The only Isaac Asimov I had read prior to this was his non-fiction essay Not as We Know It: The Chemistry of Life (which I still like to link to) and a critical review of Orwell’s 1984 noting how it should be too dysfunctional to be an effective surveillance state. My plan had been to start with the original Foundation novel, but that was checked out at the libary while this was available and since Asimov himself seemed to endorse a chronological reading order (although I had only heard that this was significantly worse than the original series) I figured it was ok for me to do so as well. I had fretted earlier that I was behind in my classic scifi, and perhaps that is true insofar as I read Dune long before I read Foundation when Herbert was responding to Asimov (and may well have copied the technique of epigraphs from an in-universe text preceding chapters, as the Encyclopedia Galactica gets used here). But it’s fortuitous that this was the next work of fiction I read after The Dispossessed due to the striking similarity between the premises of the two novels, and that surprises which didn’t work on people who’d read the preceding Foundation stories could still work on me.
Prelude to Foundation is about mathematician Hari Seldon coming from the provincial planet of Helicon to the imperial capital on Trantor due to interest in his claim that a worked out theory of “psychohistory” could theoretically predict the future. Dispossessed was about physicist Shevek leaving the provincial moon of Anarres for its wealthy opposite on the planet Urras, where it is hoped he will make a theoretical breakthrough that will enable faster-than-light communication (even giving the name to the “ansible” device that would appear in other authors’ scifi). In both works the scholar worries that the authority over the university they work in will try to monopolize their breakthrough for their own narrow purposes, but they come by this in entirely different ways reflecting the different politics of the authors and their works. Shevek really was an anarchist who believed in the ideals of the society he was raised in even if he no longer saw the rest of that society living up to what he saw as those ideals. Seldon, regardless of whether he’s a legendary figure in later novels, is defined by his naivete. He has to be pushed to such a conclusion by the cynical-yet-idealist journalist Chetter Hummin and Hummin’s many allies (most notably, historian Dors Venabili). The politics are front-and-center for Le Guin and the actual physics are an afterthought, and while actual physicist Asimov doesn’t actually dive into problems raised within the book like the complexity of meteorological systems, the political hubbub is treated as something Seldon has to just keep ahead of to do his real work without him giving that much regard to who will use it (only that he won’t have to lie and say he already has a practical version when he doesn’t). Asimov is a relatively conventional New Deal liberal (rather than someone sympathetic to anarchism, even to the extent Heinlein was) reflecting on Gibbon’s Whig history of the Roman empire, so even if the decadence of the empire is treated as a real problem, the breakup of said empire is regarded as a tragedy to be avoided, even if someone has actually thought through that as a goal which would give rise to more efficient scales of government (which should really be more of a problem for Seldon since he’s relying on the Emperor’s rivals on Trantor to jealously guard him from said Emperor’s grasp).
While the background issue of decadence presaging a collapse of the empire aligns with Great Stagnation pessimism, the primary focus on a scientific breakthrough that must be safeguarded by the most idealist/ethical resembles nothing moreso today than Singularitarians worried about General AI (all the moreso recently). Asimov is best known for his Laws of Robotics that are supposed to protect humans from these potentially powerful technologies, but robots would have to execute code rather than vague English verbiage that humans make laws (such as Asimov’s own) out of. In case you’re wondering if Asimov got more sophisticated by the time he wrote this book and could come up with something tighter than such verbiage, the answer is not really. I guess if he had then the Friendly AI folks would have less to do.
Even if we don’t get much actual scientific advances in this story about a scientific breakthrough, there is a decent amount of worldbuilding inside the page-turner story of Seldon’s misadventures around Trantor. It’s a world that has developed into one giant city, which I believe is also the case for Star Wars’ uninteresting Coruscant, but here that world is divided into innumerable sectors that get to be distinct so Seldon can have completely different mini-worlds to explore. After the university sector the more provincial ones do seem rather homogenous internally, but then you might expect an outsider to view them that way. They can also be seen to embody some of Asimov’s political complaints about social traditionalism and economic inequality, but while Asimov may not be as nuanced as Le Guin the politics also just aren’t as important so you can breeze past that material relatively easily. What’s harder to breeze past is the ending, and I don’t just mean how shallow the explanation Seldon gives for how he made his theoretical breakthrough. There are some big twists in order, and while I noted above that I may have experienced more of the surprise than Asimov afficionados would, I also can’t appreciate the full effect of them. I just didn’t care about certain things more removed from the story nearly as much as Seldon (and Asimov) did. I find interesting the idea of the present-day of the novel being so distantly removed from the pre-galactic past that no reliable history exists (which is also the case for the sufficiently ancient past of humanity now), but since I haven’t read any of Asimov’s stories taking place in that past (which would be our future) connecting this story to those is lost on me.
If you go by my blog posts it would appear that I have violated by decision to alternate between fiction & non-fiction, but in fact I read but just haven’t written a review of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook because I wanted to finish How “Natives” Think and review them both at once. That should be my next review, and I’ll probably move on to the original Foundation after that rather than Delany’s response to The Dispossessed.
Entitled to an Opinion 
April 11, 2022 at 9:48 pm
With my recent scifi reviews I’ve been linking to Josh Wimmer’s Blogging the Hugos takes in the comments. But this minor Asimov didn’t win one, not that Wimmer ever got to 1988 in his series. He did fortunately include a two-person review of this as part of the no-longer-linkable “Foundation Week” instead of just covering Foundation’s Edge when that won.
https://gizmodo.com/in-prelude-to-foundation-isaac-asimov-delves-into-psyc-5800631
That review does spoil this book, and even some revelations in earlier books which of course I haven’t read. I agree that it works as a page-turner, but since I didn’t have better Foundation novels to compare it to I can’t slight it as much as them.
April 12, 2022 at 4:45 am
Some related and some unrelated thoughts.
We always bring our own baggage. Part of yours, TGPA, is that you are living out the charge* that “Americans are just Germans who think they can speak English” (“moreso”, used twice, is not a word, any more than “anymore” is; but Americans, like Germans, often confusingly and unnecessarily compound words that do not benefit from that as well as using established compound word usages – and that Teutonicity gives them subtler biasses, too, of which grammar is merely a marker**). Similarly, part of Asimov’s baggage is that he is culturally disconnected, not simply from his own wider surroundings (as a New Yorker – see the famous cartoon of the world as seen from New York) but from the traditions of his surroundings (as an Ashkenazi; it’s not simply a Jewish thing, for as my Jewish friends have shown me, the very reverse often happens to Sephardim, as it did with Disraeli). To such a one, not being a liberal in the U.S. sense is just about literally unthinkable, as anything else is just noise. That influenced all his work, as I particularly noticed in the twist at the end of “The Stars Like Dust”, in which it is made out that U.S. political myth would inspire denizens of a class structure, yet they would be left empty and unfulfilled by the richnesses that I know from experience lie there (and that a U.S. liberal misses in his blind spot). Such things make a Tony Blair who guts the life of Sark (a place name, incidentally, that Asimov uses elsewhere). Another Asimov thing is that he practically stopped writing fiction when he hit middle age, resuming in later life; this makes a serious break, of both style and substance, which influences the later Foundation works (in the opening part of “Stranger in a Strange Land”, Heinlein writes of the issues Martians are having with getting to grips with a text from a Martian who died without noticing part way through writing it, so affecting the nature of the work as part of it was written by a dead person; I suspect this is a metaphor for how Heinlein wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land”, with early work and notes from before he, too, hit middle age).
On the use of epigrams: one of Frank Herbert’s is ascribed to “Pander Oulson” (a reworking of “Poul Anderson”), and Jack Vance continued the joke by ascribing one of his to “Frerb Hankbert”.
* This is but one of a series of multinational slurs/jokes with more than a kernel of truth, such as “Greeks are just Turks who want to be Italian”, “Italians are just Greeks who want to be French”, and “Argentinians are just Italians who speak Spanish”.
** Ask yourself if you would be more likely to say “he would have passed if he had studied” or “he would have passed if he would have studied”.
April 12, 2022 at 6:51 am
I’m afraid my lack of Asimov knowledge means I don’t know what that means.
April 12, 2022 at 8:05 am
Sark is the smallest of the Channel Islands that historically had its own near autonomy under a feudal arrangement (though the even smaller Herm was connected to Sark’s arrangements in a similar way). Sark is also a name Asimov used for one of the overlordships in “The Currents Of Space”. The billionaire Barclay Brothers found that the feudal structures of the real Sark obstructed their plans there by empowering the locals over majoritarian and rigged democratic outcomes, so the Barclay Brothers prevailed upon Tony Blair to “reform” its feudal arrangements away despite the strenuous objections of the inhabitants (he did something similar to the Church’s property rights in Glebe land after the Aston Cantlow matter).
April 12, 2022 at 8:28 am
What “Aston Cantlow matter”?
April 12, 2022 at 8:56 am
A farmer in Aston Cantlow didn’t read or didn’t think through a string attached to his holding of land. Under the law, as a previous possession of the Church that had not had its feudal obligations vacated, it still conferred a residual obligation to pay a levy to the Church as, when and if a Church need for funds under certain headings triggered that. Usually, owners of such land are well advised and take out insurance to lay off the obligation, but this farmer hadn’t done that and was caught out. He argued that the levy was in essence a tax as it arose like a call for tax and met the definitions of a tax, which various treaties, laws, etc. forbade non-state actors to levy, but the Church successfully argued that it was a contingent liability triggered in a way other than the banned ways that distinguished taxes. But after that, Tony Blair had the law changed so that all potential claims of that nature had to be registered centrally in advance and regulated by the state – thus in effect nationalising them.
Look, google is your friend in these matters.
April 12, 2022 at 10:08 am
I tried looking up Aston Cantlow on Wikipedia, but didn’t see any of that.
April 13, 2022 at 4:31 am
https://www.google.com/search?q=Aston+Cantlow+Glebe&ei=_qNWYrn1A6ScseMPpquP2AI&ved=0ahUKEwi57M2-6JD3AhUkTmwGHabVAysQ4dUDCA0&oq=Aston+Cantlow+Glebe&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAwyBggAEAgQHjoJCAAQsAMQCBAeSgQIQRgBSgQIRhgAUIgRWLcfYO9IaAFwAHgAgAHZAogBgAWSAQUyLTEuMZgBAKABAqABAcgBAcABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz – a search on “Aston Cantlow Glebe” – shows https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldjudgmt/jd030626/aston-5.htm at the bottom of the first page.
I did NOT tell you that wikipedia is your friend in these matters.
April 12, 2022 at 12:04 pm
In a lucky sort of coincidence, today Matt Yglesias wrote about the AI alignment problem I referenced above and how Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics apply (or don’t):
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-terminator-analogies?s=w
He does raise the good point that even if somebody tried to restrict a robot with such laws, somebody else might not and then that unrestricted robot could dominate. Not having read more Asimov, I don’t know how he explained why robots were a cultural singleton. I also get the impression that something like Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad wiped out the robots prior to the Foundation series, if only because Asimov wrote Foundation first and only thought about robots later when the technology seemed more viable but set them in the past anyway.
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