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The first novel in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, 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. The Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are among the most influential in the history of science fiction, celebrated for their unique blend of breathtaking action, daring ideas, and extensive worldbuilding. In Foundation, Asimov has written a timely and timeless novel of the best—and worst—that lies in humanity, and the power of even a few courageous souls to shine a light in a universe of darkness. Read more
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Kindle
Foundation by Isaac Asimov is the first book in the Foundation trilogy, set about 50,000 years in the future. The second and third volumes in the trilogy are Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. With many, many reviews describing the books, there is little need for a description of the plot here. Instead, I'll give a few incidental notes on the SciFi ideas embedded in Foundation trilogy and my recommendations for potential readers. "Foundation" is from the 1940's, when some of the ubiquitous ideas of modern science fiction were born. In the 1940's, it was already clear that the universe was a very large and complex place (though it is even larger and more complex now than was known then!). So, writers, including Asimov, invented the devices of transport and communication faster than the speed of light. This brought the stars within "reach" and opened wide horizons for imagining how the future might develop if such technologies existed. "Foundation" and its original trilogy brought forth one of Asimov's unique contributions to the imagined future of science: "psychohistory." The concept of psychohistory is that large-scale social and political events can be mathematically forecast in the form of event probabilities. Asimov's various writings use these assumptions to write stories dealing with social, political, and individual challenges of an imagined future. Asimov adroitly mixes the large- and small-scale human events into richly entertaining stories. "Foundation" and other novels of the trilogy are composed of related vignettes, reflecting their original publication in serialized form. I find this style works well for these and other Asimov books, with small-scale stories adding together to convey a sweep of events. The whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts. For readers who have little experience with SciFi novels, I think "Foundation" would be an excellent place to start. The writing is direct, crisp, and clear, and is fine for YA or adult readers. The original Foundation trilogy is almost completely free of profanity and sexual themes. Violence is limited to the occasional murder and wars at a distance. If you are already a SciFi fan, and have not read some of Isaac Asimov's work, this is an excellent place to start, although it is not the "beginning". A semi-rational path for readers new to Asimov would be "Foundation", followed, if you like it by the two other members of the original trilogy, "Foundation and Empire," and "Second Foundation". From here, if you want a little more, try either the Robot series or the expanded 7-book Foundation series. If you are game for a lot more, and want to see Asimov's "future history" in a roughly (future) chronological order, I'd suggest looking at Asimov's main set of future history works that comprise the Empire series, the Robot series, and the expanded Foundation series. I'd rate "Foundation" as Must Read for all except those who are severely SciFi-phobic!!
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Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2015 by William Mead
Format: Kindle
Breathes there a teenager of the md-20th century with a love of science fiction who was not weaned on the Foundation series? All that sweeping drama, testosterone-laden but basically non-violent (all the violence is simply swept into summarizing references to ships destroyed and cities ransacked) marching through decades without concentrating on anything really boring, like character development, emotional entanglements or the trappings of society. Not a single reference to such trash as classical music, or stage shows, or pop music, or romance, just sweeping views of a distant future (or could it have been the distant past?) with the means of traveling between stars in the galaxy in the flash of a gnat's eyelash. And yet . . . revisiting the beloved Foundation, reading through the filter of a lifetime of experience, cracks appear in the plaster, and beneath them one finds that the lath is too widely spaced, the bricks behind that lath are often without mortar, and one can see the trees where bricks are missing. We live already in an age where technology has bypassed this particular Universe. Computers have become infinitely more pervasive than Asimov might have dreamed in his wildest fantasy, for at the time of the writing they were mere collators of stacks of punched cards, the transistor had yet to be introduced or shrunk to the size of a grain of sand, much less a sub-microscopic speck imprinted by the millions on a tiny wafer of silicon. Asimov had enormous faith in the future of Humanity, but he had no idea of how rapidly that future would approach - or how slowly humans would react and adapt to the challenges posed. No Empire can be established when information is instantaneously available to three-quarters of the population. Will an army composed of humans indefinitely repress an entire population composed of their friends, family, relatives? We see the answer in Libya, in Egypt, in Syria, in Africa - where the mobile phone has allowed guerrilla tactics to be employed by any group, whether terrorist or freedom-fighter or mall-invasion gangs or "mothers against the death camps of dog pounds." Human society has been transformed by 24/7 information availability - but the universe of the Foundation proposes a populace of ciphers acting in ignorance of facts that would already be generally available in the 21st century. "Just Google it" or "look it up in Wikipedia" is nowhere to be found. There is a project of the First Foundation to write a "Galactic Encyclopedia" - yet it already exists in 2012. And yet that universe is immensely attractive, reduced to comic book simplicity, perfect for any adolescent (whether 14 or 74) to immerse himself - or very infrequently herself, as this universe is truly misogynist: the strongest female is just a papier maché accoutrement. The psychobabble of "psychohistory" which is the very premise of the Foundations is wholly implausible, of course. The introduction by Asimov of "The Mule" is his admission of the absurdity of such a concept, which he probably didn't consider when the first book was written. Man has mutated more rapidly in the past 10,000 years than Asimov's populace has in 50,000 - a highly unlikely probability in the event that man actually progresses to interstellar colonization. All that said - I downloaded the trilogy on Kindle whilst in America, read it through lovingly, and was again transported to that clean, technologically impossible universe, forgetting all the travails of real life at present, putting the horrors of terrorism, the Hunger Games, the beheadings of "infidels" and the lies of politicians to one side for too brief a span. It isn't great literature, not even great Science Fiction - yet it is riveting to any adolescent male who enjoys reading as opposed to or in parallel with the escapism of cinematic action films like the "Matix" or "Terminator" trilogies. For some reason, Europeans aren't allowed to download the books. No doubt the vagaries of copyright laws, tax authorities and those £%^&* politicians - as well as the accursed lawyers (who are blissfully absent from the trilogy, undoubtedly bred out of existence due to their total lack of humanity). Asimov was the supreme techie of his time - and it shows in his use of language - sparse, precise, technically impeccable, but occasionally impenetrable without a modicum of concentration. I heartily recommend it to you !
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Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2012 by jasonhad