Dr. Hari Seldon is a psycho-historian, a mathematician who deals with the reactions of human masses to given
social and economic
stimuli. Dr. Hari Seldon has acquired a reputation for predicting disaster, but his latest work in the University of Trantor has made him an unpopular man, for he has predicted the total destruction of the Empire in five centuries.
Trantor is the administrative center of the Empire. But Dr. Hari Seldon believes that as Trantor becomes more specialized, it will become more vulnerable as well. And as the Imperial succession grows more uncertain, feuds among the powerful clans will break out. The decline of
social responsibility will precede the fall, an outcome to which he has assigned a mathematical probability of 92.5 %.
The purpose of the Foundation that Dr. Hari Seldon has established is to save the knowledge of the race, by preparing a summary of all knowledge available. Though psycho-history is a statistical science, and cannot predict the future of any single person, it is widely believed that Dr. Hari Seldon is pursuing a secret agenda of his own. To be more precise, he stands accused of disturbing the peace and bringing about his own predictions of doom! Under these circumstances, the trial and exile of Dr. Hari Seldon is a foregone concusion…
The Foundation
trilogy is believed to have been loosely modelled on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The only difference is that the setting is in space, indeed it spans the whole of the galaxy. Replace colonies with worlds, and ships with spaceships, and the transformation is complete.
In today’s parlance, Dr. Hari Seldon would be known as a sociologist or a social scientist. And given the increasingly mathematical underpinnings of the social sciences, it cannot be denied that Isaac Asimov’s space saga has more than a grain of truth. Isaac Asimov’s space saga has spawned more than its fair share of imitations, but what they lack is the logical rationale that the author has brought to his tale. The trilogy can be read as an adventure (or space fantasy), or it can be read as a work of prediction, it is enjoyable to read nonetheless.