The Fall of Rome, In Space, With Zero Interest In Giving You A Main Character

Read this because everyone kept saying it’s the foundational text, ha, of like half of modern sci fi, and I get why now even if I didn’t love every page of it. Hari Seldon invents this new branch of math, psychohistory, that can predict the mass behavior of a whole galactic civilization even though it’s useless for predicting any one person. The Empire’s going to fall, that part’s locked in, thirty thousand years of barbarism is coming, and the only lever anyone has left is whether it’s thirty thousand years or one thousand.

Structurally it’s really a handful of connected short stories, not a novel, and the cast turns over completely every chapter or two, which some people love and some people find exhausting. I landed somewhere in the middle. What actually got me thinking was one small thing a reader pointed out, that psychohistory is only supposed to work on huge anonymous masses, and yet every single crisis in the book turns on one guy in a room being clever at the right moment, Hardin, then Mallow, then the Mule. Kind of undercuts the whole premise if you sit with it too long.

The Trantor stuff is where it gets fun for genre nerds, someone online called it flat out the blueprint for Coruscant, and psychohistory the obvious ancestor of Herbert’s mentats, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. There’s also a bit early on where George Lucas has admitted lifting from this for Star Wars, cigar smoking traders in nuclear powered ships and all.

My favorite bit of internet nonsense about this book though, someone joked it would’ve been better if Bayta had just told her husband to get lost and run off with the Mule to rule the galaxy. Four stars, ideas over people, know that going in.