Foundation (Foundation #1)

What if you could mathematically prove that the government was going to fail? More, what if you had magical math showing you the one path forward to limit how long chaos would reign following that fall? That's the premise for Foundation: Hari Seldon's psychohistory predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire and he must act to plant the seeds of the future to come to limit how long humanity will be subject to the whims of arbitrary and capricious kings splitting up the territory as the scientific knowledge of the empire is lost.

I really enjoy the separate stories of the Foundation.

I'm reading science fiction classics to get a feel for what led to the Traveller RPG right now and revisiting this one was well worth it.

Asimov isn't great at character development, the characters tend to fall off and be replaced by the next generation right as they would need to change to meet the new times. But the situations are great and keep you engaged as you see how the history of the foundation has been carried forward by each generation.

This is honestly one of the science fiction classics that has aged pretty gracefully.

The Foundation series are some of my favorite books. They're definitely a product of their time (Asimov was clearly more comfortable with writing short stories for magazines than with writing novels, and his biases are obvious in the misogynistic treatment of the few women in the story) but their basic ideas hold up well.

I personally really enjoy the rather dry political tone, and both the lack of focus on character development and the long time-skips are fitting given the premise of the story (which posits a theory of "psychohistory" in which the overall trajectory of a large group is emphasized over the actions of individuals, and which can be used to predict and direct the future over long periods of time). The plot twists and reveals also never come out of nowhere, and sufficiently tie back to previous details to make each individual part feel neat and tidy.

This is a very good novel- the beginning of a major life's work. Clearly no one should expect this novel comes to a closure. It is instead a beginning of a' mystery' and tale of evolution.

Una nova i preciosa edició d'un clàssic entre clàssics. Una saga escrita entre els anys 50s i 90s del segle 20 (no us perdeu especialment els 3 primers volums) que, com sempre feia Asimov, mentre ens explicava històries de tecnologia, robots i espai en el fons ens parlava del ser humà, com a individu, com a col·lectiu, de com ens relacionem, de com ens veiem com a individus i com ens projectem a la societat.

Having read this as quite a youngster, it's interesting to come back and re-read 25 years later.

I, Robot was my introduction to Asimov (and I guess Sci Fi) but Foundation was my introduction to larger, longer sci-fi. In my recollection it could rival Dune in it's depth but a much wider universe.

Anyway, that's not the case. It's very focussed on small moments and a limited set of characters on a limited set of worlds. It's really a set of short stories that continue the Foundation's story. Each short story is a crisis which have been predicted and in which there is only one possible action that the character can take to resolve. And they do.

And this sort of thing is fun and interesting in a Lem novel, but here it tends to be "OK, you did the thing like it was predicted well done you." It's either blindingly obvious what will happen or so out of left field that you're not invested.

It's a very quick read and while the characters tend to be very flat and mostly just serve to argue with each other, there's some interesting stuff in here.

I think back in the day, there might have been some interesting concepts in here about how one culture can effectively control another culture (here through the use of religion and commerce), but I feel like others have explored it better since.

I had remembered that the setting up of the Foundation was a lot more of this book than it is and it's kind of weird that time jumps forward so fast when I think it'd be a lot more interesting to see how things pan out in real time for longer.

But even though you're getting these very compressed moments, the time jumps don't really take you to what I had presumed would have been the conclusion of the book. For some reason it just dumps you at a seemingly random point.

A quick google finds that these were published separately as short stories and were collected together, which I guess does explain a lot.

Overall re-reading it isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

I really enjoyed the book's "prose" or rather lack thereof. The writing is very straightforward, reading at times more like a play, including many grand monologues, rather than a novel.

However, the book's subject matter is not fun at all: It basically describes various ways in which political operatives acquire more power, always justified by "the survival of civilization". All in all, it reads as a praise of imperialistic tactics, which is pretty gross.

This time, I'm not gonna read the whole trilogy.

I'm baffled that I don't enjoy another one of those books that so many people hype. I like some of his other books, but maybe I just don't fancy his writing style.

This whole system of "Is it gonna work? IS IT REALLY GONNA WORK?!?!? Yes it worked" is just not my jam. There wasn't that much sci-fi in this one as well, it's just a very minor detail to it.

This whole books starts with a guy that invents a way to guess what will happen in the future and nobody else can do that somehow. It was something that was invented and not some magic device. How is it impossible for everyone else to figure this out? Why did everyone just fall back a thousand steps in technology? Why did nobody look much more into it the first time he was right?

I just don't get this book and have no idea to whom I would recommend this one. Maybe these kind of books don't age that well? Maybe I'm just too young to get it. 🤷🏼

I enjoyed re-reading Foundation and plan to continue to read the others in the series. As I've grown older I've become more appreciative of history and how it has shaped our lives, so reading about a science fiction setting where people effectively write the history they want to have is just fun.

The principles of psychohistory, the statistical study of masses of humans to predict their behavior, was fascinating and today's real-world applications of data science scratch at similar concepts. Of course, this is a science fiction book, but it nonetheless explores the what-if: what-if this psychohistory were real and could be applied on human civilization at large?



For a more in-depth review, check out my blog: strakul.blogspot.com/2021/08/book-review-foundation-by-isaac-asimov.html

Another book revisited from my youth. It still was a good yarn, with interesting thoughts on the nature of what we might now call the "Clash of Civilizations". Also particularly amusing for the ways in which the future was both accurately and inaccurately predicted: nuclear power did not prove to be the panacea Asimov thought, and he also didn't anticipate e-mail (capsules with written messages get teleported through space) or the effects of Moore's law on storage (a Galactic Encyclopedia is planned in volumes stored in libraries throughout the galaxy). But it holds up anyway as a story and vision.

Après plus de cinquante ans d’attente, je me suis enfin décidé à lire le cycle le plus connu du bon docteur. Vous ferais-je l’affront d’un résumé ? Non, je ne crois pas. Avant d’arriver aux choses désagréables, je voudrais noter quelques points positifs. Le premier d’entre eux étant évidement la formidable écriture d’[a:Asimov|16667|Isaac Asimov|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1200326433p2/16667.jpg] qui, grâce à un vocabulaire simple mais percutant, nous fait rentrer très vite dans ces récits et surtout, nous captive de la première à la dernière page. Un autre point intéressant est mis en valeur par une citation qu’emploie régulièrement l’un des héros : "la violence est le dernier refuge de l’incompétence". Ca a dû être le postulat de départ de l’auteur : réussir un roman dans lequel la violence ne serait jamais employée par ces héros. Naturellement, pour éviter le recours à la violence, il faut faire preuve d’intelligence et de ruse. Et c’est évidement le cas des différents héros. C’est même mon principal reproche. Ils sont en effet d’une intelligence tellement au-dessus de celle de leurs adversaires qu’il leur est possible de gagner une guerre sans livrer un seul combat. Ca, à la rigueur, c’est acceptable. Seulement on ne les voit jamais se démener pour livrer une guerre, une révolution, des négociations secrètes … Et c’est ça le second gros défaut de ce livre : les phases délicates, qui feraient pourtant un bon roman, sont toujours soigneusement éludées à grands coups de "trois ans plus tard" ou "Il était maintenant maire". D’une part, c’est frustrant, et d’autre part, ça enlève une partie de l’intérêt de ce roman. Néanmoins, Fondation reste un excellent roman, une référence historique du genre qui, si elle a vieilli(1), n’en demeure pas moins une étape significative, mais de quoi ? Car il me semble (attention, hein, il me semble seulement) qu’à part le côté atomique de la chose (qui est justement le plus agaçant du roman), qui est la partie la plus datée de la chose, Asimov n’a pas été très suivi, mis à part par lui-même. Le fait est donc, qu’il s’agit d’une oeuvre du patrimoine de la SF très agréable et distrayante, et assez courte. A lire à mon sens par tous ceux souhaitant plonger un peu dans le monde des grands anciens
(1) Ca fait bien longtemps que je n’avais pas vu une telle profusion de gadgets nucléaires, de la montre au champ de force.