I've read the original Foundation trilogy twice (once in my teens and once about 8 years ago), and I thought about reading it again with the new adaption of Foundation coming out on Apple TV. Or maybe I would read the later sequels (at least one of which I read awhile back). But then I found this latter day prequel on my shelf (that I had forgotten I bought!) and figured I'd check it out.
I can say I enjoyed Prelude to Foundation overall, although parts of it dragged on a bit. You probably have to have a soft spot or at least appreciation for Asimov to really like this. I read the original trilogy as a teenager, which maybe accounts for my soft spot for Asimov. Some people these days complain about Asimov's writing, but I think it's perfectly fine for what he's doing. Asimov was always mainly about the ideas, so if you're looking for in-depth characters or snappy dialogue or whatever... well, you're not going to get that here.
What you do get are some fun twists and interesting ideas in a leisurely narrative.
We start with famed psychohistorian Dr. Hari Seldon visiting Trantor and giving a talk on his less-than-fully developed theory of psychohistory. He meets with the Emperor (!), but claims that psychohistory is as of yet not practical, but merely theoretical. This understandably disappoints the Emperor, who wanted to use psychohistory to maintain his own power. What follows in most of the novel is a chase ... sort of. It's a strangely leisurely chase considering the Emperor of a vast galactic empire is after Hari.
As he's being threatened by locals, he meets a stranger Hummin, whom he oddly trusts completely right away (we do get something of an explanation for that later...), and they go on the run. Hari goes to Streeling University, where he meets a historian Dr. Dors Venabili, who becomes his history tutor, guide, body guard, and eventually (very awkward) love interest.
Hari and Dors then go on their leisurely flight to various sections of Trantor, each with its own culture that teaches Hari a key lesson as he fully develops psychohistory. I enjoyed learning about each different culture, but we spend a little too much time in each location. This is one of those books that could have been twice as good if it had been half as long. This one must be at least twice as long as any of the volumes of the original trilogy.
One cool tie to the Apple TV series: In Prelude to Foundation Hari meets a young Raych, who we meet as an adult in the first couple episodes of the TV series. There are also some ties to Asimov's other series, but let's not spoil those here.
As for the ideas, the central one of course is psychohistory itself. I've always thought this was a cool idea since I first read the trilogy in my teens. What if you could predict the arc of history, statistically aggregated in large groups? But can you account for individual actions? Philosophically, of course, this raises the issue of determinism: if determinism is true, it would seem that psychohistory would in principle be possible. In reality, we probably lack the knowledge needed for psychohistory, not to mention the fact that history is probably chaotic in the mathematical sense (something that gets discussed a little bit in the novel) or the existence of sheer surprises out of nowhere that shape everything (as we have discovered recently with the pandemic).
Most of Prelude to Foundation is the story of Hari's development of psychohistory rather than the issues that get worked out in the original trilogy, which is interesting in that it turns out he actually needed a lot of history and not just math to form the theory. And poor Dors, being a woman in an Asimov book not named Susan Calvin (from I, Robot), ends up not getting any credit for her contributions to psychohistory. I should probably also mention Asimov's treatment of women in real life, which was often deplorable and inexcusable.
The novel raised one intriguing question for me toward the end, a question that's probably worth asking about just about any scientific paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense): to what extent is the development of psychohistory itself the result of having the idea of psychohistory? Or in other words, which came first: the idea of psychohistory or the data on which psychohistory was based?
Consider the fact that all the politicians Hari meets are already acting on the assumption that psychohistory has practical value, while Hari assumes it has theoretical value. Is this a science fictional version of something like the Quine-Duhem Thesis, the idea that scientific theories are underdetermined by their evidence? To put it in even cruder terms: is psychohistory a self-fulfilling prophecy from its very beginning?
And if so, what does this tell us about the rest of the Foundation series? Maybe something to think about if I ever get around to reading all the Foundation books! And maybe even as I watch the new TV show!
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