Foundation
For my partners from Scotland, I open this section of book reviews in English. I hope you enjoy it.
In the same way that Edward Gibbon in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, assured that the decline of this empire had to the conjunction of barbarism and religion, Asimov knew, in this masterpiece of science fiction, how to adapt the English historian’s thesis to a saga whose first volume is the one that offers “LA Factoria de Ideas” within which has been called the “Cycle of Trántor” or the “Trilogy of the Foundation”, completed by Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation.
Thus, structured in five chapters, this first delivery introduces us into the plans of Hari Seldon, through the exact science of psYcohistory, to reduce the period of barbarism in which the humanity is led in front of the imminent fall of the galactic empire. The Asimov’s force proposal lies in the concientious and elaborated argumentation, where, as a chess game, the plot follows an order in which is interesting the continous discovery of the Seldon plan through characters whose mission is magnified by the pawn’s ignorance against the board. That is to say, that the characters ignore the psycohistoritian plans. Definately, a great puzzle, where the intertextuality carried out when incorporating Gibbon results in such a contemporary work as it can be the conjunction of barbarism and religion in the fall of any human empire.
