I read this because people I admire talked about it (Elon musk, Orson Scott Card, Ben Shapiro). It’s classic science fiction in an ancient context. It was published in the 50s, 15 years before the earliest start trek, 25 years before star wars, and 35 years before Enders game, all of which are ancient history. In many ways, it belongs to the era of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Prince of Mars or even H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds more than it does modern science fiction. That being said, there are some truly brilliant ideas explored in the text.
First, the book doesn’t follow a protagonist, which means no character development and no human story. Instead, Asimov overtly follows humanities’ story, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint and century to century in galactic civilization. In some ways, it reads more like a collection of short stories in Sanderson’s Cosmere or perhaps even something from the MCU, but the novel still manages to drive a narrative crafted around philosophy development rather than character development.
This brings us to the second layer of the book. The underlying philosophy is an invented discipline designated as “Psychohistory” which is essentially 21st-century socioeconomics. The first story is about an organization that collects and organizes enough data to mathematically predict the next several thousand years of civilization history ranging from macro trends to micro-events. The notion nullifies the impact of individuals and resigns history to an inevitable course. The notion is repugnant on the surface. 70 years after the book’s writing, we have more data than Asimov ever dreamed of, yet our predictive models are still laughable (I build and laugh at them professionally). Yet it’s interesting to think about. There is some inevitability to macro trends, and history does have an uncanny way of repeating itself. Perhaps we emphasize the individual too much.
Finally, the heroes of the short stories never accomplish their goals by jumping in an X-wing and blowing stuff up. It’s always about big-scale social manipulations, even to the smallest problems. This isn’t realistic in any sense of the word, but there is something untouchable admirable about the idea that “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent”. Perhaps then, we are all merely incompetent.