Foundation

Boils down to five short stories that follow each other over the span of hundreds of years. I enjoyed the overarching threat of a 30,000 year-long dark age which has been predicted to begin roughly 300 years from the start of the book, and the attempts to stop it. Fun what-if/butterfly effect ideas are teased - are the characters preventing the disaster in their decisions, laying the groundwork for it, or even speeding up the collapse of the Empire? Unfortunately, it's a lot less exciting than it sounds! The scope is massive, spanning galaxies and there are two sequels included in the hard copy I own, so I'm hoping things develop further in a way that is not so dry and pointed, and the speed picks up. For only 200 pages, this one took me a long time to muster the courage to complete it.