55 pages • 1 hour read
Isaac AsimovFoundation and Empire
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Individual Versus History
Foundation and Empire asks a fundamental question that theorists have grappled with for centuries: Can an individual change history? The book answers both no and yes.
Hari Seldon’s Foundation is designed to pick up the pieces of the collapsing Galactic Empire and restore it to greatness. The Foundation does this through a combination of religious manipulation and interstellar trade, which help to preserve the technology, especially nuclear devices, that maintain a scientifically advanced civilization. The Foundation thus reduces the coming dark ages from 30,000 to 1,000 years.
Critical to this process are the careful, detailed preparations Seldon made to ensure that the enterprise would be a success. Seldon’s efforts are based on his work with psychohistory, which predicts long-term trends in human society that are unaffected by random actions of individuals. The project works beautifully for the first 300 years.
Several characters debate the implications of psychohistory. General Riose argues with Ducem Barr that he, as a well-placed, competent individual, can change history. He also believes that the centuries-old predictions of a long-deceased scientist cannot stand up to the decisions of a single, competent leader: “I’ll take that challenge. It’s a dead hand against a living will” (30). Barr warns Riose that his efforts already are accounted for in Seldon’s psychohistorical predictions. Sure enough, Riose’s successes cause his downfall, as if no matter what he does he cannot win against the Foundation.
These results reinforce the Foundation leaders’ faith in Seldon’s process. They are completely unprepared, then, when the Mule appears out of nowhere, quickly conquers every planet he covets, and makes a mockery of Seldon’s theories by conquering the Foundation itself. When the Foundation Time Vault releases one of its periodic updates—recorded by Seldon to explain events to future generations—the report completely fails to anticipate the Mule. Seldon, it seems, was wrong: An individual can change history, even one that seems foreordained.
This precipitates a crisis of faith at the Foundation, which has never yet failed to achieve its goals. The crisis reaches a climax when the Mule conquers the Foundation’s home planet; the remaining planets quickly fall under the Mule’s sway.
The unsolved question is how an individual could derail the Foundation’s destiny. Bayta works out that the Mule is able to control people’s emotions, an ability unanticipated by Seldon’s calculations. Such a power would upend all possible predictions for human behavior, since those predictions rely on the stability of people’s feelings and accompanying motivations.
The story hints that there may be a higher-level explanation for the Mule that preserves psychohistory, archived in the halls of the mysterious Second Foundation. At story’s end, this sister institution, based not on the original Foundation’s technology but on human psychology, remains hidden.
Thus, the book’s answer to the age-old debate on the power of individuals to change history gets put on hold. If the Foundation series proposes a final answer, it is left for the third book, Foundation and Empire, to reveal.
Power and Purpose
Several of the book’s major characters vie to control the galaxy. Each uses a different approach, and each achieves significant success followed by ultimate failure. In every case, their downfall is due to a personal flaw that trips them up.
Emperor Cleon II, the last strong leader of the Galactic Empire, relies on brilliant political perception and the reliably cruel intrigues of his second-in-command Brodrig to maintain order and stability. A product of a long string of rulers who have grown complacent, Cleon maintains the fiction that the empire is doing just fine and needs nothing more than maintenance to thrive. In reality, the far planets are rebelling, and the Foundation is already sweeping them under its umbrella. But when General Riose tries to conquer the Foundation and Brodrig joins him in the effort, Cleon senses a threat to his own rule and puts a stop to the effort. Thus, Riose’s very success spells his doom. Cleon’s success, in turn, helps to seal the Empire’s fate, with the result that, 80 years later, the Empire lies in ruins, most of its planets up for grabs.
Meanwhile, the Foundation’s rulers forge ahead patiently and systematically, relying on Hari Seldon’s psychohistorical predictions for protection. They believe their eventual victory over the galaxy is foreordained; thus, they take a somewhat passive approach to conquest, letting their Trader planets do most of the work of absorbing outlying planets.
The Foundation’s growing arrogance, however, pits it against the Traders, who plot against the home planet’s dictatorial ways. Foundation leaders also face the Mule, whose powers are not accounted for in Seldon’s predictions. Thus, the Foundation is completely unprepared for the Mule’s rise, and he conquers it with ease.
The old Empire collapses completely when its capital Trantor is sacked and billions of its citizens are killed. The royal house escapes to another planet, where it dreams futilely of a return to power and instead becomes a pawn in the Mule’s game.
The Mule seems unstoppable: His ability to adjust people’s emotions leaves them helpless with despair or devoted to him. Everywhere he goes, planets fall under his sway. His victory seems assured, but he too is stymied by a personal flaw: his trust in Bayta, who instead figures him out and blocks his advance. He says, “It’s a weakness of mine—I want people to understand me” (235), and Bayta is the only person he has ever met who appreciates him as a person. In exempting her from his mental control, he inadvertently gives her the latitude to frustrate his plan to conquer his last true opponent, the Second Foundation.
Thus, the book’s major players each succeed and then fail because of their deep-seated flaws. Most often, these failures are due to arrogance: Riose is overconfident, while Cleon and the Foundation leaders feel entitled and incautious. The exception is the Mule, who was wise and cool-headed enough to have won but for his devotion to the one person who blocks his path.
The Unexpected Hero
One of the book’s themes is only hinted at throughout the story until it appears fully expressed at the end: Civilization and its leaders underestimate women at their peril. The young historian Bayta emerges as the novel’s unexpected hero—her intelligence, foresight, and careful planning save the galaxy from the most destructive of the Mule’s plans.
The Foundation treats women and men as equals, but the Galactic Empire does not. Among the ruins of the old galactic capital of Trantor live groups of farmers who cling to the old ways. To them, it is offensive to think of a woman as equal to a man. On meeting Bayta’s group, one such farmer is stunned and aggrieved: “[Bayta] had taken a seat among the men. The strangers evidently allowed, even expected, such effrontery” (210).
The Trader worlds also display sexism. Bayta’s father-in-law comments to Toran, “I like your woman. She’s no whining ninny” (96). Between Bayta and Toran, she proves the stronger and arguably more intelligent partner, but Toran tends to take the lead when they encounter others. Bravely, he puts himself between her and possible threats, though it becomes clear that, in a fight, things would probably work better the other way around.
Bayta also befriends the clown Magnifico and later reasons that he is the Mule. The Mule loves her but does not give adequate weight to the possibility that she might see through him. She kills Mis, a man she greatly admires, to prevent him from revealing to the Mule the location of the Second Foundation, the last great institution that can defeat him.
Bravely, she confronts the Mule with her accusations, saying to Toran, “How much I will survive, I don’t know. But I can start talking—” (232). She explains that, wherever Magnifico travels, people and planets fall to the Mule. Her explanation that the Mule and the clown are the same contains a mathematical analogy: “Isn’t it just like an axiom in geometry—things equal to the same thing are equal to each other?” (234).
Thus, a woman whom everyone likes but to whom few pay close attention—whom men, and the Mule himself, are drawn to but dismiss as inferior—becomes the single most powerful person in the galaxy by stopping the Mule’s forward motion.
The most ironic fact of Bayta’s life is that she too is an unexpected change in history who thwarts the other great unexpected variable, the Mule. Thus, Bayta demonstrates that an individual human can change history as much as or more than a mutant can.
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