Foundation

Book: Foundation
Author: Isaac Asimov
Audience: High School to Adult
In a Nutshell: they're saving humanity, but they have no idea how

Sometimes I feel like a big slacker of a sci-fi fan, because there are a lot of classic novels I've never read. This was one of them. Here's the deal: Hari Seldon is the galaxy's greatest psychohistorian, meaning he can predict major events and risings and fallings of civilization based on what he knows of history, sociology, and statistics. That's right, math. Don't bother looking up "psychohistory", because the author made it up. Leave it to Asimov to imagine a universe where a math geek will save us all. That's what Seldon set out to do: through his science he sees that the gi-normous and all-powerful Galactic Empire will soon collapse, plunging the human race into 30,000 years of primitive dark ages before we recover. Seldon believes he can reduce that dark time to a mere 1,000 years. How? By setting up the Encyclopedia Foundation on a little planet on the edge of nowheresville, galactically speaking. The job of the Foundation members is to create a massive encyclopedia containing the sum of human knowledge so that it won't be lost in the dark time to come. A nice idea, but will that really eliminate 29,000 years of suffering? No, not really. Turns out old Hari Seldon had a lot more planned than just a 1,000-volume leather-bound set. The tricky part is, Seldon purposely didn't tell anyone else what chain of events would begin after the Foundation was created. So the people of the Foundation planet have no idea what they're really doing, or how it might save humanity.

The premise is very interesting, and I enjoyed the book for a while. But honestly, I got a little impatient toward the end. Like Asimov himself mentions in the foreward, the book is all ideas and talk, talk, talk. Big, exciting things do happen, but they're always "off-camera", so to speak. Only once that I remember was the point of view actually in the action. Maybe I've just been reading too many action-heavy YA books (is that even possible?!), but after a while I wanted to see the action for myself, not just hear someone talk about what just happened, or was still happening, or was about to happen. Anyway, I'm glad I read it, but I don't think I'll check out the rest of the series quite yet.