Life in a Bubble
Trantor is the major city setting in the book. It is city essentially covering the entire planet, populated by many billions who most live a life more suited to bees or ants than humans.
“If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.”
Foreshadowing Our Future
A central component of the book is a discipline called psychohistory which is a mathematic determination allowing a successful prediction of future events when applied to large groups of people. In a way, the book itself engages in psychohistory, as it seems at times to predict events occurring nearly seventy after it was originally published:
“Now any dogma, primarily based on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user…suppose one man, on ambitious man, uses the force of religion against us, rather than for us.”
Darkness
Rather amazingly for a book of this length, published at this time, and dealing with these themes, the go-go metaphor of the modern age only shows up in purely figurative terms once. Rest assured, however, that there are tinges of metaphor within its otherwise literal uses sprinkled alongside this example:
“The ship was a turmoil of darkness in which fear was so thick and palpable, it was all but a miasmic smell.”
The Foundation of Foundation
The basic foundation of what the story of Foundation is all about—distilled down to an essence placed within the context of a sentence or two—is found within the following quote. The speaker is, once again, Dr. Hari Seldon, the chief mechanic of many of the most memorable metaphorical imagery in the novel. Here he is on trial for treason and explaining his rationale for making statements in which the decline and fall of Galactic Empire is absolutely inevitable:
“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.”
Cool Space Imagery
Not all the metaphors and similes are directed toward such serious mundane things as that which occurs in other genres of literature. This is science fiction, after all, and so one definitely wants vivid images of really neat futuristic gadgets and stuff:
“From her waist as a source she was drowned in a pale, streaming luminescence of shifting color that drew itself over her head in a flashing coronet of liquid fire. It was as if someone had tom the aurora borealis out of the sky and molded it into a cloak.”
