Foundation (Foundation, #1) in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Jan 15, 2008 Tom rated it it was amazing

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 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 samples. Through mathematics, he predicts the inevitable fall of the galactic Empire and the decline of humanity into a barbaric dark age. He then sets in motion events to minimize the negative effects of this dark age and eventually create a new Empire to maintain the glory of humanity throughout the universe. The novel and sequels cover generations of time as the events he posthumously predicts and directs take place.

Having some statistics background from my Economics education, I found Asimov's ideas of psychohistory to be both fascinating and implausible. Even though Harry Seldon's phychohistory plots the future using data from an enormous sample size, history is largely written by leaders whose individual actions could not be determined or swayed by mathematics. While it is plausible to me that advanced perfected statistics could predict the fall of the empire, I must suspend my disbelief to believe that Seldon could accurately predict the course of the much smaller Foundation which so heavily depends on the decisions of individual leaders like Salvur Hardin.

Although some of the concepts behind Foundation require a dose of suspended disbelief, I didn't mind because the same ideas are so damn interesting and the way Asimov applies them to the plot is brilliant. I don't think that "beaming up" or "hyper space travel" are plausible notions either, but I love the ideas nonetheless. The idea of psychohistory, or a super-advanced form of the econometric regression analysis I studied in college, is absolutely fascinating and serves as the basis for one hell of a clever read.

I loved how Asimov approaches the idea of God. I personally believe in a God that is omnipotent and omniscient-- able to guide and predict the future. Asimov sets up Seldon to be a God-figure and explains his powers to predict and guide the future by his genius wielding of psychohistory. Religion even crops up based on Seldon's legacy. Speculating about the nature of higher power is a classic facet of sci-fi. An interesting sidenote is that this kind of speculation gave way to Tom Cruise's Scientoligist beliefs through the author L. Ron Hubbard. This shows that a clever idea placed in the right mind at the right time can dramatically influence the masses--which happens to be a theme of Foundation. With my background rooted in Cristianity, I find characters such as Aslan, Jean ValJean, and Harry Seldon that symbolize deity or reflect the authors ideas of higher power fascinating.

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Mar 12, 2008 Martin Hjort Eriksen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book is simply fantastic ... the best I have read for a long time.

As read some of the other reviews of this book, I noticed that others did not like the "jumping" style, where Asimov leaves large gaps in the storyline. Personally I loved it. I felt that it had activated my imagination of what happened.

What I also love about this book, is the political intrigue. It is absolutely well written, and I can only hope it continues for the rest of the series. ...more

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