From "Foundation".

The "Foundation" series is Asimov's most famous work. It tells the story of the gradual decline of the Galactic Empire that has ruled the Milky Way for 12,000 years. Only Harry, a master of psychohistory, can Seldon foresaw that in the future the galaxy would experience a dark period of thirty thousand years, full of ignorance, barbarism and war, so he gathered the best scientists in the empire and came to a desolate planet on the edge of the galaxy to establish a "base" and make it a An epic sci-fi story that will serve as a beacon of hope for future generations of humanity. It is composed of five short stories.

"Foundation" created three heavyweight heroes who turned the tide?

1. Hari Seldon

"Foundation" is the most impressive The hero is Harry Seldon, a master of psychohistory who has passed away for many years. The author uses the mouth of a young rural scholar, Gail Donick, to elicit memories of Seldon.

Psychohistory is a mathematical model created by Seldon, which inputs some variables through the Seldon function, such as the assassination of the emperor, the rebellion of the governor, the cyclical cycle of contemporary economic depression, the decline in the planetary development rate, etc. Seldon The probability that Trantor will be destroyed within three centuries is 92.5.

So the great master Seldon persuaded the empire to exile himself to the Terminus, gathered 100,000 people to build a base, and compiled a galactic encyclopedia to preserve the fire of human knowledge, in an attempt to shorten the dark period of the empire and spend one thousand years Complete thirty thousand years of work.

The prototype of Hari Seldon’s character is the historical mathematician Adolf Kettle. Born in Ghent in the Low Countries in what is now Belgium in 1796, Kettle was one of the first people to apply mathematics to human behavior.

Our current obsession with “big data” and the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence are direct descendants of Kettle’s intellectual achievements. Of course, Kettle did not call the discipline that emerged from it psychohistory, he called it social physics. Kettle passed on this intellectual gift to future generations: Despite free will and the vagaries of life's circumstances, human behavior in general is much more predictable than we imagine.

History is not a static river, and neither is the history of the future written by Asimov. From the beginning, the author reveals between the lines that the only constant is the historical law of change itself. The original intention of the creation of the base and its final direction are cleverly revealed in various chapters, and it does not necessarily follow Seldon's psychohistorical theory completely.

2. Sever Harding

Sever Harding, the first mayor of the base, led the base through the two Seldon crises. Harding was the only person to be present at both Seldon crises. This character has outstanding personality charm, speaks well, and has many famous sayings and aphorisms handed down. For example: "There are always benefits to being aboveboard, especially to those who are known for their hypocrisy", "Force is the last resort of the incompetent", "Don't let morality stop you from doing the right thing", "This is a pan-galactic Phenomenon - when the respect for the past and nostalgia for the past have gone too far, it means that we cannot change the past and are stagnant." and so on.

The first Seldon Crisis came to Terminus fifty years later, when Governor Anacreon rebelled against the Galactic Empire. When people on Terminus are panicking, the author quotes Mayor Harding as saying: "When you need to challenge authority, your ability to think independently is completely shut down. In your minds, His Majesty the Emperor is undoubtedly more powerful than yourself. Dr. Seldon must be wiser than himself. This is wrong, don’t you think?” These words are still of vigilant value to today’s young scholars. Harding used a strategy of vertical and horizontal manipulation to help the base survive the crisis.

The second Seldon crisis came eighty years after the base was established. The base used Scientology to package up a king of Anacreon with divine right to kings, and Uncle Wang rebelled.

Harding told the rebellious Uncle Wang an ancient fable about horses, wolves, and humans. The kings of the four kingdoms accepted the scientific religion that deified themselves, and this religion became their horse reins and reins. saddle.

When the priests at the base repair the hyperwave repeater on the interstellar cruiser, the curse of the priests, the servants of the Galactic Holy Spirit, will come true. The warships with their muzzles pointed at the base will immediately stop, and the soldiers will be exiled to the cold for fear of their souls. Surrender to space.

During the thirty years of Harding's rule, the base packaged scientific aid into sacred religion and marketed it to the surrounding wild planets. Priests from various kingdoms will regularly go to Terminus to receive scientific training and take charge of nuclear power plants. This allowed the base to successfully survive two crises and become a religious holy place that the Four Kingdoms did not dare to desecrate easily.