Speechify is a free text-to-speech software so you can listen to your favorite books. Click this affiliate link image to download today!

I was very excited to finally sit down to read my first Asimov book and since I didn't know much about his collection of work I picked the first one I saw on the shelf I ended up buying the wrong one. I bought Foundation and Empire for some dumb reason and when I started reading it it became clear that I had missed something. With just a cursory look into the matter, I realized the first book is just called Foundation, and I quickly bought that book on Amazon and waited for it to arrive. While waiting I read Channing Cornwall's new short story collection Please Haunt Me. After I was properly haunted by Channing's dark tales I settled into Foundation.

I had always heard that Asimov was one of the premier science fiction writers and was aware of his rules of robotics featured in the movie iRobot with the cheek-smacking Will Smith. Knowing that Asimov is a celebrated and noted scientist and that his writing is informed by his academic prowess I was expecting to read a highly technical and potentially difficult science fiction style. This was not my experience while reading Foundation.

Foundation is set in the far-flung future where humanity has expanded throughout the galaxy and inhabited hundreds of star systems and thousands of worlds. The scope of such a vast human ecosystem is somewhat unrelatable but that isn't an issue because the main focus is much more localized. It starts with the fall of the empire which has been the centralized governing body of the entire galaxy for as long as anyone can remember. The empire's fall is predicted by a renowned mathematician who has invented the science of psychohistory, which, if done correctly, can predict the future of large groups of people.

This mathematician's name is Hari Sheldon, who becomes a kind of scientific soothsayer to survivors of the fall long after his death. Hari Sheldon is banished, along with a few thousand of his followers to a resource-deprived planet on the very edge of the galaxy called Terminus. Their goal is to compile all the known scientific knowledge into a single Scientifica Galactic in the hopes that after the fall of the empire when the infrastructures fail and governments revert back to barbarism and violence, this knowledge will bring back a civil democracy for the Empire. Hari Seldon’s new civilization is known as The Foundation and is secretly going to be the seat of that power.

The story takes place over the course of the first 150 years of The Foundation’s history by following the major events or crises that The Foundation encounters on its way to supremacy. Each event has its heroes and villains which will shape the future of the empire. After 50 years of compiling their encyclopedia the citizens of Terminus find out that Hari Seldon’s real goal was not to simply stand by and create a large book but to create a new seat of power based on science that would take an otherwise 30,000-year decline in humanity to just 1000 years and all of this was nearly perfectly predicted by Seldon but he can’t simply tell the people what will happen or it will change the prediction. The newly formed governing body on Terminus then has to make the right statecraft moves in order to forgo destruction as the neighboring planets attempt to take them over or destroy them for this knowledge and technology. Each of the five crises we witness in The Foundation has to be managed by a different leader and so the book is broken into five parts.

Initially, I was expecting a Dunesque story with lots of action and intrigue but what I got was a grounded and easy-to-read account of fictional statecraft where the leaders attempt to predict the actions of their enemies and work toward succeeding with the least amount of violence possible. Asimov writes in a way that was surprisingly relatable and modern sounding with a smattering of big words that required context to figure out. There were quite a few names and made-up tech to figure out but that is typical of books of this scale otherwise it was easy to get through the relatively short chapters and it somehow made Statecraft compelling. I found myself wanting to continue reading just to see what happens next and like Dune there is a constant sense of potential dread and suspense as the events unfold. You want The Foundation to succeed but the odds seem against them and it is fun to see how they maneuver the intense politics in a galaxy of power-hungry despots and monarchs.

This book was enjoyable to read for reasons that don’t exist in many books I have read before. It takes a broad look at humanity and depicts the interplay between different political philosophies and value systems in an accessible and interesting way. I will definitely be continuing the series to find out what happens and I kind of hope there is a little more action in the future. I recommend this book to those that want a more subtle look at how people obtain power on large scales and the tools that people use to manipulate others. It is sophisticated but grounded in real human emotion with characters guided by self-interest and a lust for power. I can’t wait to get into the book I bought first.