So I’ve managed to pop off the first book rather quickly and am currently zipping through the second. Overall, it is a fun romp on a grand scale where character development is briefly sketched and plot arcs rise and fall with the turn of each page. This rapid style of writing fits with the assertion that Asimov was greatly influenced by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a massive and epic work in its own right, in that the Foundation Series attempts to emulate the same grand scope though through a more intimate narrative style. Having read the abridged version of Gibbon’s work I am inclined to see the parallels between the two works, particularly in the entropy of the first empire, the rise of periphery kingdoms, and the ascendancy of a second empire.

Now, the part that leaves me scratching my head is the incredibly compressed time frame for the collapse of the edge of the Galactic Empire. Asimov describes the state of the outlying provinces as nearing barbarism by the time Hari Seldon is exiled to Terminus, year one of the Foundation Era, and that within eighty years the people of the outer rim had devolved so quickly as to lose the technological expertise required to develop and maintain nuclear based systems, such as power plants, and reverted back to fossil fuels as the underpinning of their economies. That strikes me as a very far way to fall in such a short period of time, particularly given that space flight is portrayed as being common among these planets as well as interstellar warfare that spans hundreds of light years.

This isn’t to say that Asimov’s depiction of the decline of knowledge, understanding, and ability is off base. He creates a compelling and realistic possibility that elaborate rituals and a sort of technical religion would be erected about the artifacts of a prior era and this is much how I imagine that the engineering feats of the Romans were viewed hundred of years after their influence had passed–”Sure the aqueducts move water and I can patch it if it gets leaky but I can’t build one if it’s needed”. Its just that my expectation of technical and cultural decline would occur over a much greater span of time due to the realities of the existing civilization.

Technological acquisition and retention requires means and methods for the storage and access of information and those means and methods need to be standardized, codified, and disseminated for it to have any real impact on the civilization. This is why the printing press was such an important development, because it offered a lower cost method for storing and distributing information. So for a civilization to evolve to the point that it spans millions of worlds it must possess both the technology, the knowledge, and the ability to transfer that knowledge and it is unlikely that a mere eighty years is enough time for much of it to be lost.

The decline of Rome as a civilizing power and the subsequent descent of Western Europe into the Dark Ages could be attributed to two factors: literacy and information storage costs, and the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Lisa Jardine discussed in her book Worldly Goods how the prohibitive cost of manuscripts limited peoples access to knowledge and how it was a factor in literacy among the population; in other words, for the most part, you needed to be rich in order to read. So if 85% of the population is illiterate it is not going to take but a few generations for current technologies to be lost. I’m inclined to think that this could not possibly be the case for Asimov’s Galactic Empire.

For certain, I can be taken to task on several accounts. I am no historian, possibly just read enough to sound like a pedantic ass, and the simple fact is that Asimov’s Foundation Series is just a work of fiction. It is quite possible that he compressed the time frame of the decline and collapse in order to maintain the narrative cohesiveness that a recent history offers. I suppose that my expectation is that such an epic such as this should maintain its vastness over all planes including time and that I should take my wife’s advice and just enjoy the damn books.

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