Foundation is the first novel in the foundation series. The Galactic Empire is about to fail and Hari Seldon and the new science of psychohistory are attempting to save all human knowledge and bring humanity through the resulting dark ages. I am split on my feelings about this book. I have just as many things that I like as that I don’t like.
For the likes, this book combines all of my favorite things about science fiction. Foundation creates a future world in which to explore questions of humanity, science, and the future. I also loved the premise of psychohistory. There is political intrigue, lots of action, and philosophical discussions of religion, economics and mathematics. It is intelligently and well written. Lots of fun.
For the dislikes, this book jumps through it’s time line from one story to the other with little connection between them. Just when you are getting into a story it ends and you are thrust ahead another couple hundred years. This makes for poor character development and a hard time emotionally attaching to the story. This novel was first published in 1951 and feels slightly dated. There are no women characters to speak of. Also, as soon as I started reading about Hari Seldon’s group the foundation which were building a compendium of all human knowledge I thought, Wikipedia, ha ha.
That being said, I did like it and will be reading more books in the series. I’ve also seen references that the foundation series is loosely based on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To me that actually makes it more interesting.