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A review by thekarpuk
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
1.0
It's always awkward when the books that a work inspire actually eclipse the original. Now that I've read Foundation it's easy to look at other works I've read over the years that have similar structure and framing. The trouble is I just don't find Asimov all that enjoyable as an author.
It's weird, because normally fantasy/scifi politics does a lot for me, but it basically exists in a vacuum here. Asimov has little patience for character descriptions, atmosphere, or even much imagination. His world taking place thousands of years in the future is essentially the 1950's with warp drives and space ships. A big chunk of this book is just men arguing and smoking, sometimes on spaceships.
And I say men quite deliberately. From reading Prelude to Foundation, I knew he wasn't the best or most progressive of his era when it came to the opposite sex, but Foundation is embarrassing even by its era. I only noticed one woman with a speaking part, and she was portrayed as a scold and a shrew.
And on the imagination front, it just seemed weird how little Asimov expected to change. At one point a main character receives an important message in a metal tube. There's very little speculation on how advancement of atomic technology would alter how people lived. The most we get is a section where a trader discussing time-saving home improvements that sound like something out of a cartoon from the 50's about the world of tomorrow.
Also, there's something just so uncomfortable to me about the main characters. They're all such smug nerds, and big chunks of the book are just them explaining how they've already outwitted the opposition. They experience few failures or genuine setbacks, so the book just becomes the slow unfolding of a 1000 year plan by Hari Seldon, the ultimate smug nerd, who over the centuries keeps showing up as a hologram to basically keep saying, "I told you so."
This all just feels like the dork's version of a power fantasy. To believe that if you were smart enough, you could steer an entire empire. The trouble with this is that in most of history, plenty of brilliant men have been killed when they became politically inconvenient or simply pissed off the wrong person, someone who went with impulse before considering the reasons the genius set up to avoid such a fate.
Foundation leaves off not really telling a complete story, but I feel no real interest in continuing onward. The sort of itch it's intended to scratch just isn't mine.
It's weird, because normally fantasy/scifi politics does a lot for me, but it basically exists in a vacuum here. Asimov has little patience for character descriptions, atmosphere, or even much imagination. His world taking place thousands of years in the future is essentially the 1950's with warp drives and space ships. A big chunk of this book is just men arguing and smoking, sometimes on spaceships.
And I say men quite deliberately. From reading Prelude to Foundation, I knew he wasn't the best or most progressive of his era when it came to the opposite sex, but Foundation is embarrassing even by its era. I only noticed one woman with a speaking part, and she was portrayed as a scold and a shrew.
And on the imagination front, it just seemed weird how little Asimov expected to change. At one point a main character receives an important message in a metal tube. There's very little speculation on how advancement of atomic technology would alter how people lived. The most we get is a section where a trader discussing time-saving home improvements that sound like something out of a cartoon from the 50's about the world of tomorrow.
Also, there's something just so uncomfortable to me about the main characters. They're all such smug nerds, and big chunks of the book are just them explaining how they've already outwitted the opposition. They experience few failures or genuine setbacks, so the book just becomes the slow unfolding of a 1000 year plan by Hari Seldon, the ultimate smug nerd, who over the centuries keeps showing up as a hologram to basically keep saying, "I told you so."
This all just feels like the dork's version of a power fantasy. To believe that if you were smart enough, you could steer an entire empire. The trouble with this is that in most of history, plenty of brilliant men have been killed when they became politically inconvenient or simply pissed off the wrong person, someone who went with impulse before considering the reasons the genius set up to avoid such a fate.
Foundation leaves off not really telling a complete story, but I feel no real interest in continuing onward. The sort of itch it's intended to scratch just isn't mine.