terça-feira, agosto 28, 2007

The Foundation of Ideas

Last friday I've ended the reading of the great book "Foundation", authored by the great Isaac Asimov, one of greatest names of Science Fiction of the twentieth century. This book could be conceived as seminal because this is the first book, as I know of, that first talked about the ideia of a "Galactic Empire", a starting point for whatever other greatest Sci-Fi stories that followed, which of ones the most widely known are Star Wars and Dune.
As Asimov states on the preface, the idea that first inspired this particular story was the great history work known as "The fall and decline of the Roman Empire". Asimov tried to extrapolate the ideas behind an Empire Ruine into a far distant future, expliciting the ideas that maintain an Empire through time, and a way in which, after a decline, what could make an Empire reborn again. For other people, that, like me, like History, this is a greatest story that no one should lose the oportunity to read.