All a Matter of Probabilities: A Textual Reexamination of Psychohistory in Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy

This project examines one set of texts from the Golden Age of Science Fiction — Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. The Foundation Trilogy was first published as a set of connected stories from 1942 to 1950. From 1951, these stories were collected and expanded on as they were published in three novels: 1951’s Foundation, followed the next year by Foundation and Empire, and finishing with Second Foundation in 1952. Though later in his life Asimov created more stories and books within the universe, starting with 1982’s Foundation’s Edge, the original series was presented as a coherent arc and stands to be examined as a full text within its own right.

The goal of this paper is to do a close, formal reading of Asimov’s work , while comparing the text with prior criticism. The central premise of the Foundation Trilogy centers around the fictional science of Psychohistory and how it guides the characters in the created universe. Psychohistory is my focus here as it is the key novum invented by Asimov in the text. In The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. expands on the idea of the novum first introduced into science fiction criticism by Darko Suvin. Csicsery-Ronay Jr. defines the novum as the initiator of “imaginary models of radical transformations of human history” (5). This “new thing” is a sense of a rationally explicable material phenomenon, and the result is a wholesale change within the perception of reality (6)…