I've been meaning to read this series for a half a decade now. Let's hope the rest of them have me as hyped up as this one ( )

Older sci-fi but definitely appropriately cynical for todays world. Spot on Asimov! ( )

Galactic Empire is crumbling from within. Hari Seldon, sociologists and mathematician is aware of this so he starts up the plan to reduce the inevitable period of complete Empire breakdown from 30 millennia to a single one. To achieve this he establishes the Foundation(s), bastions of human knowledge and only remaining torch of glorious old days that should rekindle the human society during the dark ages and bring back the civilization as it was.

This is space opera t its best. Stories of people working on saving and preserving the civilization are stories I like a lot (for stories like this you can also check the Space Viking, Raj Whitehall, Lost Puzzler and even Warhammer 40k (although this one shows what happens when things go belly up)). There is something truly epic and noble in people trying to preserve the whole of humanity's knowledge during the dark and dangerous times.

Story covers beginnings of the Foundation and so-called Seldon's crisis in first two centuries of its existence. We are shown how universal is general behavior of the society - rise of religion as mechanism for controlling the rival kingdoms and finally the ultimate tool for establishing the inter-stellar connections, trade.

Excellent book, highly recommended to all SF fans. ( )

Foundation has a very unusual structure, broken into 3-5 parts that tell very similar stories. As such, the book lacks a strong ending, one that has been repeated 2-4 times before in the book. ( )

These are excellent ideas presented in vignettes tied around an cool framing structure. Every fifty years or so a civilization at the edge of the galaxy gets a cryptic message from its founder, a statistician-prophet that predicted the galactic dark ages and the solutions on how to get out of it. He's like a space Nate Silver. Anyway, every cycle the brightest minds on this planet must solve a grand socio-political crisis using wits and nonviolence. It's pretty rad as far as its broad themes go.
But it falls short in a number of areas. I've also read Asimov's The Caves of Steel and I've come to the conclusion that Asimov was a scientific visionary but a social illiterate. In a galaxy of quadrillions of people we get the same three or four basic character archetypes in every vignette: a smug heroic author stand-in, a mustache twirling villain, an exposition machine ("as you already know, we were originally a mining colony..."), and a horde of ignorant rubes. Once there was also a chick character who existed to get condescended to. The point is that we are getting these big-picture ideas in the packaging of poor writing. The book became a contest between how often I rolled my eyes and how often I smiled with satisfaction. My overall opinion of the book hung in the balance!
Asimov also failed to fully flesh out his dying interplanetary empire of quadrillions in a believable way. It extended to more then just that they all spoke English (we could probably assume some kind of translator device-- although this was never mentioned.) I'm referring to the cultural and psychological diversity that should inevitably occur in such a vast edifice. Compare this sterility with the empire of Frank Herbert's Dune with its strange religions and its baroque nobility. That was a galaxy that felt lived in.
But I'm not being fair. Somebody had to start this whole space opera biz. Besides, the truth is this: I smiled more often then I rolled my eyes. ( )