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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Feb 12, 2009 Andrew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

And so to the first of my challange reads - I am with a friend going to try and read through the alphabet this year and so I thought why not an Asimov - it has been some time since I have read the foundation series and I have to forget to forgot how much of a impact this book made on me.

I know that Apple are currently working on a big budget version of this series - how true it will be I guess only time will tell but considering this was another one of those "impossible to film" stories Science ...more

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May 24, 2020 Alan rated it really liked it

I finally got around to reading this after all these years. The idea that the broad sweep of the future can be mathematically modelled and predicted is a fascinating one. The way Asimov chose to deliver this is quite interesting: effectively he gives a series of short stories around characters from different time periods. It means we see the progress of the concept as the generations progress, but I felt I didn't get to know any of the characters properly because their time in the spotlight was ...more

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