For the love of books

We are pleased to introduce Neeraj Chhibba on our blog, who recently launched his debut novel – Zero Percentile: Missed IIT Kissed Russia. The book has been published by Rupa Publications and has already gone into reprint within 3 weeks of its publication.

To give a brief background about Neeraj – he was born and brought up in New Delhi. After doing his schooling in Delhi, he went on to study engineering at Volgograd, Russia, and is now currently employed with a software company in Gurgaon, India.

Now on to Neeraj & Vikas:-

Vikas: Hi Neeraj, it’s great to have you on our blog. I have read Zero Percentile and found it pretty interesting. I could feel the difference in the style of writing as the story progressed. The beginning was a bit slow but the book picked up a lot of pace after the initial few chapters.

Neeraj: I deliberately kept the start slow and funny as I tried to build the story. I wanted people to savor the initial laziness before they were hit by Phase II of the story. I have kept the language very simple so that reading my book doesn’t become a taxing exercise. Even where I have conveyed a message I have done it through very simple sentences such as “Ordinary people have that additional burden of doing something extraordinary to get noticed”, simple but powerful.

Vikas: This is your first piece of work to get published. How do you feel regarding this lucky break? Can you tell us how you approached Rupa Publications and if any other publisher, and the process that followed? A lot of aspiring authors struggle to get noticed and your answers will definitely help them.

Neeraj: Well, this is a long story. Nobody wanted to touch Zero Percentile as it was the work of a first-time author. I had finished the manuscript about three years ago and approached many publishers but none responded. Finally, I went to Rupa where I sought and got an appointment with the Publisher and rest is my small piece of history.

Vikas: So how do you suggest Indian authors to go about it?

Neeraj: My message to all aspiring writers is to keep on trying new things. What worked for me may not work for you but you may stumble upon something which could be even more fruitful.

However, if you are a debut novelist your best bet is Rupa. They have a very strong distribution network and can take your book to the interiors of the country. Rest depends on how good your book actually is. So, first and foremost make sure you have put your best foot forward by giving the publisher your work in the neatest possible form.

Vikas: Coming to the story, you have narrated it as a first-person account of Pankaj, the protagonist. Third-person narrative is generally more preferred as it gives much more flexibility but on the other hand first-person narrative helps bring out deep internal thoughts and feelings of the narrator. Is that why you have chosen the latter so as to better describe your experiences in Russia, which had a great impression on you?

Neeraj: Yes, you are right. While using the first person narrative you begin to believe as if you are talking about yourself and I personally feel that you connect to the story much better as a writer then.

Initially, I wanted to create that illusion so that people could find the story believable. But later it was too much of work trying to redraft the whole story (as everyone took it to be completely autobiographical) so I left it at that.

Vikas: So the story is not really an autobiography but rather a work of fiction inspired by various real-life incidents.

Neeraj: I would say any writer’s first book is inspired from real-life incidents. But, reality if told without amplification will never be as good to read as when told with some fictional elements added to it. This is what I have done too. Took a few real-life incidents, twisted them, mixed them with some fictional elements and we have the story called Zero Percentile.

Vikas: Such as Inside Education, which I believe refer to Vidyamandir Classes?

Neeraj: VMC and the Bhaiyas at VMC are unique in a lot of ways. They teach because teaching is a passion for them. You can very easily take them to be your role model as each one of them has something inspirational in his personality. So, I wanted to introduce the world to them through my writing and let people know that there still are places, which are pure and people who are simple, not easily swayed by the power that money usually exercises over many of us.

Vikas: Yes, I totally agree with you on that front. Any of us who has attended VMC classes will vouch so!

How did you come to choose the title “Zero Percentile: Missed IIT Kissed Russia” for the book? Any other names that were considered?

Neeraj: Zero Percentile signifies that the protagonist loses out at the most important moments of his life. We played around with many names (at least twenty five) and the Editor (appointed by the Publisher) rejected all of them till I chanced upon Zero Percentile. This was accepted immediately for I guess, people relate to numbers better than words and such a title tends to stick longer in your memory than normal.

Vikas: With the book aimed at the younger audience, you have subtly raised the issue of AIDS and how young people need to be careful with their sex lives without being preachy. Not many authors care to leave a message in their book.

Neeraj: I very strongly believe that apart from giving people a bang for their buck a writer should also try to leave a message subtly so that it sticks in the reader’s mind and he recalls it at the right time. Through my book if I am able to stop even one person from committing an indiscretion and help save a life, it’s worth all the effort.

Vikas: Completely off the topic, what do you think about the repeal of Section 377 by the Delhi High Court?

Neeraj: I think, a suppressed society can never be a mature society. Individual decisions are always for an individual to make. I would not want to comment on the biological aspect of it, but in simple words, we should respect each person’s right to privacy and leave him alone as long as he does not create problems for others.

Vikas: When did you first get inspired to write a book, and why this topic?

Neeraj: Never before has IIT been written about from the perspective of someone who did not study there. Zero Percentile delves into this aspect and tells readers that there is life beyond IIT, beyond failure and you just need the courage to get on with it.

Also, Russia has always been portrayed as the enemy by the west. Zero Percentile takes a look at the humane side of the Russian society, a far cry from the evil people they are always shown as. The time explored in the book is the tumultuous 90s when Russia was converting from a communist to a capitalist state, one of the more turbulent times for their huge population trying to cope with the extreme changes brought about by the rapid transformation.

I, like millions of science students in India had that ambition of getting into IIT but due to various factors could not (and not having the capability to get there not one of them). The ensuing period was tough for me as I am sure it is for millions of other aspirants. So, the novel idea of writing something unique – which was a mix of trying to look beyond the IITs and the life of an Indian student in Russia, gave me the impetus to write.

Vikas: How long did you take to write Zero Percentile?

Neeraj: Well, finishing the first draft took about six months. But the painful part of reading, re-reading and re-writing took almost an equal amount of time.

Vikas: How do you juggle writing with job? Do you plan to pursue this as a full time career?

Neeraj: I dedicate my weekends to writing. I set a target for myself for a month and then try to stick to it. I don’t know yet for sure about pursuing writing as a career. I would love to but how well am I accepted by the people is a key parameter for helping me decide. By the initial reactions it seems that things definitely are on the right track.

Vikas: What kind of works do you plan to publish in the near future?

Neeraj: I want to write things which are simple, accepted by a large audience and still retain a certain freshness and convey a message that gets across to the people easily. In short, I want to write stories which are uncomplicated and are universally embraced such as a Lagaan, a Chak De, a Jo Jeeta Wahee Sikander. They are all very simple stories but make people connect to them wholeheartedly.

Vikas: This concludes our interview. Thanks Neeraj for agreeing to come on our blog. We hope that you do reach your goal of being the first Indian author to sell over a million copies of his debut novel. We wish you luck.

Neeraj: Thanks Vikas. It was a pleasure to be here and answer your questions. And also to conclude, for anyone who wants to follow his dream, “Just go ahead and do it. Knocking doors opens them and you don’t know which door leads you to the success of your dream. So keep trying and don’t give up.”

Zero Percentile is the story of a survivor who continuously finds solutions to his problems, braving destiny along the way. Life in Russia is harsh, the climate is not conducive, you have to study as well as fend for yourself. Add to that the unstable political climate in the 90s and you are ready for a roller-coaster experience. This is a story of hope, a story never told and never read before!!

Get your author-signed copy now at LeBooks.in for just Rs. 71 at 25% discount. Enter the coupon: NEERAJ-LEBOOKS when you checkout in the shopping cart. Thanks for stopping by!

Recently I read the ‘Kite Runner’. I had planned on reading it so long back, when it had caused the rave in the literary circles and when I had read so many awe struck reviews in its favour, but that never did happen and now, finally almost a year late I finally got down to reading it, and I must admit that one of the books after a very long time which has made me finish the book in the least number of sittings. The story and the characters somehow do that to you I believe when you are reading a fiction. Some books have it in them, and all due respect to the author alone. The last book of the same character which I read was ‘Untouchables’ by Mulk Raj Anand. The depth of the characters and their thoughts seem to always keep them on your mind, till the stories completely unveils before you, and that is what seemingly pulls you back to the pages of the book, to know what beholds for them.

Another aspect which I realized as I was reading this book was how I did know Taliban but not the fact that Russians attacked Afghanistan which along with the US support for Russia resulted in the rise of the Taliban. How can you blame a country’s men in coming up to save their country when many just fled their country with whatever that could fit into a sack! Then, what led them to their present ways of terror and hatred such that in a few years time, the natives who stayed on in Afghanistan and who looked upon the Taliban as a saviour now looked upon them as equals to the Russians a few years back.

The various instances sited where so many try to leave the country only to be fooled by their own country men just for the few dollars to feed the hungry mouths at home. Who do you blame? Cheats or fathers?

Something similar to what you see in Untouchable where those fathers, mothers, brothers, wives are also in such a situation where their voice is not heard and rather there they are not even allowed to voice! A country at war looks savage and looks uncivilized, in fact looks like those times when we were also not where we are now. We move back in time with each step we take closer to war, as I truly doubt whether we will ever be able to prosper with war on our doorstep. War will only deter the growth and slow the process, but everything will eventually happen if not today, the day after!

You can check out the original review at my blog – Vector Gaming

It’s been almost a month and a half since we launched LeBooks.in. Over the period we have implemented numerous features, removed various bugs and finally had a major upgrade over this past weekend. It has been a topsy-turvy ride with its ups and downs but one thing has been constant, we have learnt a lot and have come a long way since.

Both Rajat and I are essentially non-IT guys. While it did put a big constraint on us (and it still does), we did not let this hamper our plans. We went ahead and outsourced the website in August thinking that it would sustain us for the few initial months while we concentrate on other stuff and build our IT team. Though we knew that the website can make or break our business, we still thought it was an ok-acceptable decision (considering the circumstances, which I won’t dwell into here) for isn’t India an hub for outsourcing and aren’t there numerous multinational companies happy with the work done. Well we were wrong, terribly wrong.

I cannot generalize for the whole web-development and -design industry in India or even NCR based on just one experience but we believe that the state of affairs would have been the still the same if we had instead chosen any other company. This company was “supposedly” the best in the NCR region with a number of big-name clients like Sony, Hyundai, Penguin, etc. in their kitty. As a hindsight it seems to us that for them we were just a small fish to prey upon.

We had made it pretty clear before signing the contract that we need the website by the stipulated date and if it cannot be done then let us know. Also, that we are very particular of what all things we want and how we want them implemented. However, over the course of time, our inputs were totally disregarded. The code for the site was lifted from the code of their other websites. We could easily see commented out stuff such as email addresses with jobs@xxx.co.uk and page categories as Departments, Other Stores, etc. They did not even make an effort to remove this.

Things came to a head when the site crashed, when it could not even manage some 10k books because the database was not normalized, and that too when the site was already delayed by a week and was still half-completed. Attempts to communicate through to the CEO, whom we thought was a decent fellow having started-up and having being featured on “Young Turks”, were of no avail. He mysteriously disappeared after responding to our first mail. We believe that most of these web-companies make websites for clients who are either ignorant and are happy with whatever is given to them or have lots of money to shell out, which we did not.

It hit us bad – a wasted couple of months, wasted money, missed opportunity at the Delhi Book Fair, missed revenues, and more than that dented credibility with our suppliers and publishers whom we had given a launch date. Well the lesson’s been learnt:-

a) When outsourcing services, opt for a smaller company, which needs you as much as you need them. It helps in negotiating contracts. We could not get a clause put into the contract where the web company would be liable for monetary compensation in case of any delays and missed deadlines. Most of the times anyways the contracts cannot be fought out in the court.

b) If you as a start-up need to get a critical service done, then try and do it in-house only, especially when it involves a lot of feedback at every step. Don’t assume that you can outsource and be done with it. Even the best of the companies cannot stick to the exact stipulations laid down by you.

So after the crash, we were pretty much in the doldrums. I started learning coding while Rajat handled the database. My sister also really helped us out. For fully a month, we worked day and night to somehow get the website back up.

Whatever might be your degrees, whatever you might be good at, in a start-up you will eventually end up doing something, about which you may have no clue leave alone any expertise. But the learning is stupendous.

During the process we eventually realized that the basic HTML code was also horrible. The site was not at all W3C compliant with 750+ errors and warning on every page. The styling was done in-line instead of making complete use of external CSS. And then the site took up to 3 mins to load and even more so on slower net connections. Frankly, the site could hardly be used except maybe referred to just family and friends, and that’s what we had to do.

But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It gave us a period of trial-run where we became aware of a lot of operational issues. Even after months of planning, one cannot really anticipate all the problems that might occur when you launch a product in the market.

Since then, we have been building our IT team. As a start-up, you need people who are self-motivated, who are quick to learn and essentially don’t need you to supervise them the whole time. We found a great guy in Mayank who has been instrumental in implementing a lot of our current features over the past month. And we are still looking for more.

Finally I am glad to say that we have a website, which though might still be very basic is ready for the world!!

 

Its a well known fact that Gillette makes more money by selling razor-blades than by selling their trademark razor. HP’s Printer division makes more money selling cartridges than it makes by selling Printers. Similarly, there are a lot of companies that make money not by selling the main product, but by selling the tied-up product. This is an old business trick and is referred to as the Razor-Blade Model(Now you know who pioneered it). Today while reading about the recently launched e-book readers-Kindle and Nook, I realized how Amazon and BN(Barnes and Nobles) are relying on this old model and forecasting huge profits in the next few years.

 

Microeconomics says that there are three characteristics of any market structure (be it Monopoly, Oligopoly or free market)- number of players, barriers to entry and bargaining power of producers as well as consumers. The market for book retail has almost no barriers to entry and Amazon and BN being big players have over the years managed to capture a majority market-share. As time passed, both of them lured customers with heavy discounts and the price wars just got uglier. Needless to say, customers had no reason to stay loyal and made the best of this price war; while Amazon and BN just kept bleeding.

 

Recently, with the advent of e-book readers these two giants saw an opportunity to finally establish a captive customer base by employing this tied -up products model. Amazon launched Kindle over two years back but the product did not have the potential to penetrate the market then. It wasn`t aesthetically designed and did not bring the much expected revenues. But with recent developments in LED technology and Google’s groundbreaking agreement with Publishers, there is renewed hope that e-books might prove to be a fatal blow to the conventional paper books.

 

Now if this is really going to change the future of the publishing industry and the way we read books, the big players of tomorrow should emerge now. And that is precisely what Amazon, Sony and BN are attempting to do. Each of them launched e-book readers with their own non-standardized formats, with the intention of hooking on a maximum number of readers to their particular product. Amazon, being the book retail giant that it is, used its clout to arm-twist publishers into providing it e-book formats for all major releases. BN joined the bandwagon too and managed to obtain most of these titles in its e-book format. In this race, Sony got left behind because of its inability to convince customers that it would be able to provide as many titles as its competitors in its own e-book format. It is this uncertainty coupled with the marginally better product aesthetics of Kindle and Nook that have led to the emergence of two leaders in the e-books business.

Coming back to the economics of this, we can understand why neither Amazon nor BN is hoping to make significant profits from the sale of e-book readers. Also, the fact that both these e-book readers are priced the same, tells us that both these Companies understand that a price war now would cause both to bleed as they do not have any margins on the e-book reader. It will be a while before either Company would have sold significant volumes to recover the enormous product development costs.

However I feel that there is a big question mark on whether these two will actually make the money that they are hoping to make. Aren’t they undermining the smartness of techies today, who would probably soon work out a way to crack each of their proprietary formats and create millions of free copies in no time. Isn’t it going to make piracy of books even easier and much more widespread. The entertainment industry has been struggling to fight this piracy for years. Won’t Amazon and BN face this same challenge when there will be on an average, 1000 copies circulating for each legitimate e-book they sell.

But none of this seems to concern Amazon and BN who are both currently focusing on meeting the high [expected] demand for e-book readers in the upcoming festive season. While these big companies fight it out in the electronic format market, the individual customer is definitely happy with the idea of have access to a cheaper electronic copy of the book, downloadable from anywhere at all. Also, the prospect of free copies of e-books being easily available in the near future has book lovers thronging stores to pick that gadget that will be their reading companion for next few years to come.

The Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum:-

1. The Bourne Identity (1980)
2. The Bourne Supremacy (1986)
3. The Bourne Ultimatum (1990)

I read the first novel of the series – The Bourne Identity way back in 2003 or so, and I must say that it deserves to be voted as the second best spy novel of all-time by Publishers Weekly, though I still have to read the winner – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré.

I have not yet come across any other book – fiction, non-fiction where I was hooked right from the first page. After all these years, I still vividly remember sitting down with the book on a lazy summer afternoon, opening the first page and reading the first few paragraphs and man was I buoyed by it. Another book that comes so close in comparison is Area 7 by Matthew Reilly in the intensity of action and thrill.

The book (Bourne Identity) is a fast-paced read with a lot of action and suspense, to which the movie adaptation does no justice, except for making Matt Damon uber-fast in his action sequences, which actually Ludlum has written fantastically in the book and needs vivid imagination and visualization to really appreciate.

A man is picked up by a trawler barely alive in the Mediterranean Sea with several bullet wounds and a head injury causing amnesia. As he recuperates with the help of a doctor, who has taken him in, he comes to know that he is not just like any other ordinary man. He has been put under the scalpel, has a fantastic knowledge of languages, and knows martial arts. The only clue to his identity is a secret account number in a Swiss bank.

Ludlum then takes us on a whirlwind trip all-over Europe with “the man” – let’s just call him Bourne, out-pacing and out-thinking the CIA, Interpol  and Carlos, the Jackal (thus called when found with a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal amongst his belongings). At the end, the true identity of Bourne is finally revealed and along with the exposure of all rogue elements. This reminds me of the trailer I saw of “Wolverine of the X-Men Series” fighting hard to find his identity and history, have to yet see the movie.

The sequel Bourne Supremacy is also as good if not better than the first one. Again for all those who have seen the film, well just forget that you have seen it. It does no justice to the book and is actually very different and contradictory to the plot.

The story continues from where Bourne Identity left off. Bourne now knows his identity, and well has a life and a wife. And all of it goes for a toss, when another Bourne comes into the picture and starts shooting real people in his name. And then to top it off Bourne’s wife, the real Bourne’s wife whom he loves very much gets abducted – well then what’s a man supposed to do now, Bourne again takes up the mantle of being Bourne and goes after the killer.

Again the book is an absolute thriller. Ludlum very successfully fleshes out the character of Bourne even further and brings the various emotions – his anguish, turmoil and anger towards his handlers and his wife’s kidnappers, towards himself and his past out in the fore. This time the story is set in the Asian theatre when the British are supposed to handover Hong Kong to China.

In the final book of the series “Bourne Ultimatum”, before he ripens off of old age Carlos has now decided to kill his old nemesis Bourne. And thus, Bourne is pulled back into the world of violence and deceit when Carlos sets upon him his network of jackals. The plot of the movie is again way different.

All in all, the trilogy is an absolute page-turner. I couldn’t wait for Bourne Supremacy after finishing Identity and then the Ultimatum. Hence, the suggestion, get the next sequel along with the book you are about to begin reading or else well wait out through the agonizing delay!!

Further continued on by Eric Van Lustbader:-

1. The Bourne Legacy (2004)
2. The Bourne Betrayal (2007)
3. The Bourne Sanction (2008)
4. The Bourne Deception (2009)

The review can also be accessed here

Recently I picked up the book A Princess Remembers by Maharani Gayatri Devi. It was one of those spontaneous buys, where I knew nothing about the reviews, or what the book holds. I knew who was Maharani Gayatri Devi and the blurb sounded like a story of a girl who has become a woman through the pages.

I started reading it, was immediately absorbed, and moved through a good 200 odd pages very quickly. Life at Cooch Beher as a young girl in complete awe of her elder brother followed by her move to England for studies and her long courtship with the Maharaja of Jaipur. Interesting to note is that the Maharaja already had two wives whom he married before he turned 18, and they were arranged for him by his father. She was the only one who drew his attention genuinely. How would the two wives take to this love affair of the Maharaja, it is enlightening to see how they accept what their husband wishes of them. They serve to be a guide to the new Maharani after the wedding, and help her in getting accustomed to the new culture and form of life.

We breeze through their young days, her siblings’ weddings, children and deaths. We see hoe the royalty married all across India, in just a search for a perfect match and relationship for their states in many cases. We see their princely way of life, and how they envisaged a change for India and their subjects with the forming of a republic India after the independence struggle. Many of the rulers were comfortable in their positions and interactions with the British that very few managed to surface anywhere near the freedom struggle which was led by men of more humble statures. These royals were very well read, worldly wise, but a threat to their position kept them away from the struggle to free India from being a territory of the British.

Independence and selfishness came hand in hand almost all across India. All important positions fell into the only party existing and the people, who stood with them through the fight, did not see an alternative in front of them. Here we see how the princely states came to their rescue, to the rescue of their people, the people who have forever contributed to their privy purses. It would be too simple to say that they came up in sheer love for their people, I believe they also saw that their say in state and politics was diminishing with each passing day, hence this can be seen as their way of some kind of revolt on the part of the Indian royalty against the Congress rule in their states. I thought of them as selfish in only venturing into politics, when they were stripped of their powers and privileges, but maybe the fact that they saw the way the their states were suffering, did contribute in making a successful opposition party in India. The people were more or less not in the habit of rising in opposition, and even if they did they would surely be represented by some who would only change the ruling party but not the corruption and squander which the country was being subjected to. (Doesn’t it somehow just resemble today’s world? I wonder where and who are going to make a good opposition this time? )

On reading this book, I saw the royal ways of life which were in the past, and how they adapted to the changed united India. It is a good light read, with some thoughts which do rummage through your head as you flip the pages of this Indian history, lifestyle, autobiography mix.

You can check out the original review at my blog – Vector Gaming

Consilience – Edward O Wilson

Consilience means the unity of knowledge, how various fields of knowledge can be united by certain underlying common principles. Wilson’s book introduces us to the idea that every problem can be solved by reductionism, that is, every problem can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts, and each of these individual smaller components can be solved. The solution to the actual problem is the combination of the solutions to these parts.

Further, Wilson goes on to suggest that the underlying principle to solve these individual components is the same in every problem, irrespective of which field the complete problem originated from. Ultimately, the solution to the individual components stems from the biological basis of behavior. For example, an artist, says Wilson, is not more creative in the sense as we understand the word, but rather has the ability to appreciate which of the infinite ideas that pass through our mind everyday (ratehr every moment) would be aesthetically appealing (both – to himself and to people). And this ability can be (sometime in the future, not presently) perfectly understood once we have a perfect understanding of the biochemical and neurobiological basis of the brain ans psychology. Ultimately, thus, since all science can be explained by mathematics, the neurobioloical basis of art too can be understood mathematically.

It is an interesting reading, and makes a lot of sense. How evolutionary theory explains art, religion, society and ethics (what we consider the humanities) is a fascinating tale. However, I have a problem with the concept of reductionism being used to solve all problems. The combination of results after reductionism is not a simple additive process… i.e., the addition is more of a vector addition as opposed to a scalar addition. In addition, if every problem can be solved by reductionism, then there must also exist a solution to the problem statement “How can a problem be split into smaller components via reductionism”. I have not yet come across a satisfactory solution to this problem.

The other problem I have with the book is the tone used, which (unintentionally perhaps, though I am unwilling to give the benefit of doubt to Wilson) assumes a superiority of scientists over the humanistic scholars. I disagree, and believe that scientists too can learn a lot from the humanities scholars, a fact that Wilson too agrees but does not discuss in detail.

I read consilience after reading a whole chapter refuting the arguments presented in it by Gould in The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magisters Pox. Both books try to tackle the existing dichotomy between the sciences and the social sciences, but use different approaches.

All in all, a book to be recommended to everyone who is stuck in the details of their own work with no heed of the work in other fields. As Wilson says, the future belongs not to the person who has more information, but to the person who knows how to combine and understand information from different fields.

This is the original post.

Robot Dreams

Just finished reading Robot Dreams by Asimov. The first few stories were ok, the usual Asimov robot type. I did not like The Ugly Little Boy (considered by many to be amongst Asimov’s best works) that much, and basically did not find the book as persuasive as the rest (like Foundation, but I guess it is not a correct comparison, since one is a series, the other is a collection of short stories).

Ans then there came The last question.

This is among the best short stories I have ever read. I have read it numerous times, but still am overawed by the ending, it staggers you like nothing ever can.

An online version is available here. I would however recommend going through the book, since flipping the pages in suspense has a different feeling w.r.t. scrolling down… but read it nonetheless.

Stunning story… almost flawless

Book Rating: 7/10

Story Rating: 10/10

This is the original post.

Edit: The last question link was broken. It has been fixed now.

The Foundation series started off with a trilogy of three books – “Foundation” (1951), “Foundation and Empire” (1952), and “Second Foundation” (1953). Due to popular demand, Asimov continued the series with “Foundation’s Edge” (1982), “Foundation and Earth” (1986), and wrote two prequels “Prelude to Foundation” (1988) and “Forward the Foundation” (1992).

The series were continued by another trilogy popularly known as the “Second Foundation Trilogy” – Foundation’s Fear by Gregory Benford, Foundation’s Chaos by Greg Bear and Foundation’s Triumph by David Brin.

Suggested order of reading is the same as above.

The basic theme of the Foundation Series is a vast interstellar galactic empire, which many believe is still in its heydays. But few, especially an old mathematician Hari Seldon through his knowledge of psychohistory, know that the empire is slowly and steadily declining and a thousand galactic years later will be followed by a dark period of suffering for the mankind, which will span over 30,000 galactic years.

The first of the three books – Foundation captures the story of its namesake, which Hari has helped set up as an anchor for humanity in those dark times. This is the story of Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow, and how they successfully navigate through various Seldon Crises and ward off aggressive attempts of their belligerent neighbors to subjugate the Foundation and its capital Terminus.

The second book of the series – Foundation and Empire, continues on with the story with a focus on the Galactic Empire, which having had forgotten about Foundation is now beginning to see it as a threat. Though the Galactic Empire is in its death throes and has lost almost all control over its peripheries where Terminus is located, it is still a major force to reckon with. And along with this threat, there is the Mule, who is threatening the ultimate collapse of the Foundation along with Hari Seldon’s plans.

An interesting aspect of this series is that unlike books such as “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R.R. Martin or “Wheel of Time” by Robert Jordan there is not a single battle scene described and yet it leaves the readers on the edge of their seat craving for more and that not in a bad way. The suspense leading to the climax and its aftermath, with a major emphasis on character building and dialogs between the lead protagonists is a hallmark of Asimov’s writing in the “Foundation” series.

The third book of the series – Second Foundation reveals the presence of another Foundation secretly set up by Hari Seldon to help guide the “First” Foundation. This is the story of Mule’s and eventually the First Foundation’s search for the Second Foundation and the conflict that ensues between them.

The Second Foundation has been destroyed and the First Foundation has emerged victorious. Was it predicted by Hari Seldon or has his plans been irrevocably damaged? Or is the Second Foundation still lurking out there, or is there some other mysterious third force subtly guiding events in the galaxy? Foundation’s Edge is the story of Golan Trevize who may have the fate of the whole galaxy resting on his shoulders.

In Foundation and Earth, Trevize along with Pelorat and Bliss attempt to seek answers by seeking the location of Earth, the knowledge of which has been systematically removed from everywhere, so much so that its name is considered an obscenity in many worlds outside the Foundation’s sphere of influence.

The first prequel, Prelude to Foundation, is a story about Seldon and his initial days on Trantor; about the resourceful Hummin and his accomplice Dors; the relationship between Seldon and Dors; and also about the enigmatic Demerzel and his secrets. Seldon arrives as a young mathematician on Trantor, head full of ideas on psychohistory but with no practical approach on making it a reality, and gets jostled between various political forces who wants to use him.

After writing the last book for the series – Forward the Foundation, Asimov himself died within weeks of writing Seldon’s death. The story is about Seldon, whom Asimov regarded as an alter ego, his life’s devotion, the all-consuming fire to develop psychohistory, and his joys and despairs shared with Dors Venabili, and ultimately his poignant death after the establishment of the Foundations.

Foundation’s Fear is set in the period covered in the early chapters of Forward the Foundation, while Foundation’s Chaos covers the early chapters of Foundation. Foundation’s Triumph covers various loose ends and describes the setting up of holographic messages to the Foundation.

All in all, foundation series is one of the epic science fiction series spanning over 500 standard galactic years, winning the one-time Hugo award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966 beating even “Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Resources:
1. Asimov Home Page
2. Wikipedia – Isaac Asimov
3. Wikipedia – Foundation Series
4. Isaac Asimov’s Book Reviews
5. Hugo Awards
6. Nebula Awards

The summary can also be accessed here