Comment

Jun 14, 2016susan_findlay rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Usually, I prefer books that are character-driven rather than plot-driven. This book was quite a change of pace for me therefore since it has almost no character development at all. The novel reads more like a series of short stories, each about 6-8 chapters long. In each "short story", a brief tale is told of how a "Seldon crisis" is handled. Then you jump forward several decades never to hear from those characters again. The only constant character is Hari Seldon who shows up postmortem as a series of holographic messages left to the people of the Foundation. In many ways, the characters are irrelevant; the Foundation novels are about the "big picture" - a sweeping narrative that covers generations. I suspect this is intentional since the fictional science of psychohistory ignores individual actions and deals in prediction behaviours of large populations of humans. To give credit where it is due, the book is a relatively easy read and the saga that Asimov is telling is interesting (as are the political themes he incorporates).