emromc 's review for:

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

4.0

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I blazed through the first, slowed down some with the second, and sped through the third. All those twists at the end...couldn't put it down. Asimov didn't write a thriller here, or an action epic like Ender's Game; this series is much more philosophical. His social, economic, and political landscape is rich and fleshed out, and though I heard going in that his characters are flat and hard to connect with, I didn't find that to be the case as much. Yes, the characters change rapidly since he's covering hundreds of years in 750 pages, but I found a few that I really liked in each book and ended up really rooting for. Salvor Hardin, Ebling Mis, Bayta, even Arcadia and her father. Sure, they weren't as fleshed out as they might have been, but then, Asimov wasn't writing a story about individuals. That's the whole point! Psychohistory isn't about individual people, it's about the masses. That idea is repeated again and again and again through the whole trilogy, and the way he bounces from character to character and has whole sections where you're not focused on any "main character" at all, but more a collective group of scientists, psychologists, traders, civilians, or what have you, reflects the philosophy of the saga: individuals don't shape the course of history. People do.
4 stars because there were parts that I had to push through, but the roller coaster ride of the last 150 pages of book 3 made up for it's slower bits (book 3 was the most uneven for me, but oh, those last 150 pages!), and the second half of the second book was much better than the first half, so that evens out some too.