueur in today’s movies.
But I think it has more to do with Asimov’s 1950 view of the future and the technology available at the time. I suppose the reason might partly be the association of this story with the long-gone days of my own youth. Cardboard sets, banks of toggle switches and Bakelite knobs, characters dressed in shiny collar-less tunics.
Interestingly, when I read the “Foundation” novels, the movie I see doesn’t look like “StarWars” or “Star Trek: Voyager.” It looks more like “Plan Nine From Outer Space” or “Forbidden Planet,” movies of Asimov’s era (and my childhood). When I read fiction, I always imagine a movie in my mind. To head off the 30,000 years of barbarity that would otherwise result, Seldon sets up a Foundation that will survive the decline and later establish a new (and, we assume, kinder and gentler) galactic empire. The premise of the story: Scientist Hari Seldon has foreseen that the galactic empire will crumble. The saga is set many thousands of years in the future, after humanity has established a galactic empire. In the original trilogy, “Foundation,” “Foundation and Empire” and “Second Foundation,” Asimov’s treatment of technology forces me to reflect on how much our vision of the future is colored by current technology, our own human limitations and the near unpredictability of developments to come.Īsimov wrote his initial three novels in the 1940s and 1950s. Or rather, I’ve been enjoying the series on audio tape while traveling to and from work - a reading technology I could perhaps have imagined but didn’t, when I first read these books about 30 years ago. For the past couple months I’ve been re-reading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” science fiction series.
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