Take a photo of a barcode or cover
rianainthestacks 's review for:
Foundation
by Isaac Asimov
Writing a review for The Foundation is a bit daunting. There is just so much depth of social philosophy throughout that even after reading it, I keep thinking over the different parts and trying to see parallels between life in the books and current times. Bottom line, this is a book about deep thinking and about being able to predict the future of galaxies by coming to an understanding of the base unit of a single person. How does a person’s actions affect other actions and other people around them and so on? How does this then lead to group actions and possible revolutions? What are all the seemingly infinite combinations of all human action and interaction that leads to any kind of change and then what kind of changes does it take to lead to a specific possible future outcome? If you know the future, will it inevitably happen because it is the future and already takes into account any possible changes between present and future present? Or, is it possible that knowing the future can create even subconscious efforts at changing even the smallest pieces which would ultimately rearrange all of the future on a grand scale? When getting into ideas of predicting the future and how prescience effects time in general, things get a little confusing.
Time is a big topic in this novel. In fact, the book consists of 5 short stories that are all connected. From one story to the next, we jump across time and space to arrive at a new future point along the timeline of the Foundation. This, to me, was a very unique and interesting writing style. I have read plenty of books with flashbacks or that skip ahead to the future at the very end, but never one whose scope is so broad as to focus on the mechanisms of falling and rising societies and social systems over many, many generations. Of course, with this writing style, there isn’t enough time to really develop even any one character from each generation observed. So I will say that I missed a connection to character in the book, and yet I was ok with this because I understand that the idea of the novel was to transcend the idea of a single person standing alone and to view instead how single people across time and in different environments, interact with large scale changes to social systems.
The Foundation is of course a science fiction, and I have seen many elements from this story also show up in modern science fiction, however Asimov’s book is also in a niche of its own. Asimov’s aim with The Foundation was to bring back more of the “science” into science fiction. Instead of being more of the fantastical, The Foundation focuses purely on rumination of psychology— and to be extremely specific, psychohistory. The difference seeming to be that with psychohistory, psychology has been developed to a point that it can be used like a math form to determine with many different variables in many different equations, how history will be most probably played out. It deals with big ideas and shifting human movements across time. It looks into several different people’s lives, and yet not in a personal way, but more as a way to glimpse that generation’s view of their place in history. Even this choice gives the story more of a scientific tone, as it makes all characters appear through an objective lens instead of the more usual subjective point of view of fiction.
I wonder in the end if Hari Seldon created a sort of self fulfilling prophecy that allowed him to remain in control even across such stretches of time, or if in fact, he would have had no effect on the happenings at all. I lean more towards the first of the two, though I believe the main point is that human life goes through stages just as things do through time and these stages could potentially be easy to predict and to control at large because they are bound to happen simply through the nature of time and humanity.
Each phase of The Foundation through time seemed to use a different method of holding power and place: from religion, to trade, to knowledge. And yet in each time period, violence may have been considered by some entity, but the Foundation’s ultimate decision would always be to work with these other social constructs instead of devolving into war, which in the end would have only decimated lives and resources. This particular outlook is coined into a phrase used throughout the book from Salvor Hardin, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Seeing how later generations not only build upon what they know of Hari Seldon, but also on such philosophy as that held by Salvor Hardin, I feel that the book also indicates that Seldon provided the “foundation” for all the future changes, but it took a leader from each generation to cement Seldon’s ideals over time. Seldon truly seems to live on through all his followers he has created in the Foundation, and is even visually present in the novel from his time vault appearances. He may have said that the original quest of the Foundation was more of a place holder than anything, yet the preservation of knowledge across time was solely in the hands of the society he founded.
This book may sound a bit dry with the focus being so much more on the “science” and social parts as opposed to the “fiction,” but this is actually not the case. Even if none of the characters were particularly developed, the way in which they were able to manipulate the system to keep themselves in power, even at times it seemed impossible, was honestly amazing. I would liken some of the scheming (particularly in Hardin’s case) to Sherlock Holmes (the tv version that is, as I have yet to actually read Sherlock Holmes). Plans began to unfurl all of the sudden, quickly, and quite to my surprise.
Time is a big topic in this novel. In fact, the book consists of 5 short stories that are all connected. From one story to the next, we jump across time and space to arrive at a new future point along the timeline of the Foundation. This, to me, was a very unique and interesting writing style. I have read plenty of books with flashbacks or that skip ahead to the future at the very end, but never one whose scope is so broad as to focus on the mechanisms of falling and rising societies and social systems over many, many generations. Of course, with this writing style, there isn’t enough time to really develop even any one character from each generation observed. So I will say that I missed a connection to character in the book, and yet I was ok with this because I understand that the idea of the novel was to transcend the idea of a single person standing alone and to view instead how single people across time and in different environments, interact with large scale changes to social systems.
The Foundation is of course a science fiction, and I have seen many elements from this story also show up in modern science fiction, however Asimov’s book is also in a niche of its own. Asimov’s aim with The Foundation was to bring back more of the “science” into science fiction. Instead of being more of the fantastical, The Foundation focuses purely on rumination of psychology— and to be extremely specific, psychohistory. The difference seeming to be that with psychohistory, psychology has been developed to a point that it can be used like a math form to determine with many different variables in many different equations, how history will be most probably played out. It deals with big ideas and shifting human movements across time. It looks into several different people’s lives, and yet not in a personal way, but more as a way to glimpse that generation’s view of their place in history. Even this choice gives the story more of a scientific tone, as it makes all characters appear through an objective lens instead of the more usual subjective point of view of fiction.
I wonder in the end if Hari Seldon created a sort of self fulfilling prophecy that allowed him to remain in control even across such stretches of time, or if in fact, he would have had no effect on the happenings at all. I lean more towards the first of the two, though I believe the main point is that human life goes through stages just as things do through time and these stages could potentially be easy to predict and to control at large because they are bound to happen simply through the nature of time and humanity.
Each phase of The Foundation through time seemed to use a different method of holding power and place: from religion, to trade, to knowledge. And yet in each time period, violence may have been considered by some entity, but the Foundation’s ultimate decision would always be to work with these other social constructs instead of devolving into war, which in the end would have only decimated lives and resources. This particular outlook is coined into a phrase used throughout the book from Salvor Hardin, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Seeing how later generations not only build upon what they know of Hari Seldon, but also on such philosophy as that held by Salvor Hardin, I feel that the book also indicates that Seldon provided the “foundation” for all the future changes, but it took a leader from each generation to cement Seldon’s ideals over time. Seldon truly seems to live on through all his followers he has created in the Foundation, and is even visually present in the novel from his time vault appearances. He may have said that the original quest of the Foundation was more of a place holder than anything, yet the preservation of knowledge across time was solely in the hands of the society he founded.
This book may sound a bit dry with the focus being so much more on the “science” and social parts as opposed to the “fiction,” but this is actually not the case. Even if none of the characters were particularly developed, the way in which they were able to manipulate the system to keep themselves in power, even at times it seemed impossible, was honestly amazing. I would liken some of the scheming (particularly in Hardin’s case) to Sherlock Holmes (the tv version that is, as I have yet to actually read Sherlock Holmes). Plans began to unfurl all of the sudden, quickly, and quite to my surprise.