Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*: Reconciling the Macroscopic and Microscopic

I started re-reading Isaac Asimov's famous novel of galactic empire, Foundation. I love this novel.

Asimov's Foundation epitomizes the "space opera," a sub-genre infamously difficult to pin down. Of course, there are other versions of the "space opera" that predate Asimov's Foundation series that only vaguely resemble it (the key family resemblance being, of course, that they are all, loosely defined, adventures in "outer space"). There are C.L. Moore's "interplanetary" stories of Northwest Smith of Earth (1930s), and, of course, there are Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular "Barsoom" stories, which were originally published in the all-fiction Munsey magazine, The All-story in February of 1912.

These older "space operas" are much more "operatic" than Asimov, which is less concerned about human interest and more concerned with sociological issues: the rise and fall of governments, the emergence of specific cultures, the effect of technological change on material economies, and so forth. Foundation has more in common in terms of genre with Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire than with Moore or Burroughs, to an extent.

In another post about my favorite Asimov short story, "The Last Question," I wrote, "Human beings, in this narrative, are less individuals and more a flowing force of energy, like the molocules of water in a river." As far as Foundation is concerned, this is overstatement. In Foundation, human beings are a force, are referred to as a "conglomerate" whose actions can be predicted with some accuracy based upon statistics. This is Hari Seldon's famous "psychohistory," a kind of super-mathematical historiography that doesn't only deal with the past but makes predictions about the future.

The interesting thing that Asimov does in these Foundation stories, to my mind, is to imagine a reconciliation between that age-old historical question: does history move forward because of significant figures (e.g. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler); or, does history move forward because of sociological/economic laws that disregard individuals. In other words, he uses literature to negotiate the apparently incommensurate "mascoscopic" approach to history (sociology, economy, ecology) and microscopic approach (biography, great persons).

That's what good literature does: it allows us to think things hitherto unthinkable.