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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780553293357
ISBN number: 0553293354
Label: Spectra
Manufacturer: Spectra
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: October 01, 1991
Publishing house: Spectra
Release Date: October 01, 1991
Sale Popularity Level: 3048
Studio: Spectra
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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.
Amazon.com Review:
Foundation marks the very 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 very 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
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Rated by buyers 
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Foundation is a masterpiece, bar none. It is not only great science fiction, but great fiction. Asimov does a truly wondrous job of painting a large picture, much in the way that the Hudson School of painting did in the 19th Century, while also giving compelling characterization, like a Rembrandt, and selecting the `right' moments that the reader can zoom in on, in this compelling account of future history. Asimov leaves Clarke in the dust in terms of characterization, and most of this is achieved via dialogue, while still painting a big picture. Asimov wrote wonderful dialogue, and one can read the tenor of a character's soul simply by how they react in words to other characters. That said, I am very surprised that Asimov did not take issue with George Lucas's Star Wars films, because without Foundation there would simply not be Star Wars. Everything is there to be plumbed and looted- a galactic Empire, rebels, space jumps to circumvent the speed of light, the Galactic Spirit (aka The Force), and so on. Even Star Trek took a heavy load of its mythos from this book, as the human dominated Federation and human-looking and human-derived aliens that dominate most of the Star Trek universe have much akin with the Empire that rules Foundation at novel's start....Foundation was very first published in novel form in 1951, but consisted of a number of short stories published throughout the 1940s in magazines like John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. Book One, The Psychohistorians, was written specifically as an opening for the novel; Book Two, The Encyclopedists was published as Foundation; Book Three, The Mayors, was published as Bridle And Saddle; Book Four, The Traders was published as The Wedge; and Book Five, The Merchant Princes, was published as The Big And The Little. Each of the Books within the novel functions almost as an autonomus story, much the way Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio do. Yet, it all ties together, and though it has always had a reputation as a space opera, even if the ultimate or original space opera, it transcends that label. Yet, those sorts of labels can be offputting to casual readers of a genre, like I am. For I am not a sci fi nut by any means, yet I sense that many people have avoided this book because like, say, reading a Rilke poem or watching Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, they have felt that something so overpraised and hyped is bound to be a letdown. It's not. It earns its praise and labels, like epic, for, even though the book is less than 150 pages long in my version, probably 250-300 pages in paperback, it is certainly epic- the timescales and range of the Empire demand nothing less. And although that term is grossly overused, in this case it is spot on. The very title of the book has, in the decades since its very first appearance, taken on another connotation, though- that of not only referring to the Foundation within the tale, but its place as the Foundation upon which modern outer space sci fi is based upon.
This is not to deny the books flaws, which are there. But, given that most of them have to do with technological things, they are not truly literary flaws, merely those of the nature of the sci fi genre. Among them are anachronisms such as typical hausfrau-like portrayals of women, who apparently still worry over household domestic products, an addiction to nicotine, an over-reliance on atomic power, the use of parsecs rather than light years as a unit of distance, the galactic Empire being at the center of the galaxy where we now know only a supermassive grey hole exists and makes life as we know it untenable due to radiation, and other minor points. Other flaws are less anachronistic than what in film would be called continuity errors, such as being able to transcend the speed of light, but recording information in actual books, and on microfilm, rather than digitally, or quantumly, yet being able to teleport that information; the Empire possessing holographic technology, yet it all being powered by vacuum tubes; or civilizations possessing interstellar ships but having economies dependent on fossil fuels- which means that dinosaurs and the like must have appeared on millions of the other worlds. Then there are just the plain odd things, such as Asimov's faith in capitalism being the solution to the galactic ills, even though in his universe it's what ails all the worlds. The idea that even were an Empire to arise and dominate a galaxy that such a massive thing could ever stagnate, seems odd. Diversity argues against that, but this shows Asimov's pessimism regarding the human ability to evolve. That these future men also have life spans akin to ours, smoke, and suffer cancer, bespeaking there seems to have been little in the way of medical breakthroughs (this was pre DNA discovery), also seems a bit of an imaginative lack.
But, perhaps the greatest flaw of the book is Asimov's love affair with the Freudian ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
The main plot of the story copies the evolution of every human society. The decline and fall of empires, followed by the rise of others, depends on the same phenomena as those described here. We are puzzled by Psychohistory, but the notion itself (forecasting the future as the weather) is sound. This novel opens a range of questions and issues beyond other books of the genre.
Rated by buyers 
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I'm not a fan of sci-fi, but really enjoyed it. I agree with other reviews that environment wasn't deeply described and there weren't any soficicated characters, but this didn't disturbed me, because the storyline was fastpaced and interesting. I couldn't put this book down before it was over.
Rated by buyers -
The scope of this series is astounding. It wasn't written for the teenager or preteen like so many pathetic series are these days, but for the thinking person with a bit of imagination.
Truly one of the greatest SF series ever written. And as such, never loses it's appeal even when read decades apart.
Rated by buyers -
Great book! First in the series of three novels, all three are worth the read. I read all three in about two and half weeks. It might be interesting to read them in conjunction with Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Every "Seldon Crisis" brings about a "new world". Really fun stuff. Don't miss out!
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