"Prelude to Foundation": For dated science fiction

I'm afraid I have to admit that I've never read one of the classics of science fiction, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (Foundation, 1951; Foundation and Empire, 1952; Second Foundation, 1952). Therefore when we were able to borrow Prelude to Foundation from the library without actually going inside the building, I read it.

Asimov published Prelude to Foundation in 1988, thirty-seven years after the first Foundation novel. As the flap copy says, "It is the year 12,020 C.E. and Emperor Cleon, First of the Name sits uneasily on the Imperial throne. Here on Trantor, the great multi-domed capital of the Galactic Empire, forty billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. It is a world so intricately woven that pulling one thread would unravel it all. Cleon I is unnerved by this . . . " When 32-year-old Outerworld mathematician Hari Seldon presents a paper on psychohistory, "little does Hari realize that he has sealed his fate and determined the destiny of humanity. For Hari Seldon possesses the prophetic power that is so desired by the Emperor. And now suddenly, this naïve and little-known Heliconian has become the most wanted man in the empire . . . ."

In some ways the book is a kind of Gulliver's Travels as Hari travels from area to area on Trantor, each with unique modes of dress, individual taboos, and concerns. He travels with a female historian who reveals almost superhuman skills as a knife fighter, and is rescued from one area after another by a character with the superhuman ability to show up when Hari needs help. Presumably Hari is assimilating the information he needs to perfect his formula for predicting the future, a future that I assume the later novels describe.

Asimov says there is unimaginable technological advances 10,000 years in the future, including cold fusion, faster-than-light space travel, books with paper on which the type advances automatically, a neuronic whip, and blasters that "mangled the organs inside the sergeant's chest" so that "without a change in expression, without a wince of pain, the sergeant crumbled and fell, dead beyond any doubt or hope." Trantor somehow is able to feed forty billion people with the entire land area covered by computer-controlled domes of various sizes and vast underground factories, stores, residences, and more. There is even the beginnings of anti-gravity, but it's expensive and limited.

Nevertheless, there's an old-fashioned feel to the technology. Trantor does have (primitive) computers, but there's no internet and no cell phone. Medicine does not seem to have advanced much, let along genetic engineering. When the character wants to buy a knife, she has to do so in an appliance store, and she recognizes the store for what it sells by a washing machine in the window. 

Even the description of the Galactic Empire sounds more like the Byzantine Empire than something 10,000 years in the future, although I'm willing to give Asimov a pass on this. I am willing to believe that, given humanity,  there are only a limited number of political arrangements possible, and people will not fundamentally change. There will always be anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, and contempt. 

My biggest difficulty with Prelude to Foundation, which is a key to the entire novel, is the unquestioned assumption that humanity would give up an advanced technology without something better to replace it. That's not the way I understand science and technology works. We give up an early technology for a more advanced technology. We gave up 78-rpm records for LPs, LPs for compact disks, CDs for downloads. I am not aware of an example in the history of technology were a device was perfected and then abandoned except in cases where it was a component of another primitive technology that itself was outmoded. 

In Prelude, humanity had apparently perfected a technology and then gave it up and never produced more of the item. (I'm being coy here because I don't want to spoil the surprise for readers who have not read the book.) I simply don't believe it, and because I don't, the novel fails for me except as a kind of old-fashioned boy's adventure story. I plan to read Foundation, however, to see what exactly this was a prelude to.