SFBRP Listeners discussion
Why do people like Asimov's Foundation?
date
newest »
newest »
It has been around fifteen years since I read Foundation, so forgive me if I'm vague on the details, but I do remembering liking it for its own. Memory says 4 stars. The original three book series has been on my reread list for a while now.
You said it was too talky. Do you generally dislike books without a lot of physical action? I have to admit, I actually can like the talky books if what the characters are talking about is interesting; if done well, it can be like a philosophical dialogue, which I can enjoy, but some people will just be bored and want more action.
You said it was too talky. Do you generally dislike books without a lot of physical action? I have to admit, I actually can like the talky books if what the characters are talking about is interesting; if done well, it can be like a philosophical dialogue, which I can enjoy, but some people will just be bored and want more action.
Mod
I don't think I expressed what I wanted to say when I said the book was "talky." Books don't have to be full of action for me to like them. In fact, I am usually more attracted to the parts of a book where characters are talking about ideas. I think what I meant by talky was that the characters bored by talking about things I didn't care about. I can see where maybe back during the Cold War, when people feared the end of civilization due to nuclear war, that some of the dialogues may have had more impact. They just don't hold up today.
Maybe people keep putting it at the top of the various lists because of nostalgia and because they remember the impact that it had in the past. Hey, even I thought the old Battlestar Galactica was great SF until I saw it again a few years back!
The other thing that bothers me is that it keeps appearing on lists of best "novels." It is clearly a collection of thinly related short stories. I think this had some influence on my enjoyment.
I resd it first when I was about 11 (1979 ish) and it seemed amazing. I think that it was the first space opera I read, and coming on the back of Star Wars and that sort of thing, my imagination was piqued. However, on a re-read a couple of years ago it was painful. Very badly written as much as anything.Still, I guess it is a classic because of the depth of the vision of galactic empires rising and falling - not something that was much explored before this, unless someone wants to correct me.
I only recently read the Foundation books a few years ago. I rather enjoyed them. The grand scope of the novels, as well as the whole idea of psychohistory (is that correct?) just seemed cool. Towards the end of the series, however, I really think it fell apart.
Aaron wrote: "I only recently read the Foundation books a few years ago. I rather enjoyed them. The grand scope of the novels, as well as the whole idea of psychohistory (is that correct?) just seemed cool. To..."
The key to enjoying Foundation is to remember, there are only THREE books. Some insane people will tell you about a series of sequels and prequels Asimov wrote thirty years later, and still more written by completely different writers. Ignore those people. They believe in Star Trek V and Highlander II too.
Sean wrote: there are only THREE books.Very good advice, because the later books were pretty lame - they just upended what the first series of books established.
I listened to the first book on tape about 15 years ago. I did not have high expectations and thought it was entertaining but overrated. The concept is fresh but the execution was so-so by the standards of modern fiction. I would think that when Asimov was writing this there were different expections and different rules. Many of the things he was doing were new. Just the topics were ground-breaking. Style in Science Fiction was not as varied as we have today.
I read foundation when I was 14 or 15, it blew my mind back then. The idea of taking history by the horns, of scientifically changing history on a galactic scale was amazing.Recently I considered getting an audio book version I found for a 13 year old. Thank god I thought of listening to it a bit before giving it to him.
It was indeed quite tedious.
Perhaps we've grown tired of politics and have lost faith in man's ability to direct history to his desires.
BTW, I think the original series was serialized. it's not an accident that it seems like a collection of short stories.
Okay I've gotta mount a defense of the trilogy (haven't read the others - yet?). It may be my own idiosyncratic response, but the worldbuilding was fantastic. I'll put it this way - I came across these as a long-time Star Wars fan, and for that matter, a fan of "fantasy/scifi" from before the age of CGI (you know what I mean). While reading Foundation, my mental images couldn't *help* but be built on these cherished, authentic-feeling sources (given how influential Foundation was on those stories to being with). Perhaps that's not the most specific way of describing it (and I know Asimov's "spaceship-and-sun" looked radically different than my 1980s-ILM-version), but that's my experience.A related issue I really enjoyed was the breadth of space and time involved. So often, characters in conceptual fiction are fighting as ultimate good versus ultimate evil, or for the very survival of the universe, or what-have-you. This story takes place over a huge span of space, a huge span of time, a range of characters. Each has a part to play, and some of their situations were memorable (the priests taking over the ship, if I recall correctly), but it's not the end of the universe, and no character is endowed by the universe as a "chosen one" or anything like that.
I also enjoyed that the galaxy-sim projection near the beginning of the third book could be accomplished by a free program I downloaded. It could probably now be done by my phone.
Oh! Also, I recall liking that Asimov's hand-waving explanations for psi powers and psychohistory actually sounded halfway plausible. I do enjoy stories where magic is assumed, but I really appreciated the veneer of scienciness present in Foundation.
I'll admit that the empire did come across as having some depth. It was the characters and stories I had a problem with. Perhaps my problem is that I was not in the least bit entertained by the first book.Cecil wrote: "Okay I've gotta mount a defense of the trilogy (haven't read the others - yet?). It may be my own idiosyncratic response, but the worldbuilding was fantastic. I'll put it this way - I came across..."
I have no idea. I have been a fan of Asimov since I was a child, but somehow I never read any of his Foundation series (except what was published in Asimov's SFF in the late 80s/early 90s) until my late 20s in 2003. BORING! It started with great promise with a short story about the birth of psychohistory. The rest of the stories were boring and silly - people sitting around nervously talking about they needed to not make a decision or take any action until there was no other option. It didn't make any sense really.Now I have heard the series gets good once "The Mule" the enemy of psychohistory appears, but the first book honestly sucked so why would I want to try and read the next one? I notice everyone who says they like it, talks about the series. Have they perhaps forgotten the tedium of the first novel and remember the second, third, and possibly more books fondly?
I had the same problem recently with Dorsai! Not that I was planning to try and read the whole Childe Cycle, but I started with Dorsai! and pretty much lost all interest in continueing. That was a slog too - way dated IMO. I keep thinking Soldier, Ask Not sounds pretty good though. It also sounds like it may stand alone pretty well.
Foundation was the first SF cycle I ever read. For an eleven years old style matters little. Ideas do. Then you grow up, emotionally and artistically. And move on to real writers.
I have no idea where I read it originally, but Isaac Asimov himself said that the Foundation trilogy bored him when he reread in preparation for writing the new books thirty years later. He kept waiting for some action, but people just kept talking.
Mod
Oh mans, soooo many authors could learn from this!
Newt Gingrich: Galactic Historianhttp://hnn.us/articles/newt-gingrich-...
"If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire. Newt’s master plan for America does not come from a Republican Party playbook. It comes from the science fiction that he read in high school. He is playing out, on a national and global scale, dreams he had as a teenager with his nose buried in pulp fiction."
Fun Fact: "Al Qaeda" comes from the Arabic noun qā'idah, which means "Foundation." Giles Foden argues that a young Osama bin Laden may have read Asimov in Arabic translation.(??!!) Seriously, WTF yo?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/...
I think people remember liking Foundation, or like remembering Foundation. It's a young adult's series: sexless, intellectual, and hugely absorbing. The secret and benevolent Second Foundation; how cool and heroic were they? Medium weight mysteries with space fleets and telepathic mutants and a happy ending. There are a lot of reasons to like The Foundation Trilogy. Subtlety, wit, and depth: no.
I think that Foundation at least the first book, perhaps the first trilogy may be very much a novel of the golden age of science fiction, ie 12 years old.If you read it as an adult whatever wonder it generates is overshadowed by everything that is boring and bad about the novel.
Mod
Oh mans, soooo many authors could learn from this!"
I'm currently writing Minding Tomorrow part 2b and I'm doing my best to avoid this. I like dialogue, but it has to progress the story, not just report of story progress.
Keep posting the links, as these are all pretty funny.
It's been ages since I read Foundation, but I think it's unfair to call it a "young adult" series. There are no teenage themes or teenage dilemmas that codify the current young adult genre.
As for talking, that can be good if the author does it well. I remember a crime novel where the narrator was drinking at a pub with his mates he hadn't seen in seventeen years, knowing that one probably murdered his girlfriend many years ago. He has to listen for unintentional clues as they talk about old times and get drunk. Sure, on the surface, it's just working class Irish getting pissed, but underneath a lot a psychology and motivations are being slowly revealed. Very well done. It would have been lame if he had to do the "action" plot of dodging bullets and bombs a la Hollywood to figure things out.
As for talking, that can be good if the author does it well. I remember a crime novel where the narrator was drinking at a pub with his mates he hadn't seen in seventeen years, knowing that one probably murdered his girlfriend many years ago. He has to listen for unintentional clues as they talk about old times and get drunk. Sure, on the surface, it's just working class Irish getting pissed, but underneath a lot a psychology and motivations are being slowly revealed. Very well done. It would have been lame if he had to do the "action" plot of dodging bullets and bombs a la Hollywood to figure things out.
As for talking, that can be good if the author does it well.I agree with you there, and I have no problem with lots of talking in of itself. But even Asimov has done it better than he did in Foundation. Half the stories in 'I, Robot', for example, are characters talking through a problem while a robot runs around in the background, and it's great stuff.
The emotional pull of the Foundation mythos is classic Jock vs. Nerd wish-fulfillment.Again and again, arch-geek Hari Seldon and his pocket-protector progeny of interplanetary Illuminati pool their wits to outsmart the 'roid-raging Frat Boys of autocracy, barbarism, and recreational dweeb-throttling.
Geek superego trounces the nerd-pounding Id -- a braintrust of nebbish, peacenik Jews ingeniously thwart the jackbooted galactic oppressor. The Foundation's antagonists are a jingo'y horde of venal politicians, Enron-style space merchants, nutty-bishop Santorum types, hawkish militarists and oligarchs, all vying to chase the scrawny neo-Seldonians down the hallway and give them a three-foot aerial wedgy, right before shutting them into their school lockers.
Smartalecky subterfuge and Mr. Miyagi-style jujitsu are the Foundation's preferred mode of defense and retaliation, often via illusionist gizmos and assorted riddle-me-this headgames. (Hari Seldon you slick dweeb you.) They're not even above using religion against itself, deploying technology-worshipping faiths into the meme-pool to counterweight the more vicious, tribalist varieties -- rather like the Bene Gesserit implanting messianic memes among the Fremen, as a guileful placeholder while they consolidate power and influence.
And all in the name of humanist pacifism, of being the heroic curator of the geek bestiaries of canon science.
The monastic dorks of the A.V. Club thus staggeringly invert the existing social order (in their own heads, as loyal Asimov readers), pounding down a cocktail of penis pills and anabolic steroids in Golden Age SF form.
So yeah, it's an understated superhero fantasy. "Psychohistory," rooted in the preposterous notion that the social-sciences will someday evolve into the extrapolative equivalent of physics and chemistry, is an all-purpose cognitive superpower of millennia-spanning prognostication and social-engineering magic that allows the Foundation to leverage their enemies' strength against themselves in one Judo shoulder-throw after another.
Clark Kent no longer has to phonebooth-change into blue and red spandex. He can now trick Zod into chasing his own tail through the power of Statistical Modeling Analysis and Game-Theoretic Long-Range Forecasting.
Boom goes the nerd dynamite!
Image: Hari Seldon and Friends, Planet Terminus, 12,020 G.E.
Granted, Asimov wrote most of these stories in his 20s, so they have a wonky apprentice flavor to them which puts off many readers.
>"...pounding down a cocktail of penis pills and anabolic steroids in Golden Age SF form."Oops, bit of a contradiction there.
But then perhaps all nerd fantasies are revenge fantasies. The distant mirroring of the persecutors.
Payback sublimated into gadgetry or Anonymous-style cyberattacks, and so on.
It's the politics. Classic, genre-defining Space Opera. Which reminds me, I really should reread the series. It's been at least 10 years since I last reread it.
I like a lot of Asimov's other works, but I just can't find anything worthwhile in this book.
I find it in all the "best of" lists. Is this because of some historical significance or do people actually enjoy reading this?
Sometimes, if people point out some redeeming value of a book that I don't like, I can find some reason to appreciate it. So please help me here.