Foundation (1951) (edit title/settings)

• Rated 0 stars

“I read this again recently for the first time since high school, and this epic about the survivors of a collapsed galactic empire is every bit as magnificent as the first time around. It also begs the question - when is the movie coming out? ”

• Rated 4 stars

“Best SciFi trilogy EVER. Did you see "Another Earth" - guess what the protagonist had on her desk? No wonder - it's full of wonders and marvels, twists and plots and detective stories and imagination and....! If you don't have the time for the full thing, check out the BBCs beautiful radio play - a classic!”

• Rated 5 stars

“I recommend the entire series!!”

• Rated 3 stars

“I was never able to quite suspend my disbelief when reading Asimov, but nevertheless, his ideas are so inventive, I always enjoyed the books. I read the entire "Foundation Trilogy" years ago.”

• Rated 0 stars

“Voted the third best science fiction novel of all time. While no doubt groundbreaking, there's literally dozens of sci-fi books that I would rather re-read. ”

• Rated 0 stars

“Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy represents the zenith of an era in science fiction. A wonderful read. Too bad Harry Selden isn't around today so we could understand the times in which we live.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Interesting book. Asimov is a wonderfully descriptive writer. I enjoyed this one a lot, although it's not my favorite.

Though very detailed in his description of the characters, the characters all seemed to live in the extreme. They were either arrogant or cruel. There really wasn't a character that I felt any sympathy for, or found to be vulnerable. They were all very hard, politically carnivorous, and temperamental.

All in all, a good story. A GREAT idea for a story line, too. But don't expect to feel empathy for the characters.

Great start to an interesting story that evolved over time. Asimov wrote these in parts released to magazines as short stories. Later, they were gathered into a single collection and published as a book.

This is simply the coolest idea and story presentation of social engineering that I've ever read. Also, a corner stone of the plot is the idea that the future can be known (with some important limitations and expressed as percentage chances) if extremely large groups of people are examined. The future for an individual cannot be known. But the future of a society of people, a nation, or an empire, can. With this knowledge of the future trends and the foreknowledge of the coming social decline, decay of political structures, and inevitable fall of the empire, the greatest Psycho-historian who ever lived, Hari Seldon, created the Foundation in an effort to reduce the human suffering that would come in the barbaric age that followed the empire's collapse. If his plan works, it will reduce the age of barbarism from 30 thousand years to only 1 thousand years.

It's a good read! Here are a couple of good wiki sites that talk about Psychohistory and the book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series

Warning! The Foundation Series Wiki has spoilers. It's worth reading and safe until you hit the "Plot" section. Don't read the plot synopsis prior to reading the books.”

• Rated 4 stars

“I thought it would be more on the boring side before I picked it up. But decided to read it anyway. It was actually very interesting; there were always unsuspected play-outs to events. That being said, the book felt like just a piece of a bigger puzzle, which I know it's a part of a series, but I would have liked it to have stood out more on its own.”

• Rated 4 stars

“A fun quick read”

• Rated 0 stars

“The first and original work in the Foundation series in which Asimov introduces the concept of psychohistory -- an interesting concept that allows prediction of the future with mathematical probability. In this work -- and apparently throughout the Foundation series -- the fate contained in the psychohistory prophesied by Hari Seldon controls the future of the inhabitants of the isolated planet Terminus and ultimately the entire galaxy. Most of the hapless humans are blythely unaware of the force that controls their destiny, but a few select and critically placed individuals are necessary to make sure the edicts of Seldon's predictions are realized. Choices made by these individuals who are uniquely situated in both time and place, and possess the wisdom necessary to interpret the meaning of crucial events -- or "Seldon" moments -- are far more important to the future than those of all other humans. Interesting for its own sake, the story is also useful as a metaphor for those who believe that "network science" offers the ability to predict or control the behavior of human societies. Although fiction, the story of Foundation highlights the important fact that though science hopes to predict the behavior of societies with mathematical probability, the real behavior is non-linear and can be profoundly changed by the actions a single individual. ”