Foundation (5.1) & Trilogy

As I rarely discard a book, it should thus come as no surprise that I have overflowing shelves of novels I’ve once read, enjoyed, savoured and then swore up-and-down-back-and-forth that I was going to re-read someday. Alas, it is someday. I’m spending whole of 2016 revisiting my book collection, digging back into books I read once, but that I haven’t read (or listened to) in at least four years. So, we’re about to find out what was worth reading… twice.
I thought I would do something a little different for my fifth book of the year. I picked up my copy of the Issac Asimov classic Foundation and started to read, only to (re)discover that the book is quite short and quite a fast read. In fact, I read the first quarter of the the first book of the Foundation trilogy on the train home.
So, I figured, why not read the whole trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire
, & Second Foundation
, or at least the original trilogy, those core three novels compiled in the 1950s. The “trilogy” has since been supplemented with a small collection of at least four additional novels, but we’ll save those for another year.
Foundation, for those who haven’t heard of this classic science fiction work, is the story of the end of the Galactic Empire, ten thousand years in the future. The collapse is predicted and a scientist leads the charge to establish a “foundation” at the edge of the universe in an effort to stave off a predicted thirty-thousand years of darkness by preserving some few fragments of human knowledge — and manipulate the course of history in the process.
It’s pulp, but it’s classic pulp science fiction and worth yet another read.