レビュー要約

• 古典SFへの応答としての知的遊戯性が評価される一方、議論の密度を重く感じる読者もいる。設定を読み解く楽しさが中心にある。

レビュー

• Five Stars

  A very good read

• Foundation as it should have been

  This book is what you get when someone reads Asimov and says "Those are some interesting ideas but crappy execution, I could do it better" and then goes ahead and does exactly that. Asimov's big ideas are all here. Fairly severe flaws in those big ideas, that Asimov apparently didn't notice, are also here; that's what drives the plot - having the Grand Galactic Plan suddenly be derailed for reasons nobody foresaw but in retrospect are totally obvious and apparently insoluble. The characters are fully fleshed out, believable, and for the most part relatable. The action is solid. The sheer scale of a galactic civilization is portrayed very well, with sketches of the multitude of details of countless star-system civilizations, in a way that Asimov never bothered with. The technology and its impact on human minds is completely believable, and especially given the impact of smartphones and social media today it allows this book to serve one of science fiction's primary purposes: to extrapolate a trend and warn of possible consequences. The high level informational mathematics is plausible enough that in discussing this with some physics and mathematics PhDs I could not find one who would say "that can't work". This is one of the best Big Ideas novels ever written. I highly recommend it. I recommend it MORE than the Foundation novels themselves - you might enjoy it more if you've read those, but you don't need to; everything you need is here.

• Five Stars

  Great, exactly as described.

• An essential contribution to the Foundation Universe

  As someone deeply engaged with studying the possibilities of ‘real’ psychohistory (my PhD was on this topic), I have long awaited a copy of Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is of course an SF construct – hence a ‘mythical’ psychohistory with no connection to the ‘actual’ form of psychoanalytic psychohistory that originates with Freud’s first psychoanalytic network. As a retired professor of mathematics from McGill University, Kingsbury is the only author of a ‘Foundation’ novel to grapple with some of the issues raised by statistical (i.e. stochastic) long-range models of human affairs implied by the ‘Seldon Plan’. The novel may well therefore be challenging for some. These issues include a) those of predictability in the social sciences, b) determinism vs. freedom of action and c) the function of ‘secrecy’ in institutions seeking to effect long-term historical change – and ‘freezing’ these changes once they have been successfully created. Since this novel appears to have been written outside the ‘canon’ approved by the Asimov estate, there are significant name changes. Those well acquainted with the original Trilogy will, however, have no trouble linking the background and events of this novel with the ‘metahistory’ of the canonical series. Particularly poignant for me is the chapter entitled The Martyrs’ Cache – which harks back to the tragic events (for the Second Foundation) at the conclusion of the third novel of the Trilogy. Suffice it to say here that the ‘fifty martyrs’ of the Second Foundation get their revenge. I might have given Psychohistorical Crisis 5 stars, but I found the characterisation rather weak – will humans living 80,000 years from now really be so much the same as we are at present? What about the ‘posthuman’ acceleration of the present? The possibility of an AI ‘singularity’? Or will collapse intervene to terminate our current scientific-technological culture? If it does, will not acute resource depletion seriously constrain any possibility of a technological renaissance in the future? I also have trouble dealing with the ‘all-human’ Galaxy, though I’m happy to treat the ‘dynamics’ of the novel as a ‘world model’. Any serious consideration of human psychology is lacking in ‘Asimovian’ conceptions of psychohistory – and it is the absence of any ‘macropsychological’ parameters that seriously constrain the ecological validity of ‘real-world’ stochastically-based models. Nevertheless, the novel has real relevance for our own time. I particularly liked the concept of the ‘fam’ – I guess that within 15-20 years at most the I-Phone will have shrunk to the size of a microchip and will be capable of being embedded within the neocortex. Then we really will be in the Neuromancer world... I strongly recommend Psychohistorical Crisis for any serious student of the Foundation universe.

• A TRUE successor to Asimov, The Future of Foundation

  This book is a FAR FUTURE look at how things have turned out in the Foundation Universe. It is not sanctioned by Asimov's estate (I have no idea why). This is a shame because this author has the courtesy to actually explore the future of Foundation (as compared to some authors (hint hint nudge nudge) who chose to "Explore Hari Seldon" as a character, something that the Good Doctor did quite comprehensively in Forward the Foundation and Prelude to Foundation and which is quite unnecessary, especially coming from outsiders. As Asimov himself said, Seldon was his alter ego and Bear, Benford and Brin (authors I ctually admire for their other work) really wasted a good opportunity to do something special with this amazing universe :(. I know that all Foundation fans are really dying to know what happens after Foundation and Earth. What mode of governance wins (the Second Foundation, Terminus or Gaia?). The premise of "Psychohistorical Crisis" is that the Second Foundation has won (doesn't say how). In any case, that won me over instantly (I was rooting for it after all ;-). Since it is unofficial, Kingsbury has used different names for everything (planets, kingdoms, people) and so on. You might think that this is awful. However, after all that time, one would expect some distortion in terms of slightly different legends, names, etc. The genius of Kingsbury lies in the fact that he has constructed this universe to the logical evolution of Asimov's universe after several centuries!!! So, if you remember ANY of the original series, you cannot help but understand instantly what places and people he is referring to. As a dedicated Asimov fan, I recommend this book to anyone who was dissatisfied with the "official" second Foundation trilogy and wants the REAL thing. The reason I call Kingsbury a genius is that in his story, he has really addressed the concepts behind psychohistory (it's really a psychohistory novel, rather than a Foundation novel). The REASONS for the name changes are part of his thesis!!! In some sense, the names have merely evolved after the fashion of a centuries-long game of 'Chinese Whispers'!!! (Any more and this would be a spoiler).

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