Foundation

Every once in a while I look at my bookshelves, and think "OK, it's time I read ", and with weary heart I pluck it off the shelf and haul it upstairs to start reading. Often, the classics are hard going - written for a different time, written without the mass market in mind, but good for the mind - they're the Brussels sprouts of novels. Such were my feelings when I decided to read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's undoubtedly one of the greats, but as a sci-fi novel written in the fifties I was expecting a slow-going, cardboard-charactered read.

Foundation turned out to be a nice surprise. The characters are disposable and cardboard, but the story is rich and deep, and spans a scale of decades, across an entire galaxy. It starts with a scientist who is the greatest Psychohistorian ever, studying psychohistory, the science of predicting the big-picture future (this was written thirty years before chaos theory was invented, so at the time it was written, it was possibly scientifically credible). He realises the galactic empire is crumbling, and starts putting things in place to ensure humanity won't go into a 30,000 year dark age. The Foundation series is the story of what follows, with the first book broken into five sections, each with a mostly different cast of characters, set decades apart.

Each section works well, and it's enjoyable to see the history unfolding. It's also interesting to read in terms of the groundwork it laid for science fiction as a genre. It's certainly worth a read, and I'm following it with the rest of the original Foundation trilogy.