Foundation

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Summary: The grandfather of SF books
Review: If you're only going to read one SF book, this is the one. This was my introduction to SF many years ago and it's still my all-time favorite. Asimov was the original and is still the master.

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Summary: Great page turner!
Review: ...P>The story was very unique.
The world he creates and the society therein is fantasic and dangerous.

The protagonist is a mathmatician running around just doing his thing not realizing that destiny awaits him.

I really, really recommend this book and the next. By the middle of the third book I did begin to loose interest as my male testosterome began to scream for more violence and suspense.

Characters are likeable and the story resolution is very satisfying. This book was great and enjoyable in and of itself even if you don't continue on with the rest of the series.

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Summary: A meditation on galactic empire
Review: Foundation is not a novel, but a series of stories which had been published separately. The entire trilogy was written in nine stories which were completed in the period between 1941 and 1951. Asimov notes himself in the foreword that part of what he intended with the fourth book _Foundation's Edge_ was to have a chance to write an actual Foundation novel.

I actually like the effect that the story-based approach gives, particularly considering that Foundation is meant to be covering the fall of galactic empire and the rise of a new power. Having chapters based on discrete periods, I think the reader gets a better sense of the sheer time involved in politics than any 9000 -page space opera could ever achieve.

One of the things I like about Foundation and its subsequent other parts is that it isn't an action-packed adventure. There isn't high romance. It isn't really about individual heartache and success, although the role of the individual is important. It's a meditative look at both politics and the future, and a darned sharp one at that.

An excellent read, even worth the time for people who don't think that they like science fiction.

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Summary: Building A Foundation
Review: Foundation. Arguably the greatest creation of science fiction to date, from the most prolific writer of the genre. Isaac Asimov's tour de force first graced the pages of the May edition of Astounding Science Fiction in 1942. By the time the last instalment of the saga was finished in 1992, (only a matter of weeks prior to Asimov's death), the story had gone full circle so that you finished almost where you had set off from. We are initially told of The Seldon Plan; A one thousand year strategy mathematically and statistically conceived by Hari Seldon, to potentially minimise the eventual downfall of the once almost omnipotent, but now crumbling Galactic Empire. Seldon's Plan is for a group of specially chosen settlers to emigrate to Terminus, an uninhabited planet in a remote corner of the galaxy, from where they will create the Encyclopedia Galactica, a definitive omnibus of information necessary to aide a new and even stronger Empire rise long after the anarchy of it's predecessors demise.
Throughout five of the seven Foundation books Asimov wrote, the reader witnesses the unfolding of The Seldon Plan, and how the original settlers of Terminus evolve over the centuries, as the work of the long dead Seldon comes to fruition. The two 'prelude' books in the series tell of Seldon's life, and his initial realisation as a young man, the gravity of what must be done to save the people far into the future, while simultaneously trying to instigate his master plan.
Upon reading the end of the last of the books in a chronological sense (Foundation & Earth), the reader is gifted with the biggest jaw-dropping, mother of all twists in the story, which turns almost all of what you have read in the previous books upside down. Read Foundation, and guaranteed you'll read the other six books all in immediate succession.

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Summary: Very entertaining even for an Action-Freak like me!
Review: Normally I need lots of action and suspense to keep me interested in a book. This book had some level of suspense (not like Koontz's, The Watcher) but focused more on the growth of the main character. Very intriguing plot that had me wondering what was going to happen next. I liked it enough to read the next two books in the series.

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Summary: A true classicl sci-fi novel
Review: Foundation clearly deserved its awards and recognition for being a classic science fiction novel. The creative and unique story line presents the reader a sensation of the future. In the beginning of the book, Hari Seldon was introduced as a psychohistorian and mathematician who could chart the future of the human race for tens of thousands of years. He predicted a decline of the Galactic Empire, which had lasted for twelve thousand years, into a state of disorder and barbarism for the next thirty thousand years. Hari Seldon then established the Foundation to serve as the purpose of shortening the period of chaos into a single millennium or less.

The book was extremely enjoyable and the pages went by fast. However, the only problem I had was that once I got to know the characters, the story went on to a situation a couple decades later with new characters. Though it bothered me, the way the author wrote his novel was necessary to put a whole century's plot into a book. Despite the many characters in the story, the author created a distinct personality for each. Yet, each of the leaders in the different parts of the book were similar in a way; they all dealt with conflict extremely calmly and ingeniously. They cleverly manipulated their enemies with their words and were always prepared against threats or opposition. They knew how to win the people's votes even when they were in a weak position to run for a government position. I could not help but to ponder about what I would have done in each of the situations. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that likes science fiction or anyone who likes reading about how characters cleverly solve their problems.

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Summary: The fall of the Galactic Empire begins
Review: Foundation consists of five stories separated by several decades each. The Trantorian Empire has lost its hold on the outer perimeter of the galaxy. Hari Seldon, founder of the predictive science of psychohistory, knows that the Empire is doomed to collapse and that thirty millennia of barbarism and anarchy will ensue before a second empire will rise. But Seldon claims to know a way to shorten the dark ages from 30,000 years to a single millennium.

The stories in Foundation chronicle the infancy and development of Seldon's Foundation society initially established on the remote planet Terminus. Seldon's psychohistory predicts several crises that the Foundation must survive in order to bring about the desired drastic shortening of the dark ages. Four of the five stories each describe a crisis that confronts the Foundation.

So far I've read the Robot series, the Empire series, and the first three books in the Foundation series (Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, Foundation). I find the epic story so far to be extremely engaging and imaginative. The stories in Foundation are a bit disconnected and not fleshed out enough, but nevertheless do a more than adequate job of describing the fall of the Galactic Empire.

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Summary: Nice book - that's it
Review: Foundation came to me highly recommended. I am not new to science fiction, but I have not read that much of this genre. I was looking forward to something that would really blow my mind away. though I admired several things about the book and thought it was a nice read, I am not going to read the other books in this series. Coming away from this book, I felt it was good, but not much more. There were several ways in which I clearly found the book to be lacking. Though Asimov's style is surely concise and highly readable, he views plot as the central element to his writing, at the expense of other aspects of great fiction that really should have been incorporated. I will outline these at length because it appears that the book's praises are already sung widely.

First, there is not much character development. Characters are presented merely to accomplish a historical event in the flow of the story. We get a feel for the characters not as real people, but as actors on the stage of world history. Though the reader admires the nerve and intellect behind each of these heroes, there is little else that makes them interesting. While this kind of presentation of characters may work in movie adaptations or history textbooks, I like to view my characters as a little more than men at work. Everybody is always scheming, there's not much downtime or description of what day-to-day life is like with these guys so far in the future, such far-off planets.

Secondly, there is a lack of real meaning or symbolism that defines great books. The closest we get to intrinsic meaning is the description of the false religion that Salvor Hardin invents. And this only helps us understand what the author probably thinks about organized religion. The all-importance of nuclear energy also seems like propaganda to get ther reader to "understand" how important it will be in our era, with no attention paid to other kinds of fascinating technology that may exist in the future, such as super-intellect, robotics, biotechnology, etc. I don't know if Asimov was just lacking in creativity, because with the exception of his brilliant description of the mother planet Trantor, the only thing different between this far off future and nowadays is the ability to jump through space.

Thirdly, romance does not play a role in the book. There no women in the book, which means there can be no romantic intrigue, or world events influenced by a woman. Also, there is no sense of wonder and excitement that a reader surely hopes to get when they enter an author's imagination. The landscape of these far off worlds is sparesely and hardly described. We spend much of our time in staterooms.

On the other hand, if you like books that are centered on brilliant leaders of nation-states and how their decisions affect the course of history, you will like this book. If you are fascinated by the economic, political, and sociological macroforces that shape history, you will like this book. If you're more about the game than the players, you will like this book.

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Summary: Grand SF in the old tradition
Review: The 'Golden Age' of science fiction (typically defined as the period shortly after John W. Campbell took charge of Astounding magazine to the late '40s) produced many of the seminal ideas now taken for granted (and almost cliched) by the SF genre. Foundation was certainly part of this era, defining two major ideas: that the entire galaxy would be populated by humans (no aliens around - an early look at the idea that we might just be unique), and that mass human behavior can be codified in mathematical algorithms and to a certain extent is predictable. These ideas, along with several other lesser ones, form the background basis for Foundation, where the galaxy-spanning Empire (closely modeled on the Roman Empire) is in decline and Hari Seldon has created the initial equations of psychohistory, which predict the eventual complete collapse of the Empire and an ensuing 'Dark Age' lasting 30,000 years. Although Seldon can see no way to prevent the Empire's collapse, he does see a way to reduce the resulting Dark Age length to about 1000 years, by setting up a Foundation in the far reaches of the galaxy, whose nominal mission is to preserve man's accumulated knowledge in a repository called the Encyclopedia Galactica.

With this as the background, the story revolves around particular points in the Foundation's existence where it is in danger of being destroyed or overrun. Originally written as separate stories, each crisis episode's (all foreseen via the magic of Seldon's mathematics) resolution progressively moves the Foundation forward from a backwater, isolated, and ivory-tower society towards an active political power, capable of dominating its surrounding stellar mini-empires, becoming an island of light in a sea of darkness and ignorance.

Viewing each episode by itself, none of them are representatives of great writing, marred by weak characterization (a typical Asimov failing) and almost hackneyed plotting. The massive shift in viewpoint and background at the start of each episode is also jarring, as the reader must readjust to a whole new set of conditions each time. However, the power of this book and its two successors is in the grand scope of the entire story line, very typical of stories of this era, as they are far more idea centered than character or plot driven. This book almost cannot be evaluated by itself, isolated from the rest of this set, because the full panorama and scale of the complete story far outweighs the individual contribution of each piece of it.

As an introduction to the Seldon universe, this first book is adequate, with surprisingly little dating, given that the separate pieces of this book were written almost 60 years ago. Yes, there are places where vacuum tubes still reign, but they sit right next to the use of holographic images, which weren't even on the scientific horizon when this was written. But the technology here is almost irrelevant, as the focus is on how to guide and shape a society of humans, to develop a proper government within which individuals can grow and be creative, while at the same time there is a background thread that asks if all human actions are pre-ordained.

Take the time to read this; ignore some of the blatant examples of '40s pulp-level style. Look instead for the great ideas and their interrelationships; feel the sense of wonder. But to fully experience why this is considered one of the best classics in the field, Foundation & Empire and Second Foundation are immediately required follow up reading.

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Summary: a product of scifi's golden age...
Review: Asimov participated in American science fiction's golden age, helping to convert pulp fantasy stories into realistic predictions of the future based on current science. It isremarkable that he wrote the Foundation while a young man, barely 20 I believe, a work with grand themes and the cornerstone of his massive and sprawling future history of mankind, which I believe went into more than 50 volumes. The basic plot is that a scientists created a new discipline, psycho-statistics I believe, that could predict the future behavior of huge masses of humans. He then attempts to
mold - or at least influence - man's fate over the next 30,000 years. What is truly amazing is that Asimov succeeds in this and the two following volumes. In a way, he should have stopped here with the series. The ideas are crisp and not yoked into a determined framework, so are fresh with lively characters. Later novels in the series - the overwhelming majority - feel more stilted, bound by concepts more than by a plain old good story.

A sci fi classic.