When I was a kid I trusted the story that Foundation was based on: that there was a Golden Age of the Roman Empire, followed by a thousand year Dark Age, worth avoiding at all cost.

Now it's clear that that story was largely a colonialist myth, what do we do with Foundation? https://twitter.com/JenLucPiquant/status/1275210465279262721

Listening to @mikeduncan has taught me that there were plenty of barbarian raids, civil wars, colonial wars, famines, plagues, and of course slavery during Roman times. Okay they had concrete and plvmbing and some kind of Pax Romana, but life wasn't perfect for the average Roman.

Listening to @byzantiumcast @atozhistory @HistPhilosophy has taught me that there was still plenty of good stuff going on during the "Dark Ages." Now that I think about it, Asimov doesn't show us much of this horrible disorder going on outside of the Foundations, does he?

Of course the biggest conceit of Foundation is that before the Fall, nobody lives outside the Galactic Empire. There is no Persia or China, but also there are no scattered Iron Age Germanic settlements, or steppe horse tribes. After the Fall there is no Islamic Empire.

I couldn't resist!

So there were "monotonously numerous revolts"! p. 13 of the 2004 Bantam edition

I wish my interactions with other data scientists were anywhere near this scrupulous!

Applying the concept of inertia to modeling political change is interesting... cc @arthur_spirling

Hari Seldon makes a very concrete prediction: that the world-city of Trantor, capital of the Empire, will be totally destroyed within three hundred years.

In the "Dark Ages" the population of the city of Rome fell from over 400,000 to as low as 35,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Demographics

Aside from the destruction of Trantor, the rest of the predictions for the fall of the Empire are mostly vague gestures at "anarchy."

Twenty-nine thousand years of human misery.

"Have me killed and you will be dead within a year." That's the power of data science!

Natural language generation for surveillance jamming

Asimov's Lord Dorwin is a well-worn caricature of falling-empire aristocrats: obsessed with appearance in a way that is typically expected of women. @HardcoreHistory has talked about this caricature: the effete urbanites ready to be stomped by the naturally macho warriors.

Of course, Asimov went on to grow some of the most famous sideburns in the twentieth century, but he did adopt Midwestern-style postvocalic /r/ patterns:

In Asimov's eye dialect, Lord Dorwin not only drops postvocalic /r/ but replaces pre-/intervocalic /r/ with "w," which usually represents the labiodental articulation famously caricatured by Peter Cook (also with sideburns) in The Princess Bride. No "linking r" @symbolicstorage!

To bolster his caricature of Dorwin as superficial, Asimov has him drop the /r/-dropping when he experiences strong emotions

The Encyclopedia Project has a system capable of extracting propositional content (or the lack thereof) from a text, but it requires some guy from the Division of Logic to spend days manipulating symbols with pen and paper.

Oh yeah, there's a whole plot where the Foundation trains people from the nearby kingdoms to run nuclear reactors and the power grids they feed, but in a form that confers functional competence while completely obscuring the underlying workings. Hm, where else have I seen that?

I'm realizing as I think about this that Asimov must have been influenced by Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, which also dealt with science and belief at the fall of Empire. As I wrote, de Camp in turn was influenced by Frazer's The Golden Bough: https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2018/02/indistinguishable-from-magic/

The Foundation techs always make sure they know a lot more than the Anacreonians, enough to install a remote control backdoor in the old imperial cruiser that the regent demanded they rehab.

I was telling someone there was no foreground violence in Foundation, but I remembered wrong!

Who said there are no female characters in Foundation? Right here we have "one of the Commdora's girls," presumably a servant, whose only role is to be awed by Hober Mallow's fancy jewelry.

The Commdora herself is a genuine character with intelligence and agency, even if she's a relatively stock character of a conniving political wife. And then Asimov just drops the whole subplot of her relationship with the Commdor. Presumably it ends badly, but how?

The Foundation had its tech priests, the Empire its caste of "tech-men" who maintained the knowledge of nuclear power.

Siwenna patrician Onum Barr on the conspicuousness of Hober Mallow's Smyrnian dialect.

Interesting how Asimov is fighting against the Great Man Theory of History, but his vignettes are still all about Great Men (Seldon, Hardin, Mallow). Wouldn't it have been nice to illustrate the broad sweeps with stories that weren't connected to anyone directly in power?

Ah yes, the planned obsolecense strategy of galactic conquest!

I always liked how the Foundation innovated in miniaturization because of the relative lack of resources on Terminus, while the Empire had no incentive to optimize in this direction.

Also, maybe the Tech-Dude choked because he got radiation poisoning from the miniature reactor?