Foundation, Notes on the book series

Last Updated: 2026, May 1st

Foundation and the Individual
A few years ago I went through Project Gutenburg and read dozens and dozens of classic sci-fi short stories and novellas. I was surprised, on re-reading Foundation, how like it was to these. I remembered it as more modern novel - more convoluted. The thoughts and motives of the main characters more complicated. More full of suspense and questions. But the four stories in the first book are each dominated by a single, confident, and invariably correct protagonist. I couldn’t help being reminded of Murray Leinster and H. Beam Piper, especially the latter. The idea that the best and only way to rule was is tyranny, where the tyrant has the long-term good of the people at heart, seems to have been a common assumption in the 40s and 50s. The happy belief that men like this not only should arise, but could and would, is sprinkled all over these stories as well. In this world of openly inconsistent leaders, of movers and shakers with palpably short-term plans, such a belief is as comforting as it is naively frustrating. It also makes me think of Terry Pratchett’s infallible tyrant, Patrician Vetinari. And of course, to a lessor degree, of Captain Kirk and his spiritual successors. What do we encourage when we portray people as theoretically capable of leading? What do we encourage when we don’t?

What Makes a Memory?
I realized, during the first story in Foundation, that I didn’t remember many details at all about the story. Nothing was a shock, it all felt familiar, and the basics of the premises I could have recited without a thought, but I didn’t remember any details. Any tech. Any characters. Except two: a strange looking man called The Mule and a little girl. I had the vague idea that he liked the girl but she was a bit afraid of him. And that the Foundation was in trouble and the story ended with them in a space ship alone together. Or maybe they took the space ship and started a new foundation with it? It was fascinating, starting the second story in Foundation and Empire and seeing how much of my memory was true and how much was false. Bay is young, but she’s hardly “a little girl,” and she’s never alone with the Mule. There are two other men traveling with them – one or them her husband! Could there be another girl in later books I’m half remembering? Why, out of everything in this series, was this story the one thing my brain bothered to retain? It’s definitely the most dramatic story so far, and the most relational. I seem to have no problem ignoring tech and politics when they were unintelligible to me, rightly concluding they were unimportant, but it seems like confusing human relations couldn’t be so easily dismissed. What do most people remember from the books they read as children?