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Asimov foundation books6/30/2023 In the Foundation trilogy, politics as a grand imperial adventure quickly turns into a boring affair of managing social unrest while keeping productivity growing. It’s been literally more than twenty five years since I read it last, but Titus Techera has a marvelous essay on our sister website, Law and Liberty, on Asimov’s work. Seldon is the founder of a discipline called “psychohistory”, which is a pseudo-scientific version of the old dream of forecasting the future so that you can change it. How can we make the Middle Ages run faster? That is the question which Asimov and his alter ego, Hari Seldon, asked. I was unaware of the fact Asimov was somehow loosely inspired by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which instead I read only recently and would recommend heartily: it is such a magnificent work), but echoes of the fall of Rome were all over. While I never quite cared about his Robot stories, I loved the Foundation ones. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein and, yes, Asimov. I read (in the Italian translation) many novels of the golden era of American sci-fi: A.E. Science fiction and comic books were my path toward the appreciation of literature. I remember reading Asimov’s Foundation as a kid of 9 or 10 years old. As, I suppose, many other viewers, I welcome the Apple TV series “Foundation” as a dream coming true.
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