This is my first foray into Asimov! I’ve been wanting to read the Foundation (and Robot) series, and hearing about the Foundation TV adaptation coming out in September finally got me to open the books.

I am impressed at how timeless the writing in this first book is; it was written in the early 1940s, but you’d never know it unless you looked it up. It could have been written today: there is nothing either in the language or in the references that could be used to date the book at all.

Reading science fiction helps me overcome my otherwise crippling climate change anxiety. I like envisioning civilizations which have overcome & moved beyond our current struggles. It helps me stay hopeful and it keeps me out of my head; I get tunnel-vision, and discouraged, when I forget to imagine how different things can be.

Foundation is great for this purpose, because it starts with a prediction of the fall of a civilization, and a plot to re-establish and rebuild a new civilization after the first one crumbles. After that, it follows the work of the people whose primary job is to persevere through the decline. “Cheery” probably isn’t the right word to describe a book that follows this arc, but I found the book extremely comforting, and a good reminder of the creativity and resilience of humans.