Books n Stuff Podcast: S2 Episode 01 - Foundation by Asimov - Read by Parvathi

Books and Stuff - The BS Podcast

Welcome to the Books n Stuff Podcast.

Foundation is the first book in the Foundation series of books. There is a prequel to this book, but we’re not gonna talk about that. We’re just gonna focus on Foundation. So what we have here, the plot basically is that the 12,000 years there’s been a galactic empire.

Imagine that a 12,000 year old galactic empire, and this empire is dying, and one person called Hari Seldon, he’s a psychohistorian. And he’s basically a doomsayer who’s predicting that this empire will fall. Of course, the empire hates that this guy is predicting their fall, and he has a lot of followers and a lot of people who are working with him, mathematician, scientists, and not many psychologists for reasons I’ll tell you about later.

However, the empire does not like this, and he and his followers are exiled to a far flung planet. Far away in the galaxy, right at the wings of the galaxy, somewhere really, really far away. And there they have to continue working on an encyclopedia that this guy wants. He cannot travel with them because he’s too old.

However, he knows exactly what will happen. And basically what he says will happen is that the empire will fall after 12,000 years and then there’ll be 30,000 years of darkness. He knows a way to kind of forestall that darkness and bring about a new age of enlightenment because 30,000 years is a very long time to remain in the dark.

According to him, if he and his followers work on an encyclopedia, they’ll be able to bring back a second empire. So basically that’s what the plot is about. However, as his followers discover over a long span of time, nothing this man says can be taken at face value. And he has his own agenda.

The Foundation, the novel, is split into five little novelettes and each are interconnected, each deals with a different period of time. And only the first section actually has this man, Hari Seldon alive. And each time he makes an appearance as a hologram, he guides this planet called Terminus. It’s got absolutely nothing, and he guides this new civilization towards this intended goal.

So each time there’s a crisis on the Terminus, this man makes an appearance right on cue and they’ve come to expect it. And it’s almost like clockwork that he makes an appearance, everything that happens to this planet Terminus, he’s able to guess. And because of psychohistory, which is basically a mix of mathematics, science, and psychology. And anything the human race does, this man is able to predict because apparently we are not as free as we thought.

And everything can be predicted. Everything is set into a pattern. So that’s what this book is about.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Here is the podcast that we recorded. Enjoy the podcast!

You can buy the book at Amazon

Image Source - Amazon

Acknowledgments

A big shout-out to Akhilesh for his voice for the intro, Anita Nagarajan for her voice for the sign-off and Parvathi Ramkumar for her Gottuvadhyam adapted rendition of Simon&Garfunkel for the intro music and for Raga Garudadhwani Thyagaraja kriti outro music.

Software used:

• Podcast banner: Canva
• Audio editing: Shotcut & Descript
• Podcast recording & hosting - Spotify for Podcasters
• Blog post editing: Org Mode in Emacs

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/