Exploring cerebral themes of economics and culture, Foundation was always going to struggle as a series. Decades ago, as a teenager, I really loved the books. The TV show is well produced and has some spectacular scenes and moments, such as the space elevator collapsing, the adult ‘Empire’ known as Day walking the Salt Spiral, and a few scenes. But it has 3 main problems.
1. The characters
The characters do not feel real. I sort of liked Gaal, the young mathematician from a backwards religious water-world planet. But she gets less and less screen time as the series progresses. The present-day hero Salvor Hardin has her boyfriend, but it’s dry and perfunctory – surviving various crisis for the sake of plot. They hardly have any real chemistry – I just didn’t believe in them as a thing. I don’t know why – they survived life and death stuff together. But something’s missing. The characters go through the motions for the sake of plot. They seem to lack a rich emotional life. Compare this to the complex characters we meet in The Expanse – with rich emotional lives and all sorts of backstory and baggage motivating them – and you’ll see the difference.
Indeed, rather than the heroes I found the villains of the story more captivating. I felt the Cleon clones – the tyrants in charge of the Empire’s decline – had more interesting motivations and interactions than anything going on in the Foundation itself. And the Emperor’s hardly feature in the original books!
The problem is the writers try to treat us as adults (usually a good thing) and keep some things back for a surprise at the ending. A basic writing rule is “Show, don’t tell.” Yet here they sometimes seem to keep the wrong things back. The timing is out – we learn afterwards why a scene had an emotional musical score and the characters all tearing up – but maybe I’m dense but I didn’t get it at the time. Without enough information to explain why an event should move us, it’s hard to be moved. It becomes a one random event after another – a bit too much like real life. For example….
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In the last episode of season 1 (Episode 10) the hero Salvor Hardin finally understands her visions, and that they come not from the Vault, but a telepathic link to her biological mother Gaal. She has a vision of Gaal diving into water. Then she kisses her boyfriend, gets up early, and goes to board ship and find her mother. But the boyfriend stops her just before she leaves. She explains that she’s had a telepathic link to her mother and knows where she is – and she’s off to get her. There’s this huge, teary farewell with overblown music. What is going on? They have an FTL ship – can’t she just jump there and get her mother? There were tiny hints as to where Salvor might be going. But it wasn’t clear enough that I knew she was leaving Terminus for good. I guessed she was going for good because of the drawn out farewell and the music. But I didn’t know why, or what was going on. Even worse – the music seemed to be telling me how to feel. But jump out, get Gaal, and come back home again. What’s the big deal? It’s hard to feel when you don’t comprehend.
2. Contradicts the books
They tried to make an action series where the quick thinking and special skills of the hero save the day. But Psychohistory is about the broad sweep of the actions of 500 quadrillion people – 500 thousand trillion people. Psychohistory predicts the Empire is destined to collapse, and how thousands of the ‘right sort’ of experts and scientists all clustered together in a lonely corner of the galaxy might create a new culture that fights the malaise and restores galactic civilisation within 1000 years. Lots of smart people gathered over there (writing Wikipedia for all I know?) will concentrate their talents and have the right culture and expand outwards across the galaxy, fixing things later on.
Huge cultural and scientific movements, broad sweeps. But Hollywood wants some action! The more excitement you write into the precariousness of an individual character using their agency in the story, the more you diminish the ability of Psychohistory to predict broad sweeps. And the TV series is full of extremely conditional, contingent moments. What if she hadn’t ducked that shot? Terminus is doomed. What if she had been faster than the Mayor in their race to the navigation couch on the Invictus – and she had been the one to sacrifice herself piloting this impossible craft? Terminus is doomed – as she is indispensable later. Basically, the more the individual shines, the less Psychohistory has to do with it. It is eclipsed by the brilliance of the individual – which is antithetical to Psychohistory.
3. Vague collapse
It was a fun story when I read it decades ago as a teenager. But in the meantime I have spent quite some time reading about the collapse of civilisation in both real world and Sci-Fi settings. Foundation’s original plot around Psychohistory leaves me wondering.
What happened to all the smart people on all those other worlds? They have FTL. If just one of those other worlds escaped the collapse – then they could spread knowledge and rebuild trust and governance across the nearby worlds.
Part of the problem with visualising this is the exact mechanisms of collapse were never spelled out – even in the books. It seems to be some kind of broad malaise in education and culture and politics and even scientific process. But while we have seen remarkable backwards steps in recent history – there is nothing that compares. Where one sector might be regressing, others appear to be advancing. For example, while NAZI Germany was an example of a sudden and surprising backwards political move – the war itself propelled amazing advances in technology. While some regions experience environmental challenges like the Middle-East’s water shortages, Israel has made fantastic progress in water efficiency and now exports water to other countries. As the world moves closer to peak oil, we have seen the rise of Tesla. If we were to experience a sudden oil shortage due to embargoes, war, or even the Export Land Model (4.a here) – there are many adaptation strategies and even positive side effects of being forced to wean off oil.
Even if we were to nuke ourselves back to the stone age, there are political and technological strategies we could use digging through the ashes – that would bring back technological civilisation within a generation or so. What is it about the Foundation’s FTL galactic civilisation that makes the wars endless? I’m trying to suspend my disbelief and say there’s something we just don’t know about FTL civilisations or even Pscyhohistory itself because we are not Harry Seldon. But watch this on hitting the ‘reset’ button here on earth.
Now imagine some future planet collapsing into war but they have FTL to go fetch help after the clouds clear? It would open up all the vast resources of space minerals and energy and expertise from other worlds across a huge galaxy. FTL would open an economic abundance we would find hard to imagine.
4. Collapse must be fast and universal or each planet could recover quickly
There must be some bad political decline throwing the whole system into turmoil. Yes, the Emperors were tyrants, and probably would take out a lot of planets in any rebellion. The Galactic Empire had about 25 million planets and 500 quadrillion citizens giving each world about 20 billion people on a very crude average. 12 billion more than we have here on earth.
But how many are all going to suddenly attach each other – especially given they’ve been working together for thousands of years? Imagine one planet collapses in one corner of the galaxy. It probably has a thousand civilised planets within range of FTL, each planet having an economy of 20 billion people. If each planet sent just 10 FTL starships with all kinds of equipment and medicine on board, that would be 10 thousand starships to the rescue.
It gets worse. Just one star could actually house a quadrillion people if we lived in O’Neil Cylinders. Then we don’t even need planets – and the galaxy could keep growing until it had a quadrillion people around every one of our 400 billion stars. That’s a lot of people and a lot of economic might to deal with disasters. Imagine each Dyson Swarm around each star is mandated to keep at least one Air-craft carrier sized ship that can go help other worlds in a disaster. That galaxy would have 400 BILLION such ships. I haven’t done the math, but I’m wondering how much of the Earth 400 BILLION aircraft carriers would take up if they all landed?
In other words, what galactic collapse – especially in a galaxy with FTL? There’s just too much redundancy and backup. For now, let’s just say I’m more optimistic than Isaac Asimov was when he wrote Foundation in the 1950’s.
Eclipse Now 