Foundation Analysis

Trantor is the capital of the Galactic Empire. One massive city encompasses the planet, covering the surface "in the ever increasing complexities of man-made structures" (I.3.20). Everything and ev...

Let's start with some light mental lifting first and then add weight as we go. Don't worry; we're here to spot.First the light stuff: Asimov wrote Foundation in third person. This means the narrato...

Asimov is Mr. Science Fiction. He might not have created the genre, but he sure helped create it as we know and love it today. Foundation, yeah, it's all about science fiction too. It takes the ide...

Asimov is not a guy for messing about. No time for fluff. No need to wax poetical. Just tell us the story. Want to see what we're talking about? Here's what we're talking about:Wienis was groping v...

Have you ever read a script treatment for a play or movie? If you have, you've probably noted that not much time gets wasted describing things. The key to a good script is to give the basic idea, a...

Foundation. The title initially seems a touch bland, especially when compared to other titles in the science fiction genre. Stranger in a Strange Land, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Do Androids Dream o...

Just imagine all the responsibility this ending has on its shoulders. Not only must it wrap up the story of "The Merchant Princes," but it ends the entire novel. On top of that, it needs to set up...

Fear not, intrepid reader. Isaac Asimov's Foundation is like a light hike through the forest. Asimov paves his sentences to offer a helping hand to all levels of readers. His characters make sure y...

Foundation isn't really a novel in the sense that it tells one complete story. It's actually five different stories sharing a fictional history, which happen to be bundled beneath the same cover. S...

Okay, okay, you get it: Foundation is actually five different stories sharing a fictional history. What does this have to do with Booker's Seven Basic Plots? Since Foundation is five different stor...

You may have noticed that Foundation isn't really a novel in the sense that it tells one complete story. It's actually five different stories sharing a fictional history, all of which happen to be...

You think you write a lot for school? Well, Asimov once calculated the volumes of his entire oeuvre (that's a fancy French term meaning all of the works of an artist or writer taken as a whole; it'...

Actually, let's make that negative G. Foundation has all the steaminess of a pile of woodchips lit on fire in a particularly dry desert. Not a single character in the novel seems even remotely inte...

Asimov's Foundation novels take place in the future, and we mean the far, far, far, super far future. The characters live so far in the future that one of the great mysteries of their time is what...