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Product Description
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, 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 mankind, 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 a fututre generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.
But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun—or fight them and be destroyed.
Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (
Foundation,
Foundation and Empire,
Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field.
--Brooks Peck
Customer Reviews
Epic
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 Fiction novel, however, I still believe I have something unqiue to contribute which is stated in my last paragraph. This book and the rest in the series take place far in the future (allegedly 50,000 years) at a time when people live throughout the Galaxy. A mathematician Hari Seldon has developed a new branch of mathematics known as psychohistory. Using the law of mass action, it can roughly predict the future on a large scale. Hari Seldon predicts the demise of the Galactic Empire...
June 19, 2008
(Texas) | Helpful Votes: 159 | Rating: 5
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
[The quotation is from Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus.]Let's say it's around 1940 or so; you're studying chemistry in grad school but your true love is history; you've read Edward Gibbon's _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, but writing a historical novel set in the _past_ would require just too much research; you get the bright idea of writing a historical tale set in the _future_, about the decline and fall of a _Galactic_ Empire, and you suggest as much to John W. Campbell, Jr.Campbell's response: he gets excited and suggests that you introduce some pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo about "psychohistory". Do you:(a) drop the idea and write something else?(b) write the story just as Campbell describes it?(c) use a little imagination, make Campbell's idea a bit more intellectually presentable, and crank out, not just a single story, but a Hugo-award-winning series?If you picked (c), congratulations; you're Isaac Asimov.The Hugo didn't come until 1965,...
September 12, 2003
(Cuyahoga Falls, OH) | Helpful Votes: 130 | Rating: 5
The First Part of One of the Finest Series of All Sci-Sci
The Foundation Trilogy is my favorite sci-fi book series, and also my favorite work by asimov. The first book in the series, Foundation, is concerned primarily with two concepts. The first is the concept that history repeats itself over and over again, and that just as great empires fell in the past, the same problems will in the future aflict empires once they become too big. And naturally after the fall of a great empire, chaos ensues. The other concept this book describes is the theory that science and mathematics are capable of predicting the trends in complex systems such as large groups of people. I am going to be honest. This book was revolutionary for its time, and a great many famous sci-fi writers were inspired after reading this book. I know that I personally could never look at world governments the same way after reading this book. It truly opens your eyes to tendancy of people to make the same mistakes over and over again, repeating the same patterns on a large scale...
August 25, 2002
(In Space above Planet Earth) | Helpful Votes: 63 | Rating: 5
