Now that I have made a full list of my books ( though I recently added 3 more to this collection 2 of each have been reviewed already here ) I would like to slowly starting up reviews on some of them. I would leave technical books out for now and just concentrate on writing up reviews on fiction books. Most techie books I buy I end up leaving it in the middle, there are very few tech books in recent times that I have read cover to cover.
Here is a review of a series that has been one of my all time favourite- Isaac Asimov's Foundation
I started reading Isaac Asimov novels long back and the first one was a borrowed copy of the Complete Robot. The Complete Robot is a collection of most of the robot stories written by Asimov and forms the foundation for the 3 laws of robotics.
Foundation series though is set far in the future, where humans have an empire spread throughout the galaxy. This empire has existed for a long time and everyone believes that it will live forever except one person namely the famous/infamous Hari Seldon. Hari Seldon has developed a complex mathematical model to predict social behaviour and he predicts that the empire is in a decline and unless something is done it will die and there will be a period of 30000 years of complete anarchy before an empire rises again. He also predicts that this decline is inevitable and can't be stopped but what can be done is that by setting up what he calls Foundations the 30000 period can be reduced to 1000 yrs. Thats what sets the tone for this series. The Foundation series is all about these two foundations and the 1000yr period between the start of the decline of the Galactic Empire and the rise of the Foundation.
Unlike most other scifi authors Isaac Asimov does not concentrate on gadgets and spaceships etc but more on philosophical debates with a science fiction backdrop. Foundation is more about how social behaviour can be manipulated to achieve political ends. The first book focuses on what we will come to know as the first foundation which is made up originally of purely scientists and their families and are given the task of collecting the whole human knowledge into an Encyclopedia Galactica to preserve it against the coming decline of the empire. The book charts the first hundred years of the foundation which at the fringes of the known galaxy is first to experience the disintegration of order as the empire crumbles at the periphery.
It shows how a technologically advanced society though militarily powerless is able to hold off much more powerful forces and achieve a balance of power in the area and then over the years using a combination of religion and commerce become the dominant power in the region. The book moves at a superb pace and will keep you hooked till the end.
By the end of it I hope the book will give you a new idea of what science fiction can be and hopefully encourage you explore this amazing genre more. Its not all Star wars and Star trek out there :).
I am sorry if the review seemed a bit lackluster and a bit lacking in details, but what I really wanted was to encourage a reader of this review to go read the book itself and one step towards that is to not reveal too much about the book.
