Book Review: The Foundation Trilogy

Azimov’s Foundation series is an imaginative work of large-scale science fiction that will get you dreaming about humanity’s future. Here we get a nice collection of the first three books — Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. They tell the story of a galactic empire on the brink of collapse and the efforts of brilliant scientists to prevent millennia of dark ages. Inspired by Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the Foundation series works fairly well as an allegory. The writing is honestly not great — Azimov was always a better scientist and visionary than wordsmith. The plot picks up in the second and third books with the introduction of The Mule. Part 1 of Second Foundation is hard to put down once you start and the ending will spur you on to check out the later Foundation novels. If you enjoy classic science fiction, this is a must read.

Grade: B