Book Bearings
Foundation
Part of the Foundation series
- 240 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1951
- 99 editions
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1 About this book
The Galactic Empire has ruled the galaxy for twelve thousand years, and it is in decline. Hari Seldon, the creator of psychohistory, a mathematics that predicts the behavior of very large populations, foresees its fall and a dark age of thirty thousand years to follow. To shorten that age he gathers scientists and scholars on a bleak planet at the edge of the galaxy, where they are to preserve human knowledge. Their settlement is the Foundation. The book is made up of five linked stories set decades apart, each showing the young Foundation in a crisis among stronger neighbors. It is the first volume of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
- Science fiction
- Fantasy
- Psychological fiction
- Psychohistory
- Life on other planets
- Prophecy
- Historians
- Robots
2 What to expect
Five linked stories about the early years of the Foundation, a colony of scholars set up to shorten the dark age after a galactic empire falls. Each story jumps decades ahead to new characters and a new crisis, settled by wit, trade, religion or politics more than by force. It is a novel of ideas and conversation, light on action and character, written in a plain mid-century style, and it opens a trilogy.
Good for readers who want: classic science fiction, big ideas about history, and politics and strategy.
3 About Isaac Asimov
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Isaac Asimov
5 Similar books
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- Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
- The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury