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Foundation: The Foundation Novels, Book 1
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Foundation: The Foundation Novels, Book 1
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Foundation: The Foundation Novels, Book 1
Audiobook8 hours

Foundation: The Foundation Novels, Book 1

Written by Isaac Asimov

Narrated by Scott Brick

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

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 future 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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 20, 2010
ISBN9780307749703
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Foundation: The Foundation Novels, Book 1
Author

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was the Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the founder of robot ethics, the world’s most prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. The Good Doctor’s fiction has been enjoyed by millions for more than half a century.

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Reviews for Foundation

Rating: 4.2928914053315115 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Great to have this audio version, though it comes across as very stilted now, and so many of the voices are indistinguishable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    First, I think it should be noted that this review is for a QUARTET of books: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, and Foundation's Edge. I just couldn't bear writing four separate reviews, so please, forgive me for this all-too-brief synopsis of a truly epic experience.

    Now, I first read the Foundation series when I was 12 or 13, and while I didn't "get" the gist of the book, I still found it hugely entertaining, enough so that I plowed through all three of them and when I happened upon a boxed set at a local used book store at a reasonable price, I had to have them, and they had to go to the top of my reading list. Of course now it's 40 years later and Isaac is long since passed on to the next plane of existence, but before he left, he wrote four additional books to go along with the original three.

    I'll leave Asimov's own intros to explain the genesis of the novels (it's fascinating and makes great reading all by itself!) but suffice to say, this is not Star Wars or Star Trek. It's not space opera. It's very talky, a lot of dialog between a lot of characters who seem to appear out of nowhere and disappear without warning, especially in the first book. Take Hari Seldon, probably THE central character...he's mentioned throughout the series... and he's actually only alive for the first thirty or forty pages of the first book!

    Weirdly, it all works if you stick with it. It's fascinating, and you can't keep from pushing on and on to see what's going to happen next. That's the mark of a truly great story, and when it lasts well into the thousands of pages...hey, few could've pulled this off but the great Asimov. There's a reason it has long been noted as the "Best Science Fiction Series of All Time". If you haven't read it, and you're a sci-fi devotee, you're depriving yourself of a treat. And if you have read the first trilogy but not the later additions to the series, I bet you'll enjoy at least the fourth book, which is a very worthy successor. I am now in the process of hunting down the "prequels", which I hope to read before I finally get the last book of Asimov's own Foundation books.

    And then there's the additional books written by other luminaries that expand the series...but, that's another story, for another day...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Quite simply this is the finest work of science fiction that I have ever read. Asimov had a way of really bringing the characters to life and making you empathize with them.

    For me the story was so captivating that I hardly put the book down. And the best part of all is that it was so well written that I did not have a clue how it would end until the last two sentences of the book. Predictable it was not.

    I have read this trilogy twice already and it is on my list for another re-read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Before reading this collection I'd read Foundation by itself at least a decade previously, and though I forgot most of it in the intervening years, the main premise of a genius scientifically predicting the next thousand years- and not just predicting, but shaping that future- is something that stuck with me. Having now revisited Foundation, as well as the next two books in the series, I expect that in another decade the premise will have stuck with me, but likely not much else, as the premise and the first part of the first book are by far the best parts of this collection.

    Both the premise and the first part of Foundation are excellent. Asimov gives us a universe ruled by the Empire, perhaps once a mighty force for order, but now a bloated bureaucratic mess in decline. The scientist Hari Seldon, having perfected the science of psychohistory, uses this hybrid of psychology and statistics to predict the inevitable fall of the Empire, and the resulting descent into barbarism that will follow. He does more than that, though, since while the fall is inevitable, the resurrection of civilization doesn't yet have a predetermined timeline. Seldon gives the last years of his life to fighting a bureaucratic world in denial so that people his grandchildren will never meet, and their grandchildren will never meet, and their grandchildren will never meet, might have a better life. He succeeds in establishing the Foundation, ostensibly a repository of knowledge, but in reality a bud at the edge of the galaxy which Seldon's psychohistory assures will one day bloom into a new, better civilization.

    That's great stuff. It also creates huge problems for how to continue with the stories that are set after this (as these first three Foundation books are essentially collections of short stories and novellas set chronologically in the same universe). Seldon's science, at least as it's first presented to us, is almost a guarantee of success (I believe Seldon gives the chances of his plan coming off as intended for the first two or three hundred years as 94% or greater). Thus it's hard to stick to the premise and still create dramatic tension, and so naturally an author would have to explore other options. Showing the reader how psychohistory works and makes the Foundation's victories inevitable might be entertaining the first time, but you can hardly stretch that out for multiple books. More problematically, psychohistory by its very nature would seem to negate the importance of individuals, as Seldon's science is based off of predicting the actions of large groups, with the actions of individuals explicitly outside of the science's predictive scope. The very existence of psychohistory would seem to negate the Great Man theory of history, so without the individual being of much importance how is the story of Foundation going to have characters whose actions feel important going forward? Asimov could have done what Stapledon did in Last and First Men and wrote the story of Foundation's thousand-year history as a historical account without prominent characters, I suppose, but I can understand why he wouldn't want to. Thus, after Part I of Foundation, Asimov had to deal with hurdles in both story construction and character development created by his novel's premise.

    Asimov jumps these hurdles in a not-particularly-impressive way, by undercutting the premise of psychohistory almost immediately. Within the first few stories the reader sees that individuals do matter, no matter what eleventh-hour speech Asimov throws in about how success was inevitable. Lip service is always paid to Seldon's plan, but it's often just background material for what is otherwise a standard science fiction story. Foundation and Empire, as well as Second Foundation, introduce complications to Seldon's plan, with the introduction of The Mule and the Second Foundation, but instead of solving the problems of psychohistory these introductions just add more wrinkles to it. I don't fault Asimov for stepping back from his premise, in fact I think he probably had to, but in taking that step back the rest of the stories are also a step down from an excellent start.

    That's my main analysis of the first three books, but there are various other things that the books did well and not so well. I enjoyed how science became a spiritual force in the early years of the Foundation, from the perspective of the Foundation characters they were turning science into a religion to fool the gullible barbaric masses of the universe, but simultaneously a different branch of science was becoming a religion to the Foundation as well: Seldon's plan quickly attained the status of quasi-divine prophesy, with Seldon himself being ascribed omniscience of a sort. Even Seldon's name became an oath to the people of the Foundation, with "by God" replaced with "by Seldon." With this early plot line, Foundation isn't so much criticizing religion as it is everyone who think they know something with certainty. On the other hand, I intensely disliked the way that the supposedly sprawling universe of the Foundation series constantly felt small. In a universe of tens of thousands of inhabited worlds and trillions of people, all the stories in the first few books take place on the same handful of planets, and every character is a descendant of a character in another story, or runs into the same handful of people. In a universe that should feel epic in scale, the cast of characters instead feels claustrophobic.

    Read in isolation, The Psychohistorians stands as a great Asimov short story, up there with Nightfall and The Last Question. As a series, however, I found that the later parts of the Foundation universe never matched Asimov's first foray into the setting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In his seminal Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov channels Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as he envisions mankind's future. Psycho-historian Hari Seldon, mathematically predicting "the developing decline and fall of the Galactic Empire" (Foundation, pg. 28), creates the Foundation as "the means by which the science and culture of the dying Empire was to be preserved through the centuries of barbarism...to be rekindled in the end into a second Empire" (Foundation, pg. 85) as well as to lessen the interregnum between the fall of the first empire and the rise of the second from a period of 30,000 years to 1,000. The three novels cover the first 400 years of this period. Asimov's portrayal of the future galaxy draws upon popular portrayals of a Middle Ages perspective of Ancient Rome. At one point, a character thinks of the superstitions regarding the relics of the Empire, musing, "There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past" (Second Foundation, pg. 156), showing a clear sense of something having been lost to the world. Finally, without giving away spoilers, the riddle of the Second Foundation borrows from a popular saying about the Roman Empire.While Asimov's writing inspired numerous other authors, this particular series left its mark all over the Star Wars franchise. From the "Korellian Republic" (Foundation, pg. 139) to the planet Trantor, which Asimov described, writing, "the lustrous, indestructible, incorruptible metal that was the unbroken surface of the planet was the foundation of the huge, metal structures that mazed the planet" (Foundation and Empire, pg. 72), and which clearly influenced Coruscant. Further, the Visi-Sonor described in Foundation and Empire is the obvious precursor to the Holophonor in Futurama. Those with any background in European history or a prior knowledge of science fiction will recognize what influenced Asimov and what he, in turn, influenced through Foundation. It's no wonder the Hugo Awards declared this the best science fiction series of all time. Even those who have not yet read it have surely read science fiction that felt its influence.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Perhaps reading this series first as an adult colors my view, but I came away less than impressed. The collected chapters working through the work seemed more disjointed than coherent. I had trouble keeping up with the overall story, and by the end was ready for it to be over.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    (review originally written for Bookslut)

    I have always been a fan of science fiction. Let's face it, when you have a father who reads Dune and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to you as bedtime stories, what other choice do you have? Given that, I really don't read that much of it anymore. Let's face it, there is a lot of crappy science fiction out there, and unless I really devote myself to the genre, it's hard to just go into the book store and pick up something that isn't going to be terribly lame. You can weed out all the books with large-chested women who are falling out of their uniforms on the cover (unless it's written by Heinlein), but that can still leave you with entire rooms full of books to wade through. The science fiction section at my favorite used book store is bigger than the entire fiction and literature section. The fact that most of it is not classified as fiction or literature should tell you something. Let's just say that I have been burned by quite a few terrible science fiction purchases. And this was back in high school, when I was still devouring Harlequin serial romance novels without blinking.

    Despite all that, the well-respected name of Isaac Asimov should immediately put all fears to rest. If that isn't enough for you, there is always that the Foundation series is the winner of the Hugo Award for best all time science fiction series. Of course what really sold it for me was the fact that my sister is the one who nominated the series for the 100 books list, and she's even more skeptical of science fiction than I am.

    Although there are now several Foundation novels, the original trilogy, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, was written thirty years before pressure from fans and his publisher forced Asimov to return to the series. When the Hugo Award was given, only these first three books existed. By the time I learned all this, I was eager to find out what all the fuss was about.

    The first book, Foundation, is more a collection of short stories than a novel. Despite the fact that women are virtually non-existent in this book (except for one wife whose only purpose in the plot is to be fascinated by some new-fangled jewelry), it is by far my favorite. The fact that many science fiction authors, who can conceive of wholly alien cultures and technologies no one has even dreamed of before often cannot conceive of a purpose besides boobs, is a source of constant irritation for me. But that's a rant for another place and time, as Asimov redeems himself with the fabulous female characters in the other two books. Foundation is a collection of near misses. It tells the story of a civilization on the fringes of the universe, strong in science but weak in resources in ships. What sets it apart from the bulk of science fiction stories, and what makes it so refreshing, is the way the Foundation men use their wits to outsmart each warlord and government that threatens them, often without a single shot being fired. At the beginning of the book they are possibly the most vulnerable planet in the galaxy. By the end, they are the ruling planet of a flourishing empire.

    The second book, Foundation and Empire, is really two novellas. In the first novella, the empire of the Foundation collides with what is left of The Empire, which once ruled the entire galaxy, but is now crumbling. This may be the least satisfying out of all the Foundation stories, as its resolution depends not at all on the genius or cunning of any one person. In the second story, the Foundation is menaced by a mutant, the Mule, something unforeseeable by the Seldon plan, which predicts that the Foundation will eventually rule over the entire galaxy. Although I was a trifle disappointed by how easy it was to guess the secret identity of the Mule, the way in which one woman discovers his identity and single handedly thwarts his effort to destroy all that the Foundation has worked for makes the story well worth it.

    The final book, Second Foundation is also really two novellas. This book holds its mysteries closer to its chest. The only frustrating thing about it is that the end does not bring us to the promised age of the Foundation's rule over the entire galaxy. It is for this reason that so much pressure was put on Asimov to add to the Foundation series.

    So if you're going to read science fiction, read the Foundation series. Or at least the trilogy. Or at least Foundation. Because this is good stuff, folks. This is what science fiction should be. Not just cool gadgetry and neat-looking aliens, but an inquiry into human behavior and civilization, the forces that hold it together and eventually tear it apart. And this series is a lot more entertaining than The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, trust me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dear Isaac, how I miss you.I first encountered Foundation when I tried to check Foundation and Empire out of the library, and the librarian (bless you, librarians, everywhere) asked me if I'd read the first one. When I said I had not, she walked back with me, found it, and I believe I exhausted the entire collection of science fiction in the library, that summer.Those three novels were heady stuff for a ten year old, in those long ago years. This trilogy is comprised of all three novels: Foundation; Foundation and Empire; and Second Foundation.I wish I could give current readers the gift of reading these three works with a fresh eye, when the world was more innocent, and the future was filled with possibilities.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I remember reading the trilogy decades ago, probably in the mid-60s, and remember the plot pretty well. I got hold of the new Everyman edition because I like Everyman bindings and I intended to do a reread in preparation for a reread of Asimov's own sequels like Foundation's Edge, none of which I remember at all well.The basic trilogy definitely holds up well over the years, and my one criticism is of the Introduction, which has some inaccuracies (or at least I think they're inaccuracies, such as the assertion that the trilogy may be slightly dated because "computers don't appear to exist" when in fact there are at least some references to them in the trilogy). More seriously, though, I have a problem with Dirda's note to the Introduction, which indicates that it does not contain any SPOILERS. Personally, I'd suggest that a reader new to the trilogy NOT read the Introduction until after reading the trilogy itself, because the Introduction includes a reference to a character who first appears in the second book (Foundation and Empire), and this reference may not be a horrendous SPOILER but it's still enough of a SPOILER that I wish Dirda hadn't brought it up.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The trilogy of books Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation are among the best Asimov ever wrote among his science-fiction novels and among his most influential. I've read it was based on Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Only this empire spans the galaxy. Hari Seldon predicts through "psychohistory" the empire will fall within 300 years and establishes a foundation to manipulate history to shorten the dark ages that will follow. The fascination is seeing how all that plays out, especially in the first book. Foundation and Empire is less episodic than the first and features one of Asimov's most complex and compelling characters, "the Mule," as well as a strong female character, Bayta, and a clever twist. Second Foundation also features a strong female character--Arkady Darell. The first three books in the series were written in the early 1950s, and at times it shows. Asimov considered himself a feminist and created strong female characters (especially Susan Calvin in his Robot stories) but even so there are blindspots and occasional gender fail, because class? This was the fifties! The trilogy is dated in other ways--technological and social advances Asimov didn't foresee, but for all that I think this is still a fantastic read rich in ideas. Asimov returned to the Foundation Series in the 80s with Foundation's Edge and other sequels and prequels, merging aspects of the Robot series with it. But though I find those stories entertaining, I don't find them quite as thought-provoking as the first three Foundation novels. However, I do think Asimov's most amazing works can be found in his short stories, not his novels. I'd particularly recommend the anthology Room is Earth Enough if you can find it. His "The Ugly Little Boy" and ""The Dead Past" are in my opinion two of the best science fiction shorts out there.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was disappointed with this trilogy of novels having just reread this Science Fiction classic after more than forty years. The three novels demonstrate exceptional plotting but little else to warrant praise. Asimov has a galaxy populated with humans and it is a grayish world dominated by a fading empire. Set at least 13,000 years in the future, after humanity has colonized space so thoroughly that most people have forgotten about the Earth itself. Foundation opens as the Galactic Empire is in its final years, having reigned over the galaxy for over ten millennia. One man on the capital planet of Trantor dares to stand up and tell the moribund Empire that its decline and fall is inevitable. Hari Seldon has developed the science of psychohistory, which aims to predict the behavior of large populations over vast periods of time. Seldon has predicted not only the fall of the Empire, but the fact that a whopping 30,000 years of barbarism will follow, unless his organization, the Encyclopedia Foundation, is able to finish its immense task of cataloging and preserving millennia of accumulated human knowledge and history. Then, perhaps, the 30,000 years can be shaved to a mere millennium.The key concept is psychohistory and Hari Selden's projections based on mathematical formulas suggest with high probability the potential for minimizing a coming 'dark age' for humanity. Most of the novel hinges on a few leaders brandishing political power rather than light sabers. The suggestion of determinism diminished the possibility of suspense for this reader. The resulting loss of interest in the story, with repetitious descriptions of the overriding Selden plan made the final novel a bit of a slog in spite of an interstellar war. Planets were destroyed with the loss of hundreds of millions of lives but that did not seem to matter. Asimov was a prolific author, but in this case his attempt to expand several stories into a series of novels was flawed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have written the reviews for the other two books as updates under this book. This one is for Second Foundation. I enjoyed it as much as Foundation and Empire, although I do think that Foundation and Empire was a little better when it came to pacing. I don't know if it's because I jumped headfirst and read the trilogy all at once, but I found that Second Foundation really lagged in certain parts. The surprise twists started getting tiresome after the third "I Know where the Second Foundation is!", which I feel dulled my excitement about finally finding out where the Second Foundation was. My guess was Terminus, I was wrong. However, it's hard to find anything bad to say about this, since the ending really did have me yelling at my bedroom walls like a lunatic. I really wish that Asimov would have written more female characters into his stories, because he writes them really well. Callia, Arkady, and Momma were like a cool drink of water as I moved through the story. When I started the first book, Foundation; I was convinced that Asimov was a sexist who couldn't imagine women in positions of power, since nowhere in the story were there women of any real consequence. He created a galaxy with complex governments and technologies but there were no women. This was very telling for me, and as such, it remains my least favorite book of the three. I don't usually feel that books get better with their sequels, but Asimov's Foundation series, does improve with each book. I know there are more than these three, and I'm looking forward to reading them, but where it pertains to these three; the stories get better as they go. Another thing that I want to address, is Asimov's writing tone. Despite there being a great deal of science in his stories, and details about math and patterns, he writes beautifully. There are some lines in his stories which feel almost poetic, they're so heartfelt. I don't recall this being present in the first book. Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation are also my favorites because there is a grown in Asimov as writer that allows him to show more vulnerability in his work, making it more alive, warm. His sense of humor also comes through in those two books, and that was a joy for me to discover. I wanted to see him as a human being through his work. Not an arrogant but very intelligent math, and science geek. I wanted some heart and soul, and he delivered that in Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. I would highly recommend this to others. So if you haven't read it, do so.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this a while ago and I think it is time to reinvest some time in it. While i remember the creation of the first and second foundation, and the whole mule story, I forget many of the details. It is a fantastic story and very well thought out.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A phenomenal sci-fi trilogy that wraps layers upon layers on the evolution of human civilization strewn across the galaxy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I am in the middle of Foundation and Empire and I must say, this old trilogy holds up much better than I thought it would.I recall Asimov recounting how, as an adult, he went back and re-read Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol and that the sense of loss when he compared it to his childhood experience of the book was ... palpable. I expected much the same thing to happen to me here ... but it hasn't.Oh, it's dated in places ("in the future everything will be NUCLEAR," and women still seem to be mostly for decoration), but the chief idea is a really really good one, and Asimov makes it utterly engaging. Some of the scenes have been stuck in my memory for decades. And I find that, much as Asimov comes under criticism for not having been a very good writer, the writing is surprisingly good most of the time.If the trilogy has a major fault, I would say that that fault is talkiness. Asimov's big climactic scenes tend, by and large, to be conversations. You won't find an awful lot of narrated action. This can make for a static, slightly claustrophobic atmosphere.Still, when he describes his characters stepping outside and seeing the "misty lens" of the Milky Way stretching over them, one really does get the sense of being in a galaxy, and one where momentous things are happening.Oh, and in the future? Everyone really likes cigars. ;^)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I am in the middle of Foundation and Empire and I must say, this old trilogy holds up much better than I thought it would.I recall Asimov recounting how, as an adult, he went back and re-read Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol and that the sense of loss when he compared it to his childhood experience of the book was ... palpable. I expected much the same thing to happen to me here ... but it hasn't.Oh, it's dated in places ("in the future everything will be NUCLEAR," and women still seem to be mostly for decoration), but the chief idea is a really really good one, and Asimov makes it utterly engaging. Some of the scenes have been stuck in my memory for decades. And I find that, much as Asimov comes under criticism for not having been a very good writer, the writing is surprisingly good most of the time.If the trilogy has a major fault, I would say that that fault is talkiness. Asimov's big climactic scenes tend, by and large, to be conversations. You won't find an awful lot of narrated action. This can make for a static, slightly claustrophobic atmosphere.Still, when he describes his characters stepping outside and seeing the "misty lens" of the Milky Way stretching over them, one really does get the sense of being in a galaxy, and one where momentous things are happening.Oh, and in the future? Everyone really likes cigars. ;^)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is my first foray into Isaac Asimov and it's been a successful one, this trilogy has made a fan out of me! I love Asimov's writing--his characters are fleshed out and brilliant despite their frequent disappearance over a matter of chapters, sometimes pages, as time passes by fast, the character cast always changing as well as the environment around them.I really enjoyed Arkady's story, in The Second Foundation. A young teenager, threatened by the idea of an elusive and mysterious "Second Foundation" that can control minds. A position understandable despite my own knowledge (and preference) for the Second Foundation, given the same situation, I would be fairly threatened to believe that my own actions weren't actually my own and being controlled by a force that existed yet I could not find.Highly recommended to anyone into science fiction, or someone looking for a great epic spanning hundreds of years.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I can understand why Asimov's Foundation Trilogy is one of the building blocks of the genre of Science Fiction as we know it today and I can respect the quality of the material itself. This trilogy is well-written, grand in scope, and has a very interesting concept, however I found it to be very dull for long periods of time and took me much longer than usual to plod through. Asimov has crafted his tale around a scientist who foresees the end the current structure of civilization and devises a plan to accelerate the growth of a new empire and drastically shorten the predicted span of time in which the universe will be thrown into a time of barbarism. In order to accomplish this, a Foundation is created on a remote and otherwise unused planet and the trilogy involves the trials and travails of this Foundation as it establishes itself as a power in the universe.Overall, not a bad series. I enjoyed the second book (Foundation and Empire) the most out of the three. As I mentioned, the story does get a bit tedious at times and it was an effort for me to pick it up and keep going from time to time. But from a historical aspect it is very interesting to read one of the building blocks of a genre.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The first effectively sets the stage, but the series bogs down as it progresses.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Helps define the hard science fiction genre. Excellent read and highly recommended. A little high brow but very entertaining.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although Asimov occasionally indulges in details that fifty years later sound quite dated, and has a wooden approach to characterization, the big ideas and plot twists of this trilogy gripped me to the end. If only he had had help with writing better humans--although this far into the future they at least have the excuse of an alien culture.Highly recommended, though I see no reason not to look for an abridged version.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I hadn't read this in over 30 years, but it still holds up and is a riveting good read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the true classics of Science Fiction. Here Asimov tells the story of humanity's downfall and re-rise in the form of the Foundation. Asimov is a true master writer, and even though at times the plots seemed to twist and bend a bit too much (especially in the last part, "The Second Foundation", I always kept on reading just to enjoy his writing. And, to be just, the story was also very ingenious, and it was fun to find out how he twined all the plot threads together...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the best sci-fi every written. About a human race on another planet that was planted there by a human race that came before them and lived on another planet.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "Foundation" is basically Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in space. The dialogue is stiff and lifeless, even for Asimov, but the premise is good enough that it remains an interesting read in spite of that.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book and the continuing foundation series are kind of like space, history, mystery novels that will make you understand infinity and realize just how infinitesimal you are. Fun!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of "those" books that I wish I could read again for the first time!! I first read it in 1969 or 70. Interesting to look at the science and see what has come to pass and what seems like it never will. I'm still waiting to colonize a new system. Ah well, probably too old now!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Foundation (Too many characters, great suprises)-Foundation and Empire (Good, I guessed it was * (wouldn't want to spoil it for you).-Second Foundation (Just when you thought you had it all figured out! (9 if it was fantasy)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first read this book when I was 15 years old, in the 60s. It’s amazing how much of the technology Asimov got right, or perhaps influenced. I used Foundation when writing my dissertation and was amazed that many others had done so as well... as predicted, these books influenced the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very interesting novel. It's mostly politics and trade but it shows how empires rise and fall.