"If the darkened ones refuse enlightenment, is it not the greater sign of their need for it?”
Hate to say it, but the first book in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov had failed to impress me as much as I was hoping it would.
The book is a collection of short stories that Asimov submitted to magazines, and most are dialogues about interstellar politics and economical warfare, which is spiced with admittedly compelling narrative climaxes and religious and science fiction imagery. The plot is centred on its world building involving the Galactic Empire and a Foundation that was established to survive the Empire's collapse through a series of crises to ensure the establishment of a Second Empire.
“Why, they don’t even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically, and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out. The whole war is a battle between those two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little."
Characters are introduced to become legendary figures of the distant past in the next string of chapters; readers are often told how characters react because they are largely flat mouth-pieces for the plot of the short stories which serves as to drive the book's larger narrative forward; this said, some traits are prevalent, and some people are followed for large spans of time while meeting aged characters or projections of the long-dead.
“Exactly. None of us are. But I did receive some elementary training in my youth—enough to know what psychology is capable of, even if I can’t exploit its capabilities myself.
I felt Foundation covered too long of a time span, but the nature of the composition explains this while the story is there and has its moments, highlights including the hard-science-disguised-as-magic cursing of a starship and planetary ecumenopolis cities; just brimming with staple sci-fi ideas that writers, including Asimov himself, have been inspired by and have been extrapolating on for decades.
“What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.”
