i am reading for the first time The foundation with 12 years. Almost everything I love and hate in my life I discovered there, and it was not easy: I had been fascinated by Ender’s Game, one of my favorite books, but the universe I had created Isaac Asimov in his worldsIt was something else. What seemed like a story acquired a gigantic scale in every way, and I couldn’t tear myself away from those first few pages as it was my first time reading a story where literally the scale of everything seems endless. .
I was passionate about technology and searched for answers in science fiction to find out what the future of it all would look like
I’m not saying that I don’t remember those times of pre-adolescence with a certain nostalgia. I loved reading and discovering things and just two years ago I received my first computer with a few incredible 64 KB of RAM. Such a large amount of memory made practically anything possible back then: technology was finally coming into our homes and it was all a discovery. These stories from the future interested me because I was fascinated by what we could do with technology at the time, and I couldn’t wait to find out how far we could go. i used science fiction look for those answers.
And I received them. The stories of the time were rude, flashy – excessively Florida sometimes – and every story was closed at short notice, the heroes were in a rush to do their jobs, and the villains ran out of time to stop them. The world, the worlds – of this one, or any other universe – waited for us to explore them carefully from the present to the marvel in exactly the same way than we expected. And the boy did they get it.
I wondered if there was one more step in science fiction that would lead even further the limits of these stories that fascinated me. I was looking for the future of the future that these authors told us about. And then the Foundation found me: it was the only book in the “science fiction” section of my city library that didn’t have any striking spaceships or a title worthy of the best B-movie. It was an 80s edition of Bruguera, which I read in 1989. Big blue letters. ISAAC ASIMOV. In orange, FOUNDATION. And one strange star symbol. Nothing more. This book was more like a bible, and in a way it was.
I don’t know if you’ll like it – the librarian told me – it’s one of the few books that doesn’t take much, it’s still on that shelf. Of course, who reads it tells me wonders. I think there are more rooms there.
I read the first chapters this weekend. I didn’t find anything that I expected, and that’s what got me hooked. While all stories tell us about heroes on epic missions, here he knew one man who seemed to already have all the answers. An old man, weak and conceited. His name was Hari Seldon and he was about to terrorize the Empire that ruled the known universe with his predictions.
The breadth of The Foundation is that of setting no limits
Isaac Asimov wanted to write a history book, but human history failed to do so. He had learned almost everything about the Roman Empire from the books of the time, and he thought he would do a lot more but only if we got away from Earth. The history of the foundation is on a scale that costs even if we try to imagine it: the word has no limits
The scale of history is almost infinite: more than 20 million star systems and 30,000 years in which it takes place
Is gigantic civilization It is as far from us as we are from the Big Bang: the origin of man is lost among eons of ancient history – before robots – and the truth is that no one is more interested in this than ‘to its own future. And the future is going to be chaos: Seldon predicts the end of the Empire thanks to the psychohistory, and with him, a time of darkness and decay as you cannot imagine – for human arrogance is still intact in this story and more present than ever in emperors since Cleon I, the last of the Entun dynasty and also the last to listen to Seldon.
“You cannot save yourself. You can only save your inheritance.”. For it, Seldon and a group of faithful form The Foundation, a scientific institution that will move away to the end of the galaxy, with the aim of reduce the number of thousands of years of barbarism after the fall of the Galactic Empire
The Foundation as a great technological story
Asimov’s story on the Foundation is neither more nor less than 16 volumes written between 1942 and 1992. Although we are only talking about the first three books he wrote, “Foundation”, “Foundation and Empire” and “Second Foundation”, we will literally speak of millions of worlds and millennia of interconnected stories and characters. Rumors to bring to the screens (To anyone) of the Foundation have been dancing for years, but they lived and died at roughly the same pace: Roland Emmerich (Director of Independence Day) wanted to make a movie with part of the story. Jonathan Nolan (Director of Interstellar) tried to get it in 2014, but the attempt was unsuccessful despite Nolan managing to bring the Westworld series to HBO in 2016.
For years The Foundation was considered a technically impossible work to do in the cinema or in a series, especially because of the enormity of the story. Asimov’s universe reduced to a window is terribly complex to translate, and the adventure that David S. Goyer produced for Apple TV + maybe managed to bring this epic and majesty finally into our rooms. It’s the first time something like this has been endorsed by Asimov’s heirs, and it features a cast of top-notch actors like Jared Harris and Lee Pace.
This is the science fiction story in which many of us have fallen in love with science fiction, where we discovered the power of technology and where we realized that heroes aren’t always the ones who wear the best armor, and where the future can be just as enviable or fearsome. If you want to read a book from the saga before September 24, you still have time. I am sincerely excited that someone can discover these books today and enjoy them as I did then. And we can live them together on the small screen (Finally!), comment so much and more about them when the time comes … Big spacebe ready! We are about to connect the viewer with the cosmodrome…