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Title: Foundation (Foundation Novels)
ISBN: 0553293354
Author:
Isaac Asimov
Publicate Date: 1991-10-01
Publish: 1991-10-01
List Price: $7.99
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Mass Market Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $3.89
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1: Amazing Asimov read !!!!!!
I can't say enough about this book, weather you like SF or not this book is a MUST READ!!! It's more about people/civilizations/political systems than SF but either way I highly recommend it.
As for SF it is simply the best SF book ever written!!!!
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2: Psychohistory and the statistical prediction of mob behaviour!
By the end of the thirteenth millennium, mankind had populated millions of planets scattered throughout the galaxy. The centre of the imperial government was located on the planet Trantor, in effect a single planetary city some 75,000,000 square miles in extent. Every conceivable square foot of habitable space was occupied with a teeming population well in excess of 40 billion souls. Its internal problems were so vast that it was all but inevitable that its grip on the outer reaches of its dominion should weaken. The empire, like every other empire that had preceded it, was in the throes of decline.
Hari Seldon, a brilliant mathematician and psychologist developed the science of psychohistory - the use of mathematics and symbolic logic to evaluate and predict the future behaviour of statistically large segments of human population. When he applied his analysis to the Empire, the conclusions were bleak and inescapable. The stagnating Empire would imminently fall and collapse into a galactic dark age - a period of anarchy and chaos and a loss of art, culture, knowledge, technology and science that would last for thirty thousand years.
When he knew that imperial collapse was inevitable, he created the "Foundation" and implemented what was later to become known as the Seldon Plan. He couldn't stop the dark age but he could shorten its duration to a mere thousand years and give civilization the ability to start over again.
Asimov, known to his millions of fans merely as the "good doctor", certainly didn't stint when it came to the scope of his ideas and the size of the canvas on which he chose to paint. "Foundation" is a classic sci-fi novel that leans far towards the left side of the sci-fi spectrum. Hard sci-fi, technology and advanced science are touched upon only to the extent that they are necessary to make sense of an Empire that spans an entire galaxy. Quaintly, much of the science is seriously dated - data storage is on microfilm, atomic power is the norm even in spaceships that are expected to travel galactic distances - and could hardly be considered brilliantly prescient.
So it is clearly the ideas that Asimov deals with that have elevated "Foundation" to its status as one of the most loved and most read science fiction novels of all time - science as religion, the authoritarian nature of religious dogma, the insidious Machiavellian nature of political diplomacy, the inevitability of the decline and collapse of a major empire and a powerful discussion as to whether violence is a necessary tool to resolve differences or whether it is merely "the last refuge of the incompetent".
While I will happily acknowledge that "Foundation" was interesting and thoroughly enjoyable, I was somewhat disappointed to discover that it did not have the same thrill or excitement that I experienced when I first read it thirty years ago. The level of science in the book seems almost lack-lustre and in my mind did not live up to the grandiose scope of the novel. Like so many of his peers in the 1950s, women were stoutly ignored and played no part in "Foundation" at all.
Dickens wrote at the turn of the century so one expects his prose to be different. Asimov wrote "Foundation" in 1951 so one certainly expects it to be a product of that time. But, unlike Dickens (and I'm not really quite able to put my finger on the reason why), the prose simply didn't age quite as well. So, in the full knowledge that many will disagree with me, I'm unwilling to accord "Foundation" the 5-star rating that many will expect. Four stars only from this reader and a high recommendation that this book must be read if you claim to be a fan of the classic sci-fi genre.
Paul Weiss
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3: Amazing book to get hooked on Asimov!
I won't bother you with much detail about the book, just know that this is one of the best (if not THE BEST) Science Fiction books I have ever read. I highly recommend this book to everyone. If you plan to read only one Sci-Fi book in your entire life, please make it this one! Asimov pretty much established the grounds for all space odysseys' that followed (think Star Wars, Star Trek, Hitchhiker's Guide, etc.). You wont be let down.
The book is actually a collection of 5 short stories published together in one volume. It all begins at about 30,000 years after our time, and about 12,000 years after the Galactic Empire was established. Hari Seldon, a brilliant mathematician, has developed a theory (psychohistory) that can accurately foretell the behavior of immense human populations to the tee. Using it he placed the Empire's demise at 300 years, with an added bonus of 30,000 years of struggle in a chaotic and barbaric galaxy, until the Second Empire is established.
What are you waiting for,get yourself a copy!!!
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4: Excellent
Foundation is a masterpiece, bar none. It is not only great science fiction, but great fiction. Asimov does a truly wondrous job of painting a large picture, much in the way that the Hudson School of painting did in the 19th Century, while also giving compelling characterization, like a Rembrandt, and selecting the `right' moments that the reader can zoom in on, in this compelling account of future history. Asimov leaves Clarke in the dust in terms of characterization, and most of this is achieved via dialogue, while still painting a big picture. Asimov wrote wonderful dialogue, and one can read the tenor of a character's soul simply by how they react in words to other characters. That said, I am very surprised that Asimov did not take issue with George Lucas's Star Wars films, because without Foundation there would simply not be Star Wars. Everything is there to be plumbed and looted- a galactic Empire, rebels, space jumps to circumvent the speed of light, the Galactic Spirit (aka The Force), and so on. Even Star Trek took a heavy load of its mythos from this book, as the human dominated Federation and human-looking and human-derived aliens that dominate most of the Star Trek universe have much akin with the Empire that rules Foundation at novel's start....Foundation was first published in novel form in 1951, but consisted of a number of short stories published throughout the 1940s in magazines like John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. Book One, The Psychohistorians, was written specifically as an opening for the novel; Book Two, The Encyclopedists was published as Foundation; Book Three, The Mayors, was published as Bridle And Saddle; Book Four, The Traders was published as The Wedge; and Book Five, The Merchant Princes, was published as The Big And The Little. Each of the Books within the novel functions almost as an autonomus story, much the way Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio do. Yet, it all ties together, and though it has always had a reputation as a space opera, even if the ultimate or original space opera, it transcends that label. Yet, those sorts of labels can be offputting to casual readers of a genre, like I am. For I am not a sci fi nut by any means, yet I sense that many people have avoided this book because like, say, reading a Rilke poem or watching Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, they have felt that something so overpraised and hyped is bound to be a letdown. It's not. It earns its praise and labels, like epic, for, even though the book is less than 150 pages long in my version, probably 250-300 pages in paperback, it is certainly epic- the timescales and range of the Empire demand nothing less. And although that term is grossly overused, in this case it is spot on. The very title of the book has, in the decades since its first appearance, taken on another connotation, though- that of not only referring to the Foundation within the tale, but its place as the Foundation upon which modern outer space sci fi is based upon.
This is not to deny the books flaws, which are there. But, given that most of them have to do with technological things, they are not truly literary flaws, merely those of the nature of the sci fi genre. Among them are anachronisms such as typical hausfrau-like portrayals of women, who apparently still worry over household domestic products, an addiction to nicotine, an over-reliance on atomic power, the use of parsecs rather than light years as a unit of distance, the galactic Empire being at the center of the galaxy where we now know only a supermassive black hole exists and makes life as we know it untenable due to radiation, and other minor points. Other flaws are less anachronistic than what in film would be called continuity errors, such as being able to transcend the speed of light, but recording information in actual books, and on microfilm, rather than digitally, or quantumly, yet being able to teleport that information; the Empire possessing holographic technology, yet it all being powered by vacuum tubes; or civilizations possessing interstellar ships but having economies dependent on fossil fuels- which means that dinosaurs and the like must have appeared on millions of the other worlds. Then there are just the plain odd things, such as Asimov's faith in capitalism being the solution to the galactic ills, even though in his universe it's what ails all the worlds. The idea that even were an Empire to arise and dominate a galaxy that such a massive thing could ever stagnate, seems odd. Diversity argues against that, but this shows Asimov's pessimism regarding the human ability to evolve. That these future men also have life spans akin to ours, smoke, and suffer cancer, bespeaking there seems to have been little in the way of medical breakthroughs (this was pre DNA discovery), also seems a bit of an imaginative lack.
But, perhaps the greatest flaw of the book is Asimov's love affair with the Freudian Psychohistory (although I'm told in later books Asimov redacted the mythos to reveal it all a fraud), which reeks of determinism, exalts psychology to a `hard' science, damns free will, plays to the Fallacy Of Uninterrupted Trends, and has been totally demolished in the wake of chaos theory. Still, even though Psychohistory fails as science, it's still far easier for a writer to predict human nature than scientific advances.
But, again, these are mere quibbles, relatively speaking. Let me look at the pro side of the ledger. The very Psychohistory that, in reality, is specious, allows for the very drama of the tale to exist. While poor science it makes for excellent drama. To watch the various Foundation leaders grapple with their own will versus their faith in Seldon is the essence of existentialism. Asimov's use off offstage action is not just a condensing device, but clues the reader in to what is really important- the human moments and confrontations, not the comic book like blowing up of great interstellar vessels. A third device that works well is the use of select epigraphs throughout the story, culled from the fictive Encyclopedia Galactica. They unify the tale, lend it grandeur, and ground this future history as if it were already in the reader's past, much as Edward Gibbons' real and influential The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire did, and which Asimov acknowledged as his main source of ideas. Wisely, there is not too much technobabble, which helps date a work more than anything else. Also, as stated before, the book is rife with humor and sparkling dialogue, as well as plausible catchphrases like `Galaxy knows' or `By galaxy!' It is also worth re-stressing that the book's focus is not on scientific progress but social progress, and this predicates a number of major existential queries, such as what is progress? How does progress reconcile with human nature? Is progress ever expanding, cyclical, or helical? What is knowledge? How do the two square? Should knowledge be commoditized? Should knowledge be mysticized? What is free will and ethical agency? But most of all, how can all these subjects and ideas be best related?
Yet, most of all, despite the ideas and the narrative, is the wonderful fact that Asimov is just flat-out a damned good writer. His prose is sometimes muscular, sometimes poetic, but always lucid and clear. His plots are not overly Byzantine, yet quite complex, his sentence and paragraph structure not ornate, but subtly seductive. How Hollywood has never optioned this book for a film is beyond me. Wait, no it's not. Why would they want to do compelling, human-based science fiction when they can pump out the pseudo-intellectualism of a Philip K. Dick, or the vapid ??r-mythography of Star Wars, and make a fortune? Perhaps Asimov might be re-thinking his faith in Adam Smith's invisible hand in the great beyond?
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5: Science Fiction at its best
The main plot of the story copies the evolution of every human society. The decline and fall of empires, followed by the rise of others, depends on the same phenomena as those described here. We are puzzled by Psychohistory, but the notion itself (forecasting the future as the weather) is sound. This novel opens a range of questions and issues beyond other books of the genre.
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