I found the premise of the book really intriguing. The human civilization in Asimov’s world is highly advanced, covering many galaxies and is at the height of its technological development. It is governed as an Empire. One genius scientist figures out that the existing macro trends of the population, economy, and politics will lead to a collapse, followed by several millennia of chaos and civil war. While he judges this outcome as unavoidable he devises a plan to preserve scientific and technological knowledge to shorten the duration of the chaos period from 28k years to 1k years before a second empire can develop.

Asimov describes this plan in several episodic short stories each putting focus on a dominating force: science, religion and trade. The presented inevitability of complex macro trends that is the essence of psychohistory reminded me of some sections in Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems:

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them.

It’s hard for me to rate this book as I don’t yet know how the series concludes, but so far I like it.