Foundation
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST ALL-TIME SERIES
The Foundation series is Isaac Asimov’s iconic masterpiece. Unfolding against the backdrop of a crumbling Galactic Empire, the story of Hari Seldon’s two Foundations is a lasting testament to an extraordinary imagination, one that shaped science fiction as we know it today.
The Galactic Empire has prospered for twelve thousand years. Nobody suspects that the heart of the thriving Empire is rotten, until psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses his new science to foresee its terrible fate.
Exiled to the desolate planet Terminus, Seldon establishes a colony of the greatest minds in the Empire, a Foundation which holds the key to changing the fate of the galaxy.
However, the death throes of the Empire breed hostile new enemies, and the young Foundation’s fate will be threatened first.
Reviews
‘One of the most staggering achievements in modern SF’
The Times
‘Isaac Asimov was one of the great explainers of the age…It will never be known how many practicing scientists today, in how many countries, owe their initial inspiration to a book, article, or short story by Isaac Asimov’
Carl Sagan
‘Asimov displayed one of the most dynamic imaginations in science fiction’
Daily Telegraph
‘Asimov’s career was one of the most formidable in science fiction’
The Times
About the author
Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 in Russia and was brought to the USA by his parents three years later. He grew up in Brooklyn and attended Columbia University. After a short spell in the army, he gained a doctorate and worked in academia and chemical research.
Asimov’s career as a science fiction writer began in 1939 with the short story ‘Marooned Off Vesta’. Thereafter he became a regular contributor to the leading SF magazines of the day. Asimov wrote hundreds of short stories and novels, including the iconic I, Robot and Foundation. He won the Hugo Award four times and the Nebula Award once.
Apart from his world-famous science fiction, Asimov also wrote highly successful detective mystery stories, a four-volume History of North America, a two-volume Guide to the Bible, a biographical dictionary, encyclopaedias, and textbooks, as well as two volumes of autobiography.
Asimov died in 1992 at the age of 72.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Legendary sci-fi author Isaac Asimov truly saw the future with his Hugo-winning Foundation, a book of awe-inspiring interconnected short stories. The first introduces “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon, a man who has mastered the science of predicting human events beyond his own lifetime—and his forecast doesn’t look good. To avoid the 30,000 years of dark ages he foresees when the present-day Galactic Empire inevitably falls into decay, he recruits a colony of people he calls the Foundation to write the Encyclopedia Galactica: a summary of all human knowledge that will hopefully lessen the devastating impact of those upcoming dark times. Between stories and generations, the Foundation’s gatekeepers face serious (and familiar) obstacles, from religious zealotry to capitalist treachery. Intergalactic negotiations and philosophical power struggles might not sound thrilling on the surface, but in the hands of a master storyteller, they’re electrifying.
