Sat 14 Feb 2009
If you’re a fan of or at least familiar with Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, then you’ll find this review comprehensible and potentially interesting. Otherwise this is probably just gibberish.
I remember reading the Foundation books as a teenager, in a grey, omnibus hardback edition that I bought used at a county library booksale. From the introduction to that edition I remember Asimov mentioning that his series and the Lord of the Rings were contenders for the 1966 Hugo award for best series, and surprisingly Asimov’s book won.
The setting of the Foundation books is a distant future when humanity has colonized much of the galaxy, and a huge galactic empire has emerged as the central government for quadrillions of the galaxy’s human inhabitants (with no aliens in sight). Hari Seldon, a mathematician and historian, has developed a branch of predictive mathematics called “psychohistory” that can, with considerable accuracy predict the future destinies of human societies. Seldon come to understand that a collapse of galactic society is immanent and unavoidable, and develops with his colleagues a master Plan to dramatically shorten the inevitable interregnum and dark age, and preserve what he can of human scientific and cultural knowledge from the immanent chaos. The rest of the series follows the execution of that Plan, its inevitable setbacks, and ultimate success. Asimov drew heavily on Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and the Foundation series is in a sense that account writ large on a galactic stage.
There was a trio of “Foundation” books published in the 1990s — I read a couple of them, but found them almost as forgettable as the (terrible) Brian Herbert successor books to the Dune series.
“Crisis” is set many thousands of years in the future, in the height of the Second Empire, which is even greater and more powerful than the First. The galaxy is benevolently run by the Lyceum, a group of scholars who manipulate human events to ensure stability and optimal outcomes using the now much more deeply-developed tools of psychohistorical prediction. They also ruthlessly suppress development of advanced mathematics, knowing that emergence of other groups of “predictors” would diminish their ability to control events.
Humankind has also developed the “fam”, a “tuned psychic probe” that grants the wearer dramatically enhanced cognitive abilities, memory, and access to the omnipresent data network and is permanently linked the the human mind with which it is joined.
The book follows Eron Osa, a psychohistorical scholar who is “executed” by having his fam destroyed for a crime he doesn’t even remember. The novel unfolds as we trace Osa’s childhood into the present, while also following him as he struggles to orient himself in a world that he can no longer understand and missing much of his past.
The big ideas here are about the nature of prediction and secrecy, and the uses and misuses of power. This is a big, long, and baroquely-complex book. However I find Kingsbury’s book a pleasure to read at times, and worth a now second reading. If you liked the Foundation books, then you’ll find this a faithful successor.