Emlyyn's Full Review: Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Empire
The Best book of the Foundtation Series, for me, is "Foundation". (For which there is no epinions category - strange). This book, "Foundation and Empire", and its sequel, "Second Foundation", come close.
The moral to all three of these stories - there isn't one. Books like that are practically the only ones worth reading, because I can sum up books with a moral in ten words or less, and then you don't have to go through all the hassle of actually reading it. The Goodies and Badies are not clear-cut by any means, and you can't even use the ages-old "If they won, they're the goodies, if they lost, they're the badies" formula.
The premise - that very large groups of people become statistically predictable, and a very advanced Mathematics could "predict" the future course of history. The more people under consideration, the more predictable they become.
Whether or not this is true, the presumption that it is leads to some interesting moral issues:
- Although Asimov claims that Psychohistory (the prediction Mathematics) does not negate Free Will, does it really? Can an individual be both completely in control of his/her actions and still be assured of being swept along with the course of history regardless of anything they might do whatsoever?
- If an apocolypse is approaching, what shall we do?
- Is Seldon playing God in his scheme to mandate and set the future course of history? Des he have the right? Will the civilisation he hopes will be created by the end of the Seldon Plan be lessened by the fact that it didn't happen on its own - Seldon *made* it happen?
It's fascinating stuff. Light on the details of the setting, but you can get such details reading the later Foundation fiction, if you really want to. But the point is the issues arising from being able to predict the future, and with any luck you won't quibble over things like the books being too short and the characters a little stereotyped.
Although small and seemingly helpless, the Foundation had managed to survive against the greed of its neighboring warlords. But could it stand against...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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