Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury

Good Reads ratings: 276

this is a "re-imagining of the world of Isaac Aismov's Foundation series set after the establishment of the Second Empire" from Wikipedia, which is not recognised as canon by the estate, nor intended to be one. with that said, and a warning that the vocabulary is WAY the hell out there and requires you to either eat a dictionary or use context clues every three paragraphs, this is a fantastic read.

quick rundown of the plot: math has gotten to the point that people can use it to predict the future of populations (psychohistory), and after this was used to limit a dark age from 10,000 years down to a mere 1,000 the galaxy has entered a second empire just like the first one. surely this won't have any negative repurcussions? enter the protagonist Eron Osa, a pscholar (psychohistorian that uses data of the past to predict the future) who was sentenced for a crime he can't remember because his computer brain with the crime recorded on it has been taken from him and has basically been reduced to a toddler since he used the machine instead of his wet brain for 90% of his life. the story follows him as he learns to use his feeble human gray matter in tandem with a much less impressive computer than the old one he had as a pscholar, and piece together what the hell he did to deserve getting it taken away.

it's been a few years since i read it, but i remember being blown away by how well the universe and various worlds were described, the cultures Eron wades through on his journey. it focuses much less on the mystery of his crime than the synopsis would have you think, but the answer is eventually brought to light. most of the fun came from trying to figure out what any of the giant words meant, since i was in high school and had never heard of things like psychohistory before this book, and i still haven't had the opportunity to read Foundation ungortunately. a great standalone book all the same.