Saturday, November 14, 2009
Foundation by Isaac Asimov (review)
Foundation by Isaac Asimov is one of those books that bears become a specified historical tentpole of the literary genre that it's facile to disregard and accept for granted, a lot in the same direction new moviegoers nowadays could find it difficult to puzzle out the brilliance in Citizen Kane. Foundation by Isaac Asimov is not what you will call "a great book" plainly because critics tell you so. You have to read it, and find for yourself how staggeringly written and diverting piece of sociopolitical SF aggregated with brilliant storyline, and its finest dimensions could appear unusual to nowadays lecturers until you recognise just how magnificent they are accomplished. If you count over the years how SF genre has changed, becoming burdened by either futile style or clumsy plotting masquerading as epic legendry, Asimov's aphoristic language found in Foundation is a real breathing place full of energising air. Isaac Asimov acknowledged possibly better than anybody in that literary genre that SF is all about communicating. Isaac Asimov wrote as clearly as it gets, but not laconically. There's more than plenty humour to go around. To the highest degree imposingly, Asimov's plots were as complex as any of nowadays top novelists'. Nevertheless he still managed to maintain his lecturers' heads free from mental confusion and thwarting.
The stage for Foundation is set 13,000 years in a potential future, after human race has colonized space so exhaustively that just about everyone have lost any information regarding Earth. Foundation opens as the Galactic Empire is in its terminal years, having ruled across the galaxy for over 10 millennia. One-person on the capital planet of Trantor (a planetary which, by the way, George Lucas unabashedly abstracted and renamed Coruscant for use in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace) dares to arise and evidence the dying Empire that its descent and capitulation is ineluctable. Hari Seldon has acquired the science of psychohistory, which aims to anticipate the behavior of wide populations across huge periods. Seldon has anticipated not alone the decline of the Empire, but the reality that a bashing 30,000 years of savagery will accompany that fall, unless his system, the Encyclopedia Foundation, is able to complete its vast task of cataloguing and maintaining millennia of compiled human knowledge and history. So, maybe, the 30,000 years could be trimmed to a bare millenium.
If you can't find any of the books in the Foundation Series, check Amazon:
All The Books in the Foundation Series
Read more about it on Wikipedia
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