Isaac Asimov

A science-fiction narrative of the Foundation, a colony of psychologists, which forms the center of power in the Galaxy.

Foundation and Empire

Jean Bonnefoy

Fondation foudroyée

Le Cycle de Fondation, tome 4 

Sésame

Oups j'ai oublié d'écrire une critique. Plus de souvenirs très précis mais franchement c'était bien, un des meilleurs de la série. Plus que deux avoir d'avoir terminé le cycle......

Seconde Fondation

Le Cycle de Fondation, tome 3

Une chouette suite, dans la continuité du roman précédent. Fait rare pour Asimov il y'a enfin un personnages féminin défini par autre chose que ses intérêts amoureux.

Le cycle de Fondation. 5, Terre et fondation

Ça y'est !!!! J'ai terminé de lire les 15 tomes des trois cycles de Fondation.... Après au moins trois ans à le lire, je suis trop content parce que tout ça se clôt avec un des meilleurs tome de la série.

Au-delà de la froideur habituel d'Asimov, j'ai vraiment ressenti un truc assez mystérieux dans ce livre, de "sens of wonder" comme on dit. Pleins de questions philosophiques, politiques et métaphysiques qui s'ouvrent au fil du livre, et une dimension poétique à laquelle Asimov ne m'avait pas habitué. Délicieux !

J'ai adoré la dimension archéologue/historien spatial où l'on remonte le temps en explorant ces planètes pour retrouver la terre. J'y ai retrouvé l'atmosphère du jeu OuterWilds. C'était presque parfois frustrant que l'obsession de Trevize de trouver des infos sur la Terre ne le rende pas plus curieux sur les sociétés passées dont il découvrait les vestiges.

Toute la partie d'exploration des mondes spatiens ainsi que la clôture du livre sont rendus encore plus plaisant par tous les clins d'œil au reste de la série. On prend grave plaisir à se remémorer tel ou tel personnage, à voir comment cet événement qu'on a lu s'est transmis dans l'histoire et les conséquences imprévus qu'il a eu 20 000 ans plus tard.

Le final m'a fait des effets du "Problème à trois corps" avec la dimension assez démentielle que prend les perspectives.

Bon.
Par contre.
Deux gros points noir.
Le premier, c'est un classique j'en parle dans quasi toutes mes critiques des bouquins de Asimov : la mysoginie et le traitement des personnages féminins. À peu près comme d'habitude les femmes sont limitées à des potiches, souvent sexualisées, et niaises. Alors même que ce tome ouvre un peu une question sur le genre pendant la deuxième partie avec le personnage de Fallom, ça reste vraiment cringe avec notre regard contemporain. Si on pouvait un peu plus le comprendre sur les premiers romans de la saga écrits dans les années 45, celui ci date de 86...

Ce qui m'amène au deuxième point : l'écriture des personnages. Pour un auteur qui base une immense partie de son procédé narratif j'étais vraiment surpris, beaucoup de relations entre les personnages sonnent fausses. Trevize est accariatre pour absolument rien, la relation entre Joie et Pelorat tiens à peine debout.

Bref, ces deux derniers points noircissent sérieusement le tableau, mais j'ai malgré tout bien aimé cette lecture et les réflexions qu'elle ouvre sur l'histoire et l'avenir de l'humanité.

Aamna

After the disappointment that The Foundation was, I am happy to share that my enthusiasm for the series is renewed. It's nowhere close to what it was when I was done with Forward The Foundation but I am not complaining. 

Here's hoping the next one cements the second foundation of my ardour.

Foundation's edge

Traci Wilbanks

After reading this fourth book in the series, I am very happy with how things came together. The descriptions of the technology and communication methods used in this book are tremendous. The words came to life in my mind.

Gavin

Why shouldn't I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and of the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire? After all, I had read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not once, but twice.
Better! Asimov still can't do characters, but the Mule's lack of character is fitting, chilling - realistic for an authoritarian. Asimov is fit to write villains, in that sense.

Seldon is by this point in the tale identified with history itself:

  "you can't beat a Seldon crisis by a far-fetched, impractical, storybook scheme like that. Suppose you had never got hold of the capsule. Suppose Brodrig hadn't used the word 'ultimate.' Seldon doesn't depend on wild luck." 
"If wild luck comes our way, there's no law says Seldon can't take advantage of it."
 
Or perhaps just any good part of history. Great trick!

(More seriously, history is full of wild luck. I don't pretend to know the magnitude of the contributions of structure and chance, groups and individuals. But 70% wouldn't surprise me.)

Psychohistory was one of the dreams of classical Marxism, even as written by someone supremely relaxed about markets and democracy. "The laws of history" indeed. ("For the first three centuries, the percentage probability of nondeviation is nine point four two." Current social science would be impressive to manage 9.42% for the first three minutes.) It's even foiled by genetics:

  Can a genetic accident of unpredictable biological properties be taken into account in the Seldon Plan? [No.]


---

There's usually exactly one well-written passage in an Asimov book, and here it is:

  To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was "system," an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was "industry," indecision when right was "caution," and blind stubbornness when wrong, "determination." 

And withal he wasted no money, killed no man needlessly, and meant extremely well. 
 
(I explain this by A being a latently great writer who just never took the fucking time to be one.)

---

The Mule is extremely rational... he just has a very fucked up goal (to rule the universe before he dies prematurely without progeny). This is good villainy!

Second foundation

In which it is revealed that the Seldon Plan is overfit. (It's only a model.)

Surprisingly hippieish, Huxleyish, with it lauding mental science over physical science.

  in a society given over... to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind

The obvious rejection is of behaviorism. But the main claim of psychohistory, of the predictability of the exact course of human history, goes way beyond behaviorism in some ways.

This is funny out of context:

  The Executive Council of the Second Foundation was in session. To us they are merely voices. Neither the exact scene of the meeting nor the identity of those present are essential at the point. 

Nor, strictly speaking, can we even consider an exact reproduction of any part of the session - unless we wish to sacrifice completely even the minimum comprehensibility we have a right to expect. 

We deal here with psychologists - and not merely psychologists. Let us say, rather, scientists with a psychological orientation. That is, men whose fundamental conception of scientific philosophy is pointed in an entirely different direction from all of the orientations we know.

We finally get some details about psychohistory.

  Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the final mathematicization thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded. Through the development of the mathematics necessary to understand the facts of neural physiology and the electrochemistry of the nervous system, which themselves had to be, had to be, traced down to nuclear forces, it first became possible to truly develop psychology. And through the generalization of psychological 
knowledge from the individual to the group, sociology was also mathematicized. 

The Seldon Plan has mumbo-jumbo mathematical derivations between steps, but he here admits that has of course been modified and falsified and had its assumptions violated. So it's not an apriori mathematical theory: it's a model. 

  The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct... They've watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they've checked reality, and they have learned.

Reading between the lines, the Seldon Plan is what we now call a probabilistic program. (It's not just a DAG because it has forks and conditionals.) One distribution per planet, and about 30 million planets. This is about 10,000 times beyond current practical model sizes, but this is a weak objection. 

Their adapting the plan over the centuries is obviously sane, and I'm glad to see Asimov's sense of realism here. But this also introduces massive overfitting risk! There is no test set for politics.

(Ada Palmer's Brillists are Second Foundationers. Both slightly ridiculous, both overpowered and absurdly soft-peddling it.)

---

One obvious note I missed until this third book is that Asimov isn't an authoritarian, and the Foundation is not his utopia. The Plan is the ultimate paternalism, and the Second Foundationeers' mind control the ultimate unaccountable authority. So Asimov is not in fact endorsing psychohistory and the Plan and the supremacy of scientists over all, including other scientists. Or if he is, he shouldn't be. 

  The Second Empire is not yet formed. We have still a society which would resent a ruling class of psychologists, and which would fear its development and fight against it.


  The Rossemites had blinked solemnly, uncertain of the word "taxes." When collection time came, many had paid, or had stood by in confusion while the uniformed, other-wordlings loaded the harvested corn and the pelts on to the broad ground-cars. 

Here and there indignant peasants banded together and brought out ancient hunting weapons - but of this nothing ever came. Grumblingly they had disbanded when the men of Tazenda came and with dismay watched their hard struggle for existence become harder... The tax-farmers, Rossemites in the employ of Tazenda, came periodically, but they were creatures of custom now and the peasant had learned how to hide his grain and drive his cattle into the forest, and refrain from having his hut appear too ostentatiously prosperous. Then with a dull, uncomprehending expression he would greet all sharp questioning as to his assets by merely pointing at what they could see. 


---

One of his few pieces of good writing is the Fiddler on the Roof scene where the farmers see the spaceship landing and rush to host the rich offworlders. 

  She snuffled: "It is a ship from outer space." 
And Narovi remarked impatiently: "And what else could it be? We have visitors, old woman, 
visitors!" 
The ship was sinking slowly to a landing on the bare frozen field in the northern portions of 
Narovi's farm. 
"But what shall we do?" gasped the woman. "Can we offer these people hospitality? Is the dirt 
floor of our hovel to be theirs and the pickings of last week's hoecake?" 
"Shall they then go to our neighbors?"


---

(view spoiler)[I don't like the fall of the Mule. You get this symbolic victory in fiction a lot - where the loser deduces the consequences of the current situation and stops fighting, offers up their throat. A real psycho, a real mule, would struggle irrationally until they were stopped.

Even before his neutering, the motivation Asimov gives him - the ugly envious outsider kid looking for revenge - is too simplistic to be satisfying. (I accept that there seem to be such people.) (hide spoiler)]


  What was it all for? And if he were the master of all there was - what then? Would it really stop men like Pritcher. from being straight and tall, self-confident, strong? Would Bail Channis lose his looks? Would he himself be other than he was?...

The internal ramifications of his physical deformity and mental uniqueness are obvious to all of us. 

Oh yeah, people with deformities are obvious. He was way more effective with mysterious motives.

--- 


  it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elitehood.


False! And in his time.

Foundation and empire

Erwin Lemuel Oliva

I read this second book of the Foundation series faster than the first. It had more action, and there was this nagging feeling that I knew how this book will end.

Written when he was still in his 20s, The Foundation series is Asimov's own speculation of a future where robots, mutants, and human beings battle for survival. Hari Seldon, the founder of psychohistory, predicted the demise of The Empire, suggested the creation of a Foundation to save humanity from its extinction. The Foundation, however, fell and was conquered by a mutant they called The Mule. 

Looking forward to reading the third book, fast.

Foundation and Empire is the story of first contact between the two Foundations of Hari Seldon. The Seldon Plan guided the First Foundation safely through two centuries of chaos as the Galactic Empire disintegrated. Seldon's recorded holographic image appeared in the Council Chamber on Terminus at moments of crisis predicted by pshychohistory, and his voice was heard. Even war between the Foundation and the remains of the Empire was foreseen - and planned for - by the great scientist.But Seldon had no way of predicting the birth of the Mule, a mutant of uncanny power and unlimited ambition. The Mule's conquests are effortless and his subjects mind-controlled slaves.The Foundation is powerless against the supernormal force the Mule exerts. The Seldon Plan is in tatters. Two men and a woman from Terminus flee to the ruins of might Trantor in an effort to discover where the mysterious Second Foundation was established. Its help is needed desperately against the mental powers of the Mule. But the Mule, using those same astonishing powers, is also looking for the Second Foundation.

Tiago

Este livro continua a história da Fundação e a sua luta pela sobrevivência perante o Império e outras novas forças. 
É um livro entusiasmante e que não tenta ser mais do que uma boa história, o que o torna excelente para relaxar.

Adam

Part 3 of the Foundation trilogy. I wasn't as emotionally attached to some of the characters in this one as the others, but at least the ending payed off.

When the First Foundation was conquered by a force Seldon had not foreseen - the overwhelming power of a single individual, a mutant called the Mule - the second Foundation was forced to reveal its existence and, infinitely worse, a portion of its power. One man understood the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos. This was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire. The mathematics of psychohistory enabled Seldon to predict the collapse of the Empire and the onset of an era of chaos and war. To restore civilization in the shortest possible time, Seldon set up two Foundations.The First was established on Terminus in the full daylight of publicity. But the Second, "at the other end of the galaxy", took shape behind a veil of total silence. Because the Second Foundation guards the laws of psychohistory, which are valid only so long as they remain secret.So far the second Foundation's location, its most closely guarded secret of all, has been kept hidden. The Mule and the remnants of the First Foundation will do anything to discover it.This is the story of the Second Foundation.

Second Foundation

Elinor

i was going to give this book 4 stars but that ending was so just ????? yeah. i liked it a lot. would have liked to have more female characters in the series as a whole just to have anyone to relate to but also this series was written a long time ago so i never expected to have any major characters who were women. but otherwise i thought this series was amazing. its a shame that most of my friends dont read sci fi or political science fiction(can this be called that??)

Brianna

”It’s a dead hand against a living will.”

I didn’t enjoy the reading experience of this one as much as Foundation and it rested pretty easily in the 3 star range until I got to the end. One thing changed the whole book for me. I suspect it’s much better on rereads!

”All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.”


Out of the three original, the first is definitely my favorite. Second Foundation returned a bit more to its roots as far as narrative style to me and, while Foundation and Empire is good in its own right, thank god it did.

I struggle with the lack of characters to latch on to in this series but miraculously it has not inhibited my being entertained nor ability to admire what is being accomplished. No small feat.

A story that stretches as far as Foundation is not something I thought I’d be able to understand, let alone get into, and I’m glad that I can say with full conviction Asimov is on top for a reason.

FOUNDATIONS EDGE- PB

The Foundation, a colony of psychologists, battles for supreme power in the galaxy, while also struggling to preserve all the accumulated knowledge of humankind in The Foundation, a sanctuary created by Hari Seldon. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Fraser Simons

It gets by on the strength of the concept and premise, but feels otherwise pretty antiquated; especially concerning dialogue. I’d honestly rather have an infodump than suffer through more pompous peacocking people torrenting their views to one another in a room without description. I get, you’re all very intelligent, but it feels like B movie dialogue when at its worst.

Donald

The "who is the Mule?" surprise is pretty easy to figure out, but this is good fun. Even better than the first book.

Barry Hess

I guess I'm not an Asimov fan. The dialog-only writing style is odd to me. I'm not even gonna finish book #3.

Folio Society (London, England)

Alexia

Angelica Bercic

I'm not gonna say it isn't good, but I have a hard time taking a book seriously when a characters name is Magnifico Giganticus. Like, seriously? 

The book has the same characteristics as the first book, being mainly dialogue. In all honesty, I would think it was better to listen to as an audiobook. No depth into characters and it's hard to actually care since there's really no detailed descriptions. 

Nonetheless, I'm gonna finish the trilogy. Hopefully it'll end on a better note.

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST ALL-TIME SERIES The Foundation series is Isaac Asimov's iconic masterpiece. Unfolding against the backdrop of a crumbling Galactic Empire, the story of Hari Seldon's two Foundations is a lasting testament to an extraordinary imagination, one whose unprecedented scale shaped science fiction as we know it today. The First Foundation survived two centuries of barbarism as the once-mighty Galactic Empire descended into chaos. Now it mist prepare for war against the remnants of the Empire as the Imperial fleet advances on their planet, Terminus. Hari Seldon predicted this war; he even prepared his Foundation for it. But he couldn't foresee the birth of the mutant Mule. In possession of a power which reduces fearsome opposition to devoted slaves, the Mule poses a terrible threat to Seldon's Foundation.

When looking into Sci-Fi books that I should have already read, this trilogy kept coming up. It won the Hugo award for "Best Trilogy" - an award created just to give it to this series. It was short, but lived up to the hype. The premise relies on “psychohistory”, a way of mathematically predicting the future. The first book was actually based on a number of short stories and parallels the fall of Rome. I enjoyed the series, but not enough to read the other 11 books in the series.

The third novel in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series The Foundation lies in ruins—destroyed by a mutant mind bent on humanity’s annihilation. But it’s rumored that there’s a Second Foundation hidden somewhere at the end of the Galaxy, established as insurance to preserve the knowledge of mankind. Now a desperate race has begun between the survivors of the First Foundation and an alien entity to find this last flicker of humanity’s shining past—and future hope. Yet the key to it all might be a fourteen-year-old girl burdened with a terrible secret. Is she the Foundation’s savior—or its deadliest enemy? Unforgettable, thought-provoking, and riveting, Second Foundation is a stunning novel of adventure and ideas writ huge across the Galaxy—a powerful tale of humankind’s struggle to preserve the fragile light of wisdom against the threat of its own dark barbarism.

Good story, although predicitable at times. Sets things up for part 3 of the series in a solid second book in a trilogy, in the same ways you'd expect from a part 2.

Foundation and Empire

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