The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

[2007-07-09]
Trying out this very popular book on a recommendation from someone at work. It is a bestseller over many years, and it is highly lauded on the same plane as Tolkein’s now ubiquitous Lord Of The Rings series. I’m definitely looking forward to it as I haven’t read a science fiction novel of any kind in quite some time.

However thus far I’ve mainly just read the prelude which talked about the author’s history with the series. It’s a daunting looking book consisting of numerous short stories that were originally published as articles in a magazine. However I’ve learned that sometimes the long books are the ones that will get finished most quickly! So we shall see what type of book this one is.

[2007-08-14]
I guess that I forgot to update this. So in the trilogy, I’ve already finished 2 of the books and am halfway through the third. I have really enjoyed them! I like that they’re pretty short (they were originally published as articles so they can’t be too long). It makes it easy to bite it off in chunks.

I’ve learned that the First Galactic Empire rose to extreme prominence (a height unthinkable today where there were quadrillions of people) and then was calculated to actually fall by one Hari Seldon. He mastered psychohistory which is a science that we don’t know about. It deals with the application of mathematics to human behavior. It utilizes statistics and history in order to deal with sociology. It’s actually a pretty interesting idea. In any case, Seldon calculates a whole lot of history and uses it to try to minimize the horrible outcomes and cause humanity to suffer less.

The stories and rises and falls of the Foundations are then followed with the bulk of the story thus far consisting of the First Foundation. I am currently reading more about the Second Foundation, and I hope that all goes well because I only have about 60 or so pages left (out of over 500!).

[2007-08-17]
Alright it’s done! I finished essentially 3 books! It’s not that I read slow, on the contrary I think that I probably read at a fair cliip. However, I just don’t devote enough time to it so that I read voraciously as I did when I was younger.

In any case, that was a pretty good trilogy. Granted I think that I was left a little bit wanting at the end because you don’t actually get taken to the very end of the story, but I still think that it took me through some interesting stories. Reading it is part science fiction (okay a lot of science fiction), but it’s also kind of like experiencing some history first-hand. I think that if one did not know history, and read through it for the first time in a book, then that would be a similar experience to reading this book. Of course this book also has interesting things that don’t currently exist (or do they??) such as psychohistory (predicting behavior of the masses based on probabilities), encephalographic patterns (mapping the mind so that you actually know what one is thinking), and nucleics (tiny nuclear-powered devices) that make it real fun.

I’d definitely recommend reading this trilogy if science fiction has every tickled your fancy. Of course, you probably have already read it in that case (it’s a million-copy bestseller!). I enjoy discovering classics.