I’m sorry SF fans. I’m well aware that the
Foundation trilogy
is classic, seminal, well-loved SF, and the Hugo “Best Series of All
Time” and all that… but I didn’t like these books at all.
In a very quick summary, the trilogy concerns the establishment of
the Foundation, which was apparently conceived as a scientific
enterprise tasked with documenting all of the knowledge of the galaxy in
a Galactic Encyclopedia. Shortly after its initial settlement on a
remote planet, it is revealed to Foundation scientists that the true
purpose of the Foundation is not, in fact, simply to create the
Encyclopedia, but rather to develop into the new dominant political
power that will supplant the current failing Empire. The majority of the
books chronicles a series of “crises” that the Foundation must overcome
in order to achieve the predicted political goals of the Foundation
founder and lead the galaxy out of centuries of “barbarism.”
I need to clarify quickly that I only read the first two books in the trilogy,
Foundation and
Foundation and Empire.
I was just not enjoying them and didn’t want to trudge through the
third. Both books (and the third as well, from what I’ve heard) are
actually composed of short stories, which chronologically detail the
circumstances leading up to and surrounding the crises and how the
Foundation pulls through them. Because this is going to be a mostly
negative review, I’ll start by saying what I did like. First, the
world-building is first-rate. Secondly, the concept of “psychohistory,”
the scientific art that propels the story, is pretty cool. I’m grabbing
this directly from Wikipedia, since several editors have spent — I’m
sure — painstaking hours perfecting this short definition, and it’s
better than I am likely to do on my own: psychohistory is “a concept of
mathematical sociology (analogous to mathematical physics). Using the
laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large
scale; it is error-prone on a small scale. It works on the principle
that the behaviour of a mass of people is predictable if the quantity of
this mass is very large (equal to the population of the galaxy, which
has a population of quadrillions of humans, inhabiting millions of star
systems). The larger the number, the more predictable is the future.”
In practice, what this means for the story is that a premier
psychohistorian has mapped out the future of the Empire and the
Foundation and has foreseen the crises that the Foundation will need to
overcome in order to assume its rightful place as the dominant power in
the galaxy — and that brings me to my first complaint, which, as it
turns out, was apparently something that Asimov himself had anticipated
when writing
Foundation. Though the *idea* of psychohistory is a
pretty significant contribution to our collective imaginations and the
SF canon, it’s application here makes for a pretty clinical, repetitive
story that lacks true conflict. Because we already know that the
Foundation will emerge from the predicted crises, the crises themselves
fail to hold any weight. The stories add up to “Oh no! Something bad is
happening! This must be a crisis!” “Fear not, I am here to play the role
of the clever hero in this tale, who will outsmart our opposition and
secure victory for the Foundation!” “Oh, whew, that was a close one!”
over and over again. While it’s momentarily fun to read the exact way
that said hero overcomes the crisis, it’s expected. As a reader, I felt
no tension, and considering the high drama of terming these obstacles
“crises,” I’d like to experience a bit more of that drama for myself.
Asimov altered the formula a bit in
Foundation and Empire
with the introduction of The Mule, a character who alters the predicted
the course of the galaxy, since his role in everything was not foreseen
by the initial psychohistorian-puppetmaster. Unfortunately, even though
the second novel does end up dealing in that kind of suspense and
uncertainty I was hoping for from the first, I was already so tired of
what I felt to be a formulaic — and frankly kind of boring — experience
that I just couldn’t continue, despite the novel ending in a very
unresolved place.
My other major complaint — and I’m sorry, because I know this is a
more modern concern to impose on a novel of this time, but I just can’t
help it — is
holy shit, where are the women? When I complained about the sexism in
Stranger in a Strange Land,
back when I reviewed it for CBR4, what I didn’t realize at the time was
that, apparently, I should have been pleased that Heinlein even
bothered to include women at all! There is one woman in
Foundation,
and if I’m remembering correctly, she appears for about 1 page to nag
at her husband and get all moony-eyed over some jewelry. And that’s it!
So like I said, I guess I should have given Heinlein credit for
bothering to remember that women exist, even if the way he wrote them
was colored by his time. I know people will always gripe that feminists
want to shoehorn women into places where they aren’t appropriate, but I
can’t help but wonder why these people have the imagination to accept
human civilization across a galaxy, with such cool inventions as nuclear
reactors that can be worn around the wrist so as to give someone a
personal deflector shield, but something like including a few women here
and there (which is actually pretty realistic, hello) absolutely runs
up against the edge of the fantastical things we can create. We do get a
significant female character part of the way through
Foundation and Empire,
and though she’s exactly the kind of woman I would have expected from
this book — somebody’s fancy, emotive wife, with a powerful
maternal/protective instinct — I was happy to have her after 500 pages
with almost nary a lady in sight. (Okay, Beyta becomes more interesting
right at the end, but for most of the book, I feel my assessment is
accurate, if harsh.) So, like I said, I know it may not be exactly
fair
to hold this book to my more modern standards, but it’s my review,
damnit, and this kind of stuff is seriously distracting and alienating
for me. And it’s also bullshit, quite frankly, because literature from
times much earlier than Asimov’s manages to include more than one gender
without patronizing them, so I reserve the right to be not impressed.
So, all of that goes to say, I’m sorry world, but
Foundation
wasn’t for me. I’d like to say that I can kind of understand why it has
the reverence that it does, but honestly, I don’t really get it. Even
if I put aside all of my lady-concerns, the completely formulaic nature
of the first book (and half of the second) have me scratching my head as
to why this is still considered the be THE BEST of sci-fi. It would be
one thing for people to say “This was great at the time, but it hasn’t
aged well,” but it seems like
Foundation still tops a lot of best-of lists, and, well, I’ve read a lot better.
