Book 25: Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Back to some good, old-school sci-fi.  This is the second of the Foundation series and I really enjoyed the first.  This one is supposed to be about the meeting between the Foundation and the old Galactic Empire.  For being such a famous series (in sci-fi circles, at least) I know very little about these books.

What I do know is that it's only 272 pages.  So that's a very easy 40 pages per day.

REVIEW:  As mentioned, this is the second volume of the series and I found it to be quite a bit weaker than the first.  Part of the concept of the series is that the founder of the Foundation predicted, mathematically, the fall of the Galactic Empire and, to forestall some of the worst of the resulting chaos, established the Foundation to harbor the most advanced of the Empire's technology and plant a seed to rebuild society at an accelerated rate.

Because the founder has predicted, scientifically, the future path that his new society will take, it just remains for events to unfold and for the Foundation to grow and overcome challenges that present themselves.  This leads to a bit of a problem though, as far as a story goes.  Because the future has been decided the actions the Foundation takes and the results of those actions start to feel like destiny and there is no real need to do anything as a feeling of "it will all work out in the end" pervades.  Even the characters in the book seem to feel this way and it becomes a little boring.

Now it could be that the first half of the book is written this way to set things up for the second half, which picks up the pace considerably.  But, even given this, you're still stuck with a boring half-a-book.  For some reason, Asimov even has the climax of the first part of the book take place off-screen.  There is a big conflict building but, just as it is about to unfold, you see what happens... from the point of view of some characters that happen to be half a galaxy away... watching it on the news.  No spaceship battles, no planetary invasions, just a ticker telling what happened.

The second half was much more interesting and seemed to take things in a different direction, so that kept things interesting, and it seems to lead directly to the third book in the series.  So, I suppose I'll continue on with the story for one more book.  Overall, though, this one was significantly less interesting than the first book:  6 out of 10.