The first of the Foundation trilogy, a classic of the genre. A series of novellas that track the fall of the Galactic Empire and the rise of the fledgling Foundation. Its great to see the early Foundation laying down its influence not through violence, but through trade and politics. ( )

The Galactic Empire is decaying. Scientific knowledge has ceased to advance is instead decaying. Outlying systems begin to operate as independent kingdoms in which the loss of civilization (here mostly represented by nuclear power) accelerates. A dark ages is looming, predicted by Hari Seldon and his science of psychohistory. Psychohistory holds that the future, in essence, can be predicted because large groups of people (mobs) will behave in particular ways. To shorten the dark ages, he establishes a Foundation to guard human knowledge. The book was woven together from separate stories and it shows—one crisis ends and another begins thirty or fifty years later. I felt the idea of psychohistory was not internally consistent; it is supposed to predict the actions of mobs, yet each crisis is solved by the bold thinking of one or a few men. And they are all men. Women make no appearance. Some might say that fact makes sense for the era in which the book was written, but I disagree. This book was published twenty years after the first woman on the president’s cabinet. Women were doctors and lawyers and other professionals, if not in large numbers. The intellectual, almost Machiavellian solutions to the individual problems were quite interesting, and I didn’t feel bored while reading the novel. On the whole though, there’s not much to offer, with a lack of character development and overarching plot. ( )

At first I was skeptical of the premise of this book--the idea that an understanding of psychology would allow scientists to thoroughly predict the future and thus plot out its course. Whatever. Considering that it was written in the '50s, this kind of idea, and the absolute absence of women in the story, is understandable. There were a lot of similarities--both in tone and content--to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I would call this book vaguely amusing for that fact alone. ( )

I have mixed feelings about this book. There were a lot of points where it was interesting and I easily read 100 pages or so without getting bored - always a good sign in a book. The premise of the book is an extremely good mathematician, Hari Seldon, specializing in statistics, has predicted (presumably accurately) the downfall of the entire Galactic Empire in the next thousand years. To reduce the damage that will be done, he takes a few hundred or so psychoanalysts to an uninhabited planet, Terminus, to combine all the knowledge known to man into one giant encyclopedia. Those who work on the encyclopedia call themselves the Foundation. However, soon society starts to deteriorating and the Foundation finds themselves at the mercy of people who have been reduced to living a life similar to those of the Dark Ages. As it says on Amazon, "mankind’s last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and live as slaves—or take a stand for freedom and risk total destruction."

Only it seems as if nothing really happened in this first of three books. The Foundation was created, it had a few challenges and it established a few heros. However, the book is divided into five sections and each section skips forward roughly 50 years or so. This means that every time someone of importance was established, they were dead in the next section. There was really no one main character to follow throughout the book. It felt like this book was more or less a history lesson. It was very impersonal and you really never got a chance to know any characters. They were there and then they were gone.

I have every intention of reading the next two books in the trilogy because I'm intrigued enough to continue giving it a chance and they are relatively quick reads. If you're not a fan of science fiction though, I doubt you'd like these books. ( )