With a penchant for both science fiction and the classics, I decided to begin Asimov's Foundation series this summer. This is the first Asimov I've ever read, so I honestly didn't really know what to expect. Further, I've only read the first book of the multiple book series, so to say I have an incomplete picture of this work is an understatement.Spoilers below!
The novel consists five distinct parts, each separated by several decades, advancing the timeline far enough for a new set of protagonists to deal with the historical consequences of the prior characters' actions.
Setting in a collapsing Romanesque galactic empire spanning millions of worlds, the premise is that a very gifted man, Harry Seldon, has devised a method (with the name 'Psychohistory') to scientifically with astonishing accuracy predict the future, up to thousands of years in advance, with, you know, math and stuff. Yeah, math. That's it.
Ok. The book's central conceit is psychohistory. If you have a hard time swallowing psychohistory, the underlying thread of this work begins to ravel. I love science fiction. I love fantasy. But for some reason I can divine, I had an impossible time suspending my disbelief regarding psychohistory. And that, along with numerous other issues, prevented me from truly appreciated Asimov's work.
A Very Dated Telling
Probably the biggest shock to me from the get go was the extremity to which this series dates itself. It was embarrassing, in a way, that such a revered novel could be so horribly dated through it's descriptions of technology. Perhaps some might consider this some of it's charm, but I found it extremely jarring.
The ultimate level of technology in this universe nuclear power. Ok, fine. We didn't want to invent some sort of fantastic science fiction power source that seemed contrived. (More on contrivance later...) Furthermore, nuclear power is the in the zeitgeist of this series' conception, so it makes sense that it might be a theme within the book.
All that said, however, one of the paradigms of the greats of science fiction across any medium is their ability to be prescient, to imagine a technology, culture, etc that may be magical at the point pen is put to paper, yet pans out in fact years later. Asimov himself may even be accused of this prescience in his Robot novels.
Well, whatever qualities he had in that regard seem sorely absent here. Nuclear technology, which perhaps seemed the wave of the future in the 1940's, doesn't age well. It doesn't have any magical properties described in the book, and further, radiation is quite deadly, despite the many characters tendency to bathe themselves in the stuff.
And this nuclear power is an extremely central theme. Entire civilizations lose knowledge of nuclear power, and the Foundation's knowledge of nuclear power becomes their prime means of shaping their destiny. They use this knowledge of nuclear power as a bargaining tool to ensure their continued survival, and even at times absolute control of other cultures.
All this begs the question, in my mind, how are their ships powered? These civilizations that have lost power - are we seriously suggesting that they're traveling interstellar distances with what.... coal and oil?
I suppose I shouldn't get hung up on this point, especially as I have the benefit of technological hindsight, but this point completely destroyed immersion for me as a reader. The best novels, of any genre, are timeless. The best science fiction novels are often, technologically, ambiguous. By hinging so much of this world on the use of something so specific and known (nuclear power), the novel has dated itself in the worst way possible.
Well. Maybe not the worst way.
Surprisingly Passive Sexism
There are no female characters worth mentioning in the book. In fact, I can only think of one female character in the first book. And she was greedy, spoiled, and cared only for her own vanity.
Look, I get it, it was written in a different time by a male author in a very different culture than that in which we currently live. But that aforementioned prescience many science fiction greats have been imbued with? Rarely is it confined to technology. Often they have dashes of it in their societies, norms which have evolved beyond our current culture, many of which we have later caught up and met.
Well, that is not the case here. Not only are the only primary characters male, but the only secondary characters are also male. Women just aren't worth mentioning in the narrative. I hear this changes in the later books. I hope this changes in the later books. But were I to someday have a daughter, this is not a book which I would recommend to her.
Contrivance. Contrivance Contrivance Contrivance.
A Classic?
I'm genuinely puzzled. Why is this a classic? I can only hope the later novels offer some redemption, as I found myself forcing my way through this book, struggling to suspend disbelief (something I'm generally quite adept at) to choke down one more forced "Seldon crisis" and to hope for something of interest to happen at some point, any point, in the narrative.
