An amusing read, but I think I still prefer Brin and Simmons when it comes to epic space opera. Probably the most interesting thing about this book (and, I assume, the rest of the series) is the millennia-spanning time scale of its narrative, which Asimov handles by establishing Hari Seldon's statistical prophesy, and then dropping in at critical junctures to investigate how individuals contrive to fulfill that prophecy. It's kind of a fun model, always knowing the general direction of the plot More...

"Somewhere in the fifty years just past is where the historians of the future will place an arbitrary line and say: 'This marks the Fall of the Galactic Empire.'"
p. 80

Foundation is The Book of Kells writ large. The amazing-but-made-up science of psychohistory determines that the Galactic Empire is crumbling and the impending Dark Age can only be, at best, shortened (from 30,000 years to 1,000) if all its expansive knowledge and learning are preserved and disseminated in just the right way. This More...

I just re-read this for about the 5th or 6th time, although this was probably the first time I've gone back to this volume in over a decade or even two. Asimov still holds up for me, though I can't say how much of that is nostalgia. Still, he's probably not for everyone, a little wordy at times, not much action. Even so the whole Foundation series was a major great concept when it first came out and I still recommend it to anyone who loves science fiction, especially "classic" science fiction. T More...

I highly recommend Foundation to anyone who professes to have a grain of interest in Sci-Fi. The political intrigue, religious undertones, innovative sci-fi thoeories, world building, and epic scope make Foundation one of the most worthy reads of speculative fiction.

The premise is that the genius, Harry Seldon, has created and perfected a new science, phychohistory, a form of advanced statistics, to the degree that he can mathematically predict and guide the future of extremely large population More...

Honestly, I don't get why this book/series is so popular. There are some interesting elements to it (for instance, the use of religion as a tool of mass control and the implicit resultant argument that religion is no more than a fraud, "the opiate of the people," after all), but the book gave me little to enjoy or dig into. The forces of the novel are broad, historical, dealing with masses of people; this means that there is little to no room for individual characters here and little to be done More...

Jediným důvodem, proč Nadaci nedám všech pět hvězdiček, je ten, že jsem měla starší vydání, kde je moře překlepů a kde často chybí úvozovky. Kazilo mi to plynulost i přehlednost čtení a celkově je něco takového v dnešní době monstrózním faux pas.

Pokaždé, když čtu něco ze sci-fi písečku si říkám, proč vlastně čtu knihy. Proč jsou psána pokračování. Proč se autor nespokojí s jedním rozuzlením děje, ale stále pokračuje dále a dále.
A odpověď je jednoduchá: Píše pro své čtenáře. Sci-fi není můj šále More...

The Foundation trilogy (three first books) and the Foundation series (all seven) are often regarded as the greatest set of Science Fiction literature ever produced. The Foundation series won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. Isaac Asimov was among the world's best authors, an accomplished scientist, and he was also a genius with an IQ above 170, and it shows in the intelligently concocted but complex plots and narrative. There are already 331 reviews for this Science Fi More...

I first read this when I was 16, and it changed my life, giving me a whole new take on history and psychology and even math. I even tried a year as a psych major in college to see if the statistical approach was really the answer. Forty years later, I read it again, just to see what effect it would have. What I noticed was that the plot was carefully staged and not "fair" (in that the writer often kept some secret informaiton up his sleeve that the reader didn't know, but still it was a good rea More...

Sure, okay, this is pretty good. A series of interconnected short stories, each with the same basic theme: our heroes are put in a tight spot and have to weasel their way out of it. Sortof like a mystery in a way: you get to try to figure out what their answer will be. Sometimes it's a little obvious. (Really, no one imagined that the Foundation guys would take charge of that big-ass spaceship? Nobody thought of that? And anyway, how did Seldon predict that they would randomly find a huge dereli More...

I have been waiting to read Foundation for a long time. Before it I've only read a number of short stories by Asimov.

I'd say I'm fairly new to scifi. I've been reading it for only about 3 years, and I'm still catching up with the classics. What gripped me the most so far are large stories with massive universes (a la Dune and Hyperion). I wasn't lucky to find much of those recently, so boy did I start reading Foundation in the right time.

It's a lot shorter than I thought it would be (the audio v More...

It really is high time I review this sucker, even though I'm not sure how I'm going to do it. Even Hari Seldon doesn't know how I'm going to do it, but that's because individuals are hard to predict. He could tell you fer sure what's going to happen in 2012, though: whether or not we can expect Xenu's return, whether or not the Tea Party is going to win and realize they don't have a bloody clue how to lower taxes, whether or not the final battle between vampires and werewolves will happen, whate More...

Foundation. The name is apt.

Isaac Asimov's sprawling scifi tale is the rock on which much of today's space opera is built. Truer scifi historians than me would cite the late 1920s and pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and E. E. "Doc" Smith as the DNA donors that spawned a thousand space operas. They would be right, but Asimov's fame towers above all others. His 1952 story of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire is space opera's... foundation.

Unfortunately, the analogy continues. Fou More...

I enjoy reading science fiction, and even seek it out when I'm ready for a break from well-written books in which nothing really happens. As with all sci-fi, there were some great ideas in this book, psychohistory chief among them. Much like psychology predicts behavior, psychohistory predicts large, sweeping patterns through time. The book then explores influence, power, and control within the frame of psychohistory. Some interesting questions and themes come along - does the individual matter More...

Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is often cited amongst the nerdegalian as the best sci-fi series evar. It's set, as you may guess, far into the future where a man discovers that Rome ...uh, I mean The Galactic Empire is fated to collapse and bring about 30,000 years of barbarism unless certain actions are taken to start a long chain of events, the first of which is to create a kind of galactic Wikipedia. I'm not normally a fan of hard science fiction, and reading this trilogy kind of reminds me More...

This novel takes place in the far distant future, when humans have settled the whole galaxy. The origins of humanity, on the legendary "Earth," have been all but forgotten. The Galactic Empire is dying, and a small colony of scientists (the "Foundation") are struggling to survive the subsequent dark ages.

First, the bad news: The book is, in some respects, very dated. In this distant future, women all but do not exist. Asimov could imagine a radically changed society, but apparently not in this o More...

I enjoyed the first book because its theories were new and intriguing. The second book just waded about, repeating itself, with a mutant variable thrown in. I liked the third book because it felt like something actually happened. It’s as if the first book is the word problem, the second book is the solving of it, and the third is the answer. I wonder if he intended this to be a trilogy when he started or the long series that it became. Asimov didn’t ever really write a novel with any of it. It’s More...

One of the great books of science fiction. Brilliant plot, great characters, and one of the most memorable quotes of all sci-fi: "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". The first section reads slowly, but its worth sticking with it because the book as a whole is spectacular.

SPOILER ALERT - THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE STORY, BUT CONTAINS ELEMENTS OF THE BOOKS THAT YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT. IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE ENTIRE SERIES (AND ARE PLANNING TO) STOP READING NOW.

I'm a psychologi More...

I downloaded the original Foundation trilogy nearly 30 (!) years after reading them the first time -- and (probably because I was in 7th grade at the time) not really "getting" them. I was certain my intervening maturity would reveal a more nuanced and, frankly epic read than the one I remembered from childhood.

Sadly, the first one's still a bit boring, taking place mostly as a series of deep, philosophical conversations between characters with odd names and impeccably described facial hair (and More...

Couldn't believe all that smoking in the future.

Totally inconsequential but this book and the previous one that I read, The Driver's Seat, both make mention in their opening pages of unstainable fabrics.

In Driver's Seat it gives us the first sign that Lise is a bit odd. In Foundation of course it's just part of the future.

A man in glaring blue-and-yellow uniform, shining and new in unstainable plasto-textile, reached for his two bags.

Part of the future but realised by the 1970s (maybe not plasto More...

W Rating: B-

Foundation is an old school style book with five or so episodic looks at the future of this millennium of barbarism that is to follow the eventual collapse of the empire. (That's a sentence!)While the book is brief and quick to the point and essentially short stories squeezed together, they flow well and the characters have merit.

I think that I have read too much history and cultural/societal development books to have this be a very novel idea. It was good, and I am ready to read the More...

I really, really liked it. I don't know why that surprised me so much, but I did. I am now disappointed that there aren't any used copies of the rest of the series around, so I'm going to be forced to buy them new. I'm glad that Tim started me in the direction of the classic sci-fi, because it's been the perfect escapism lately.

It's amazing how you can programme half of a civilization into doing exactly what you want because there are only so many outcomes and natural reactions that people may choose according to upbringing and idiosyncrasies. This is only book one of how Seldon uses pyschohistory and his legacy lives on and on toward the rebuilding of the empire. It makes you wonder how everyone would have fared without the interference of people who have looked and planned ahead and anticipated many actions, feelings More...

The original Foundation trilogy or, rather, sequence, since it's actually a set of short stories/novellas rather than actual books, is frequently cited in lists of "great SF".
It fully deserves its place. Although none of the stories in themselves are out-and-out classics, the cumulative effect is utterly amazing, recounting an almost-plausible massive future history all hung on the genius concept of "psychohistory", which is used as the theoretical filter through which the individual stories pla More...

For those wanting to start science fiction, or hoping to learn what it's about: Foundation. The start of Asimov's epic series and so far the best science fiction series I've read. It gets overhyped by many readers, it's not Lord of the Rings epic but I've yet to find something in Science Fiction that is. Asimov admitted that it's his own science fiction retelling of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon it suffers most from Asimov's hyper technicality though the overa More...

Constitué de dialogues ayant trait à la stratégie pour la plupart, ce livre relate l'histoire de la Fondation, de sa création par Hari Seldon à l'ère des Princes Marchands, près d'un siècle plus tard. Le concept-clé de ce roman est celui de psychohistoire, science permettant, via des calculs de probabilités, de prédire le cours de l'histoire. Le contexte historique est houleux : l'Empire Galactique est sur le point de tomber. La psychohistoire prédit une période de barbarie d'une durée de 30.000 More...

I have always been a fan of science fiction, especially so called "hard" science fiction (stories based around the "big idea," or cutting edge science and astronomy, or speculation about future events; rather than just fantasy writing which happens to involve space ships and blaster rifles), but I have never been a huge fan of Isaac Asimov (sacrilege, I know) and I have never read his seminal work the Foundation Trilogy. However there is a time for everything, and the time for this is now...

Asim More...

I tried to like Asimov and his robots. Really, I did. My friend, who is usually spot-on with his recommendations, would rave and rave about Asimov, this series included. But these stories are so focused on plot, plot, plot, with no effort left over for milieu, character development, or anything else, that I quickly tired of his stories. Each scene plays out more like a math problem than an actual chapter of a story. It's a shame that Asimov is the so-called "grand master" of science fiction. More...

The Foundation series is a must read for science fiction fans. It has totally unique plots and ideas and it seems kind of believable considering how far it is set in the future. The protagonist characters are so smart and it is amazing what they are able to figure out given the same evidence that is shared with the reader. Each subplot in Foundation is its own mystery and it is a challenge to try to figure out what is going on. But inevitably the characters will outsmart you but the outcomes are More...

Mind blowing in its scope and scale Foundation handles its big ideas with supreme elegance.

With a narrative spanning millennia, a colony at the edge of the galaxy strives to preserve and rebuild civilization as a dark age looms. It all revolves around Asimov's idea of psychohistory. It's a fun pseudo-science that reputedly inspired a young Paul Krugman to take up economics and it's not hard to see why. Psychohistory purports to be able to predict the course of human events by studying the intera More...