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One of the great masterworks of science fiction, the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are unsurpassed for their unique blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building. The story of our future begins with the history of Foundation and its greatest psychohistorian: Hari Seldon. For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. Only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future--a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare--that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire--both scientists and scholars--and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation. But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. And mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and live as slaves, or take a stand for freedom and risk total destruction.… (more)
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But ... beyond the basic
The story consists of one dreary formal 'boardroom-style' meeting after another. In it we are fed much more detail about Asimov's (impossibe to swallow) vision of the political workings of society than detail about the wider scope. Action is not shown but discussed in hindsight in the board room. To me that is cowardly and stand-offish. And the writing style exacerbates this impression. It is consistently pompous.
I know I'm swimming against the tide by saying this, but having read five of Asimov's books now, I'm finished. I can't stand him. I will read no more.
An exceptional book. Some say that Asimov doesn't spend time creating characters with any depth or worlds with any feel. And while I'll concede that he doesn't, I don't believe we're missing anything. The point, at least in this novel, is not about the uniqueness of worlds and individuals, but about the commonality of worlds, populations, and ideas. The ideas put forth here are huge: psychohistory; the consolidation of political power; the mechanisms for empire building through religion, trade and culture. Huge, HUGE ideas that would certainly be diminished if the author spent more time developing a character that exists for a blip on the timeline of the story...
Read 12/2007
Which isn't the only anachronism. Someone's phone goes off while their in the bath. Which was a thing back in the day.
With reading The Dispossessed, Dune and
So in case you don't know, Foundation is set thousands of years into the future, when Earth has been forgotten and humans have established a Galactic Empire. Everyone is thoroughly pleased with themselves for doing this and believes this Empire will last forever. But Hari Seldon, one of the great thinkers of the Empire, has developed a form of mathematics called psychohistory which predicts the future by predicting the mob-behaviour of human beings; how they will respond to various events, how things will then play out as a result of these things etc. Psychohistory predicts that the Empire is doomed; in response, Seldon helps set up a Foundation on a remote planet intended to protect the science and culture of the Empire from the coming Dark Ages, shorten the length of those times and plant the seeds for a new Galactic Empire. But along the way, there will be many crises that will have to be faced by the Foundation; the novel deals with those crises.
Foundation can be praised for its creative ideas and it's extremely well-executed stories of political intrigue, but it still pretty much fails as a novel. Asimov has no interest in emotionally involving you in his story; its cold and detached, focusing entirely on the big picture and having no concern for the micro-scale. Characters are barely given personalities, and there is little difference in voices between any of them (a comparison with the Star Wars prequels would not be inaccurate). There's no real explanation of setting in most of the novel either, no tone is really established; all Asimov wants to tell you about are the crises as predicted by psychohistory. As a result the novel is very dry, so that it doesn't even really feel like you're reading a novel at all. This may not bother sci-fi fanatics, but people who want novels to actually make them feel something aren't going to be blown away.
Foundation is worth reading because of its reputation, but if I were you I wouldn't expect the greatest sci-fi book you've ever read. Still, it's good enough for me to want to read the next two.
I prefer the robot series, it's more engaging. The weakness of the Foundation series is the ultimate "goal" of decreasing the Middle Ages anarchic period from 30,000 years to 1,000 years. Doesn't make too much sense, and it does not help the reader to invest in the story, especially when the charachters necessarily change with each of the 5 stories.
Very cleverly thought out. But you don't get engaged in the fate of the characters - the main thing is the imagined world they inhabit, and all the great ideas that are presented. Well, it didn't matter much, since this is a satire on political maneuvering, and as satire it works very well, I laughed a lot.
The stories do not engage you emotionally, but it is great fun to see how Asimov conceived how matters might occur.
I have reread this after more than 35 years and it is interesting how much of the reworking of historic trends I missed the first time around (probably read when I was 12 or 13). It definitely bears rereading and although it no longer has the wow factor from writing about such large themes, it is an enjoyable read.
Presented as a future history of the initial disintegration of a galactic empire and the early rise of the science and culture based organization which will attempt to preserve humanity through the dark millenia to come, Foundation offers a time-lapse overview of key events rather than an in-depth exploration of any of them. Full of political intrigue, however, Foundation does lend itself to post-millenial realpolitik readings and effectively illustrates the use of propaganda and religion to spread a secular doctrine of knowledge and science.
Rightfully acknowledged for its originality at the time of its publication, one wonders how the author managed to think of technologies far in the future, while still having characters purchase newspapers.
Criticisms notwithstanding, I am intrigued enough by the plot to continue reading in the series.
The first book is an adventure. The first character we meet is Gaal Dornick whom you form an attachment to right away. But by the end of the second chapter you learn that he is no one, you will never know him again. The book travels like this, quickly through the characters and
9-1998
Unfortunately, I found the book to be too simple - with the bad guys obviously bad, the good guys cardboard cutouts of a hero, and the only woman in the story to be a
Its a story of its time and its missing a lot of the complexity that are in modern science fiction stories.
Also, every time "nucleics" (Devices run off of nuclear energy) was mentioned, I cringed a bit. Nuclear Energy was the big new-fangled energy in the 1950's, but this book seemed to do nothing but promote it.
I'm glad I read it. It is an interesting story, but a bit far fetched. Its intriguing how man hasn't changed... This book was written in an era that is the start of the whole modern day science fiction.
I read
The alleged reason for the Foundation's existence is to compile all human knowledge into a galactic encyclopaedia which (Seldon asserts) will allow the period of anarchy following the collapse of the Empire to be reduced from thirty thousand years to a mere one thousand years. The structure of the book is a series of short stories that cover important developments in the Foundation's history. It turns out the encyclopaedia is entirely a ruse, and Seldon, via a series of prerecorded holographic lectures, appears every so often and explains what he predicted would be happening (via phsychohistory), and offers vague suggestions as to how to proceed in the future. Though mineral poor, Terminus leverages its technology to take over or dominate the surrounding areas with its superior technology.
The episodic format of the book works well - allowing for the Foundation's story to progress without long tedious periods being detailed. The books have been compared to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Asimov says influenced the work. The only thing I found to be silly was the concept that is introduced in one of the stories that one of the nearby "barbarian kingdoms" remains an interstellar power despite having "lost" atomic power (i.e. they don't have the know-how to produce atomic power). At the time Asimov wrote the books, atomic energy seems to have been something of a buzz word in science fiction, and losing it was clearly supposed to show how far the Foundation's rivals had fallen, but the depiction just brought to my mind the incredibly silly image of coal fired or gas-turbine starships. As usual for the era's science fiction, no one predicted the microchip revolution, and scientists are still using slide rules and computers are the size of buildings (or cities) while atomic generators are made the size of belt buckles.
Technology wierdness aside, this is one of the foundational (note the pun) works of science fiction. It is a must read for any science fiction fan.
On the one hand, the liberal use of religion as a a means of controlling the people is quite interesting for a book of its time, and almost forgives the misogynistic portrait of characters. On the other hand, however, the blind faith in and person cult
As such, I personally find the values of the book quite.. Unrelatable.
The premise is that the Galactic Empire and its home planet of Trantor are going to fall after twelve thousand years of interstellar rule, and
And brilliantly, Asimov shows key points in the start of that thousand years, individual short histories that have bearing on one another only because each key person in those histories realizes that they are coming to a Seldon-anticipated moment: there seems to be no way out of their particular galactic situation except for one, and that would be what Seldon predicted.
I read this book in my early 20's, liked it well enough, but remember being jarred by the decades and centuries between the stories. Now, I read it with a lot more understanding of human interaction, and some measure of cynicism, which helps Asimov's originality shine through.
I have to admit that I've tried to read this book a zillion times, and I finally got through it. The surprising thing is I really liked it this time through. Not sure why it never hit me the other times. However, it's a difficult read and may not be for everyone. I don't think the language is hard, or the concepts, just that the writing is perhaps a little dry and the huge jumps in time can be disorienting. However I do strongly reccomend this book for sci fi fans, and it is certainly a classic.
Part of the beauty of the novel for me was making the connections between the lines of characters in between chapters. They're not always there but the learning process regarding Asimovian lore while reading the book is great. If you really want to be sold on the brilliance of Asimov, I have to recommend one of his moderately short stories, "Nightfall." It was my first read of his and has since made me a longtime fan.
It means that everything we do is balanced on a knife edge between social and selfish impulses. The societies we create mean that people fill niches in that social structure in such a way that although individuals have flexibility of thought and predictive intelligence to work out eventual harmful consequences of collective actions, there is no flexibility in the structure to allow fundamental change in the direction we are heading together. That's why we have the rise and fall of empires through the ages and a seeming lack of ability to avoid the effects of climate change, despite knowing about it. I wonder sometimes if Asimov had it right. He seemed to suggest that human social structures are subject to the same chaos theories as weather patterns. If you could predict the consequences of small changes could it fundamentally alter the outcome of human existence at a later date and avoid catastrophic population collapse. However, I also wonder if the societal niche theory means that societies are self-healing. For example, if you went back in time and stopped Hitler's birth would that small change result in a fundamental shift in our history or would someone else simply have moved into that available space and carried out the same role. How predetermined is our fate?
I think a lot of our issues have arisen because we are a semi-social species. We are neither so altruistic as an ant nor as sociopathic as a solitary predatory species. However, perhaps it's only a semi-social species that can evolve predictive intelligence to the same capacity as ourselves. I think I may have just found my question for the "science" of Pychohistory.
Is there a possibly a mathematical model to predict the fate of the human race? It's possible that's the sort of question you should only ask a mathematician after you've taken them to the pub and fed them a couple of pints of beer.
NB: I've read these stories also as an adult and seen a subtext I missed, that the entire galaxy is a thinly-disguised Manhattan and Brooklyn. Once you've visited the city it adds a different perspective. Reading it in the sequence the stories were originally released also makes a poignant tinge as the kid gets disenchanted with Marxism and the possibilities of treating Sociology as a predictive science. It's no more literature than Dickens was.
Still, essential reading for the literate, modern