Maybe it was a good thing I waited after all. At least until I was a bit more long in the tooth, if no wiser or more worldly. I do so appreciate the scale of the vision involved, for it is indeed vast in scope and ambition. Dealing as it does with the predictable behaviour of vast groups of people over very long periods of time., or Psychohistory, as the catalyst for the great experiment created by Hari Seldon, as he calls his school of thought. And calls it, he does. Predicting, from the available information, societal and historic, the oncoming chaos , decline and fall, and ultimately a delically balanced but more than possible resurrection. The birth of Foundation.
Foundation is a sprawling and complex notion of a book, in some ways a string of novellas tethered by a huge story arc, one stretching across thousands of years and millions and millions of miles. Phew, to put it mildly. Like much of Assimov's work it is off course prescient.. The notion that free will within a contained system is but controlled opposition, its allowed for, even encouraged as a form of venting, the trick of liberty, when it is no such thing. One wonders at times if there is anything benign about man made systems of control but arguably anything is better than chaos...
What would I know. Dare I say it, whole civilizations have been built on less sturdy foundations than Pyscohistory.
