Read: 11/28/2020 – 1/20/2021
You might love this if you’re looking for: Classic science fiction, space politics, and people speaking “sardonically.”
You might not love this if you’re looking for: Character development, dynamic female characters, or descriptive settings.
*Note: I read this trilogy in a single, bound edition and, as such, will be reviewing them overall, rather than as three separate installments. At this point, they kind of all blur together.*
The Foundation Trilogy, as it stood for almost 30 years before Asimov added some prequels and additional volumes, is a saga that revolves around the predictions of Hari Seldon, a mathematician who developed “Psychohistory” – a type of science where mathematics can be used to predict human sociological behavior. In an attempt to reduce the impact of the eminent fall of the Galactic Empire and the resulting 30,000 year long Dark Age, Seldon creates two Foundations of scientists and separates them to opposite ends of the galaxy. It’s very much a “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” kind of thing.
As time goes by, the crises that Seldon predicts come to fruition and, as he has worked out with his calculations, humanity (as a whole) behaves predictably and things work themselves out. This carries on, as peacefully as the impending fall of an empire can, until one person, The Mule, comes along who disrupts the system. If people don’t behave in the way that Seldon predicted they will, the next crisis will have dire consequences.
While Asimov is undeniably a cornerstone author in the sci-fi genre and the Foundation series is absolutely a classic which many other authors have built upon, reading it in 2020/2021 magnified another truth about these books: the Foundation series is a product of its time. Between the disjointed nature of the entirety of the first book (as it was initially published serially as short stories in a science fiction magazine), the emphasis on psychiatry/mind control in science fiction, and the regard for women’s roles in the series, it’s obvious from pretty early on in the text that this was written in the 1950s.
However, this is not to say that the book isn’t without its merits. The commentary on humanity’s predictability on a mass scale was, honestly, nothing short of fascinating. From groupthink to power of suggestion to the impact of religion and the idea of fate versus free-will, I’m sure dissertations have been written on this series. (It was my favorite part of the story and why the first book is my favorite of the three.) Also, some of the tech that Asimov introduced into the story was interesting and inventive.
For me, the downsides with these books are heavily seated in the storytelling. Asimov was obviously a great mind when it came to science and mathematics – to create a story like this, he almost had to be – but the art of storytelling, dynamic character creation, and realistic dialogue are not his strongest suit. While I’d grant a pass to the disjointedness of the first book, due to the way it was originally published, his attempts at a cohesive plot still fall a bit short in the second and third.
I joked while reading it that Asimov is the king of expositional monologues. Plotwise, Asimov bounces from one important scene to the next, during which he bogs down the plot with rambling, sometimes multiple pages long monologues about what happened in the interim. This isn’t the only issue with Asimov’s dialogue. His characters all speak like robots and conversation doesn’t flow in a natural feeling way.
It also seems like Asimov’s focus on commentary was to the detriment of the characters. While very few of the characters stick around for more than a chapter in the first book and, thus, don’t really require a lot of development, this trend continues once he falls into a more continuous plot of the other books. Despite following around Toran, Bayta, Ebling Mis, and The Mule (along with a few others) for the better part of two books, none of the characters get much by way of development. Asimov shows very few of their traits – in fact, most of the time, the characters are relegated to talking heads.
While all of this makes for a story that can’t really compare to the more action-packed, character driven sci-fi stories that are popular now, I do think that the Foundation books are worth a read. Not only are they on the shorter side, but the first one is especially compelling. I’m just not sure this is the book to turn to if you’re looking for a world to get lost in for an afternoon. There’s likely a reason why no one answers the “If you could live in the world of any book, which would it be?” question with Foundation.
Also, if you’re unfamiliar with the meaning of the word “sardonic”, do yourself a favor and look it up beforehand. You can’t go more than a few pages in these books without someone saying something sardonically.
