Resumo de Foundation's Edge

. Asimov has retold the fall of the Roman Empire on an intergalactic stage. In the story he parallels the decline of the unified Roman Empire it's division into smaller eastern and western entities, the final collapse of the western empire followed by a dark age, the eastern empire acting as a repository of culture and knowledge up until the fall of Constantinople and the dissemination of that knowledge across Europe spark the European Renaissance.

Transferring real history in this way to a fictional setting was a brilliant idea and in the telling of the story Asimov include realistic political machinations and some intriguing plot twists that any reader will find difficult see coming. The later books deal with event not paralleled in history and are not quite of the same standards the original trilogy but still make a welcome addition to the overall story.

Asimov's stroke of genius that makes the foundation series stand out from its contemporaries is of course the creation of psychohistory. Prediction of the future by mathematical models is not so far fetched and modern quantum physics has given us examples of this. The predicted movement of a drop of water in an ocean is difficult just as the action of an individual can be but the movement of a larger body of water such as a wave is easier predict if your mathematical model is complex enough in the same way crowds are easier to deal with than individuals. So the Asimov's ideas are based on reasonable scientific theory.

Asimov also addresses the idea that human history is not dependant on the actions of individuals but relies more on external influences and the behaviour of populations. Seldon plan is based on this assumption and this is an excepted theory today. Another branch of science in the form of Chaos theory would seen to also suggest that any predictive model is vulnerable to random events.

The final aspect of the story that only makes an appearance in the later book is the notion of artificial intelligence and at what point does a machine however complicated it's workings become a living organism. Is the onset of consciousness the decisive event and can programming ever be broken of are infact humans to an extent programmed.

Asimov never disappoint when it comes to the concept he introduced in to his stories, he always manages to be imaginative and thought provoking. The plots are always very well crafted and even in the later Foundation novels where it is obvious that some of the plot lines have been unnaturally massaged in order to fit into elements present in other previously unrelated Asimov books they still are more cohesive than many other sci-fi series

One thing that even the most ardent Asimov fan could not claim is that Asimov's writing style qualifies him as great literature. That is not to say that he can't tell a great story it is only that in his books the prose is a tool for conveying an idea rather than an aspect of the book that can be appreciated in its own right. The characterisations are slightly two dimensional often to fit in to the fast pace of the storyline. Having said this over the course of the whole series many of the principal characters are examined in much more detail and this greatly adds to our understanding of their motivations.

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