Foundation

I hadn't read this since 2nd or 3rd grade, so I decided to pick it up again. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it through more than the first few chapters -- it wasn't just the lack of female characters, it was the aggressive maleness of the book. I think the courtroom scene used the words "man" and "men" 30 times in 9 pages, referring variously to the all-male judicial team, the tens of thousands of male scientists and engineers being recruited by the psychohistorian (all with their "wives and children," the only women to be referenced in the text), and to humanity in general. I had a sense this was what Asimov was like, but it was worse than I'd feared.

Important as a foundational (ha!) science fiction text, but not my vision of the future.

Foundation

I grew up on Isaac Asimov. From ages 8 to 13 I read all of his fiction that I could get my hands on, and most of the non-fiction as well: hundreds of thousands of words. He was one of my heroes.

So fifty years later, when I came across his Foundation Trilogy in the same Science Fiction Book Club edition that I read as a kid, I found it an irresistible pickup. I’ve now reread “Foundation,” the first of the trilogy. And let me tell you, it is awful. I almost don’t know where to start.

Let’s start with a ludicrously unimaginative view of the far future. In the first chapter, the protagonist takes a kind of interstellar commuter train (he chats with the conductor) to his destination planet, which is New York City, but more show more so (its tall buildings and impressive infrastructure amaze the provincials). At the spaceport (whose description is indistinguishable from that of Penn Station), he hops in a cab. At the end of the ride, he pays the cabbie with coins.

Every man smokes tobacco: either cigarettes or cigars. If I had a quarter for every time a man lights up in Foundation, it would pay for the trilogy. There isn’t any sociological or historical reason given for this; apparently, all of Asimov’s peers smoked, so all of the men in his fiction smoke. It seems to be that simple.

The decline of the galactic empire is illustrated when the hostile neighbors of Terminus, the Foundation planet, have fallen back on coal and gas power. It’s shown repeatedly that these economies have reverted because the knowledge necessary to maintain atomic power has been lost. Nevertheless, these coal and gas economies maintain their interstellar fleets. Although it’s funny to imagine a coal-fired starship, it tends to break you out of the suspension of disbelief.

Next let’s look at “Foundation” as a reading experience. I’ll start with characterization, of which there is virtually none. All the characters are stock puppetry, each of whom embodies exactly one trait: wise, canny, scheming, or naive. Now, the book was written as four novellas, published in the monthly magazines of the day. Asimov then added a prologue story to fill things out. What this means to the reader is that even the bare-minimum characterization established for each character has no room to be developed.

You’ll have noted that above I said that “every man” smokes tobacco. I couldn’t speak more generally because women not only barely appear in this book, they are never mentioned or referred to when they don’t appear. It’s positively uncanny, like the novel written entirely without the letter “e.” The two women who do appear? A servant girl brought in to coo over the special high-tech dress the trader hero hopes to sell, and the shrewish wife of a high provincial official. I’m not sure what purpose she serves in the book.

“Foundation” has a single strength, and that’s the interesting concept of a “psychohistorian” genius who is able to predict the fall and renaissance of a galactic society over thousands of years by applying large-scale sociological principles. But without characterization, without recurring characters, and without a trace of imagination beyond the broad strokes of the plot, this is a depressing and downright alarming read, neither fun nor challenging, and without excitement of any kind. show less

A classic early example of a "fix-up," the gathering together of a group of stories with a little tinkering to shape them into something more novel-ish. In this case, four previously published stories have been gathered (and given new names), along with a new introductory story; whatever tinkering has been done, this feels more like a collection of separate stories than it does like a single narrative.

It's typical of early 40s SF. Ideas are more important than characters, who serve primarily as mouthpieces for those ideas; "the future" is depicted mostly through giving characters names that sound like rejected pharmaceutical products ("Ask your doctor if Hari Seldon is right for you!").

Hari Seldon is the dominant figure in this book, show more though he doesn't actually appear in most of the stories. He is the great genius of Asimov's imagined science, psychohistory, which posits that while the actions of individuals are unpredictable, the actions of societies can be predicted with (astonishingly precise) accuracy. What he does after he forecasts the coming downfall of the great galactic Empire sets in motion the events of these stories, which take place over the course of roughly a century, with a different set of characters featured in each chapter.

Alas, I fear that "stories" is a generous description for what's in this book. These are primarily exchanges of political and philosophical speeches, dressed up in the guise of stories. But the costume is a little too thin, and the alternating "here's how I will destroy you" and "but you have not foreseen my brilliant strategy" monologues get tired very quickly.

The Foundation series was enormously popular in its day, and Asimov returned to it late in his career as part of an attempt (rather misguided, if you ask me) to tie all of his novels into one grand future history. All four of the previously published stories gathered here were eventually nominated for Retro Hugos as the best of their year, as were stories gathered for the second volume in the series (so I'll eventually be reading that one, too).

But as a reading experience 80 years after their original publication, they really don't hold up very well. show less

When a book is labelled a classic, it is either because a) it is an entertaining read that has endured simply for this reason, or b) because, despite its dryness, it has exerted influence in establishing its genre or sub-genre – namely, that it is foundational. The best and most irresistible classics combine both a) and b). Isaac Asimov's Foundation is, unfortunately, only the latter.

You can clearly see its influence on later science fiction – particularly the grand epics – but as a book to read it has dated badly. Its sweep – once revolutionary – now seems tame and imbalanced; too sharp in its world-building in some places and too blunt in others. Its writing is occasionally clumsy – with some poor sentence structure – show more and this is only exacerbated by the typos that unforgivably survive even into the 2016 HarperVoyager edition. The book never settles into its story, being a series of loosely-connected vignettes set generations apart, and the reader struggles to assimilate all the future-world dynamics and mass of characters, only to have their story ended within thirty or forty pages and replaced with more to grapple with. Even then, none of the characters are especially interesting or singular.

The book is defended on the grounds that it prioritises ideas over characters, but the central concept of 'psychohistory' never convinces at all. Early on, when characters opine that psychohistory "cannot predict the future of a single man with any accuracy", and that "calculations upon one man mean nothing" (both on page 21), I thought the book might develop into a paean to individuality, but sadly not. The book progresses rather dully towards pre-ordained conclusions, the reader's interest long since lost. Foundation was visionary, but to a modern audience it is disappointingly colourless, and seems little more than erudite pulp. show less

Rereading one of the most influential book series on young me after 20 years:

The book is basically what I remembered it to be. Men - always men, except for that one time when it's a wife complaining, geez - in rooms talking. I also remembered having fun with it, but I was surprised how much fun it was to read. Just calmly revealing that out of economic necessity (which is part of a thousand year long plan) you've already won is somehow more cool than any action scene I've read.

There is also an interesting tension in the book. It's all supposed to be inevitable and not hinging on individuals, on those "great men of history" and yet we follow these great men throughout the book, and not everything they do seem inevitable. I guess you just show more have to have some plot and suspense. I resolved this tension by basically saying that statistically history will provide an opportunity and statistically someone capable of taking it will be around, but I don't think this is something that's in the book. Ultimately I think it's a good thing I never really took the way this books views history very seriously, but it does provide an interesting perspective maybe. And at the end of the day it's just a really fun read for me. show less

The influence of Foundation can't be understated. Unfortunately, it ends up being yet another in a line of works long surpassed by their imitators.

Billed as "a landmark of imaginative fiction", the bulk of Foundation is comprised of board meetings, politicking, and 4D chess grandstanding. This is a "fix-it" novel, and it shows. The first section, "The Psychohistorians", is little more than a show trial (which reads more like a Q and A session) that serves only to tell you how smart Hari Seldon is. Thankfully, the remainder of the book actually bothers to tell a story. As long as you can stomach "The Psychohistorians", the rest of the book is good, if dated, sci-fi.

I don't think I can say much about this book (or series) that hasn't been show more said, but there is one thing I feel compelled to point out. Somehow in Asimov's grand vision of the future, there are no women. The only female character in this story is (a) not involved with the Foundation, (b) is the subject of very pointed and direct scorn from her husband, and (c) seemingly written to be as insufferable as possible. I'm going to chalk it up to the nature of the times, but I know that's a flimsy excuse.

I'm sure Foundation was nothing short of revolutionary in 1951, but it definitely hasn't aged well. My advice: read Dune instead. show less

Psychohistorian Hari Seldon has become so advanced in the field of predicting the development of societies that he has foreseen the unthinkable: the fall of the Galactic Empire and thirty thousand years of suffering to follow. Initially tried for treason, he manages to convince the empire that, while the collapse is unavoidable, he can reduce the time of suffering to a single millennium through the establishment of a foundation tasked with the creation of a massive encyclopedia to preserve all human knowledge. The government really just wants to send his team into exile on a distant planet. He secretly wants exactly this. He's calculated out all of the statistical probabilities. He knows how these people will grow and develop over show more generations, forming a civilization that can restore peace and prosperity to the galaxy. But only if they can find the same solutions he did for a series of increasingly complex crises. Crises that will bring the entire civilization to ruin if the people do not choose correctly.

Of all the classic science fiction I've read, this is the one that most reflects the sort of complex logic that I love to work through when computer programming. It's a book that demands to be read slowly, allowing your brain to absorb all the factors at play and marvel at the characters' solutions. The world building is fantastic in terms of sociology, and the technology portrayed works in a way that's also entirely logical and often very clever. The city of Trantor, where the book begins, is awesome to see because the author really went deep on the question of how a planet composed entirely of one enormous city would function and how the people living on it would behave.

The plot also takes a completely refreshing approach, in that none of the problems are solved by violence. Hari Seldon and those who lead after his death win not by attacking their enemies but by outsmarting them, and in doing so achieve fantastic results. In fact, I find it impossible to imagine any other solutions that would have achieved so much with so few negative side effects. Personally speaking, I love a quote that's often repeated by one of the major characters: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Due to the fact that the plot circles around the development of a civilization, it is not focused on a single character, of course. The perspective is omniscient and the book is separated into parts, each of which jumps forward in time. Because of this and because most of the sections begin with a fresh set of characters and a fresh new conflict, I would recommend reading the book itself in pieces with breaks in between. This can also give your brain a much needed break!

If you're looking for a quick read you can zip through in a day or if you're hoping to become deeply familiar with one central character, this isn't the book for you. If, on the other hand, you love logic puzzles, are intrigued by the idea of a plot that follows the growth of a civilization rather than an individual, or are just looking to read something different, I would definitely recommend you give this one a try.

The caveat, however, is that as with many classic novels, hints of sexism are definitely present. All the most important characters are male, the only prominent female character is depicted as a nagging wife who at one point is briefly won over by her husband giving her a device that creates an illusion like a beautiful piece of clothing for her to wear, and there are mentions of boys and men engaging in war while mentions of women are in connection to devices for cooking and doing laundry. It's definitely a product of its time, and this dampened my enjoyment a bit.

Personally, I chose to imagine many of the male characters as female since the roles they play matter so much more than their individual characteristics. Given that the plot is so much about groups of people rather than individuals, I also like to imagine a great deal of diversity in leadership and other important positions in society that are not shown on the page. In my head, that's what the future looks like, and I'm not going to let a few old-fashioned attitudes ruin my experience of an otherwise awesome book. The decision, though, is for each person to make according to their own preferences. show less