This is currently a four-book prequel to the Honorverse (all of well before Honorverse times) by Weber, Zahn, and Pope. The flavour is Honorverse minus the infodumps, which leaves missile battles, secret agents influencing strategic decisions, and politics. There is very little scientific discovery. The most central character, Travis Long, is just one thread in a story which frequently switches scenes and viewpoints.

On Baen podcasts, Weber is quite proud of the politics and of his thoughts on history and strategy. I think the question as to whether there is any point to this is a statement about History itself. If History has underlying tides, then PsychoHistory might exist, and Weber's work could be marked on how well his stories reflect those tides. If History is just a list of mistakes and of wars started by random megalomaniacs, then perhaps the best we can do is to find out as much as possible about what is happening now, while refraining from exptrapolating too far forwards by any means, including by historical analogies.

(This series is slightly cheaper this month - I am writing here now based on only a single reading of the last two books so if this mention makes somebody suddenly keen to buy the books they have one whole day left at the reduced price).

Since Gibbon was part of the inspiration behind Foundation, I note:

“History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

― Edward Gibbon

On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 1:40:25 PM UTC-7, mcdow...@sky.com wrote:
> If History has underlying tides, then PsychoHistory might exist,

We do currently have a discipline which makes predictions about events in the
real world based on averaging human behavior in the way that chemistry averages
the behavior of molecules. It is called economics.

As well, while I disagree with the author's extravagant claims for geographic
determinism, in his book _Guns, Germs and Steel_, the author, Jared Diamond,
does demonstrate that the broad outlines of history do follow from geographical
factors to a significant degree.

The trouble is, though, that it is also true that random acts of individual humans
can multiply to affect an entire society as if through a chain reaction. So there are
fundamental limits on the predictive power of this sort of thing, leaving what we
can achieve as insufficient to support a field of study resembling Asimov's
psychohistory.

What we can and should do is learn from history.

John Savard

On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 01:17:20 -0800, Quadibloc wrote:

> On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 1:40:25 PM UTC-7, mcdow...@sky.com
> wrote:
>> If History has underlying tides, then PsychoHistory might exist,
> ...
>
> The trouble is, though, that it is also true that random acts of
> individual humans can multiply to affect an entire society as if through
> a chain reaction. So there are fundamental limits on the predictive
> power of this sort of thing, leaving what we can achieve as insufficient
> to support a field of study resembling Asimov's psychohistory.
>

Basically I would agree, but I think that the sociology of
manipulating en masse through the mass media is more advanced
that has been disclosed in the open literature.