Issac Asimov

[Rob McCow]

Here's what I thought about Foundation, pinged it up to the SFX website and they printed some of it in their magazine! Could be something to do with the fact that everyone else was a bit 'meh' about Foundation.

Um... is this the right thread to say how brilliant Foundation is?

On the face of it, there's no way Foundation should be an enjoyable read. The story in outline sounds dreadful. A Galactic Empire collapses, but through the use of social science a group of intellectuals lay down a plan to shorten the time before the Empire rises again. There are no paticularly well developed characters. There's precious little in the way of love affairs or violence. The plot is split into five vaguely connected segments, meaning that the reader is repeatedly taken to the reset point. Above all, it's a story about mathematics!

Yet it's all hugely resonant with events in the last sixty years. The Galactic Empire shows few signs of outward strain and yet it is on the brink of collapse. Compare this with the fall of Soviet Russia, or the build up to the recent credit crunch. The Western World has enjoyed prosperity and relative peace for decades, so it's natural to feel that perhaps everything is about to change; that we are on the brink of catastrophe.

The clue that gives it away is that the Empire is no longer moving forwards in terms of culture or science, but turning in on itself. The leaps forward of today seem minute when compared with the leaps of yesterday. Again, although this may not entirely be true in the modern world, to any living observer it certainly feels that way, with crumbling democratic and financial institutions.

Just because it's a recognisable situation doesn't make it an uplifiting read. Asimov's optimism and certainty in science of all kinds makes that. The Foundation rebuilds civilisation through largely peaceful methods, showing that intelligence and understanding can score astounding victories over brute force.

The story demonstrates time and again how trade and intelligence can be used to supplant the need for violence. In fact, Foundation should be essential reading for any politician today! Why go to war with a starving society ruled by a despot, if you can win the people over by giving them what they need? Even the most cynical person must concede that there are occasions where this is possible.

Asimov is often equated with Hari Seldon in terms of their world view. The concept that it is possible to predict the broad flow of humanity isn't depressing the way it is presented here. The fact that the knowledge of the predictions could change the outcome stop it becoming too restrictive. So Hari Seldon can pop up as a friendly prophet locked in a time-booth, able to offer advice and wisdom and allow humanity to advance forward.

Asimov is a superlative inventor of mini-mysteries, as the I, Robot series proved. Here the mysteries are not about how to improve the behaviour of robots. Instead there are far more subtle and complex challenges for the Foundation to solve. In each section, the Foundation overcomes the apparently impossible odds to acquire its victories. The reader is swept up in all this and as events move forward, I found myself cheering the Foundation on.

The fact Asimov achieves all this within 250 or so pages is astounding. The novel is breathtaking, an awe-inspiring trip through hundreds of years of history. The prose is simple and direct, as a result it feels as fresh and original now as it must have done in the 1950's. The story tells us about our society on every level and is a joyful celebration of the power of mankind's ingenuity.

Even against it's immediate sequels and the increasingly bloated tomes that came after Second Foundation, the original stands up as a sci-fi classic that takes you around the galaxy and back in a blaze of genius.

That's what I think anyway. Sorry I didn't have time to make it shorter.

[Andrew Curnow]

That's an excellent little review, in fact it makes me want to go off and re-read the original books.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Ah but his Robot stories are better, and have inspired me and my brood of software testers to knock the kinks out of computer programs ever since!

Heck a form of software tester who's a hero!!! Course when they did it as a movie, they relegated us all to nerds again - thank you Will Smith ...

[Captain Tancredi]

Funnily enough I started Foundation this morning (as much as anything else because I wanted a short read for reasons I won't go into here). My copy is dated 1990 so the Waterstone's bookmark a third of the way through from my first attempt at reading it can only have been there about eighteen years at most- but on the basis of the first 75 pages or so I'm probably more open to the ideas now than I would have been in my early twenties.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I never really got on well with the Foundation books because they have a funny kind of scope - there are very few consistent characters throughout. And I think the idea of some kind of sociological superscience which predicts future turmoils was a bit too much to really swallow. It all seemed a bit too predeterministic - if there's such a word.

If there's no such word, there damn well should be!