Foundation / Isaac Asimov

 

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of my reading groups (The Dead Writers Society) chose Isaac Asimov as a featured author for the final quarter of 2021. I am interested in revisiting his work, having read quite a bit of it when I was in high school, and I remember being quite the fan of the Foundation series back then. I know that I reread this trilogy back in 2011 when I had just begun my Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Project, but before I joined Goodreads.

This novel still retained the ability to suck me into the plot, as the Galactic Empire lurches to disaster and Hari Selden establishes the Foundation in order to diminish the period of “barbarism" before another “civilized" empire arises. I remember as a teen being fascinated by the concept of psychohistory, being able to predict human behaviour and history through mathematics. The concept of taking one of the social sciences and converting it into a “hard" science was exciting.

This time through, I was amused by some of the details, such as the Encyclopedia Galactica. The thought of a printed encyclopedia is archaic now in the days of Wikipedia, but it seemed completely plausible to me in the 1970s, well before the internet. Like a lot of other books published in the 1950s, there is a lot of smoking, making me remember how ubiquitous that behaviour was. No one in my family smoked, but we kept ashtrays on hand for the smokers among the relatives who visited. It would have been rude not to accommodate them, but it was perfectly polite for them to smoke in our tobacco free home. How life has changed!

I was also struck this time at how few female characters there are. Those that are included seem to be largely shrewish wives, making their husbands' lives miserable, or young women who are completely captivated by jewelry and gadgets. None of the featured male characters has a woman in his life and they are all coldly intellectual. When faced with a crisis, we find that these men have always planned for it and they emerge victorious by virtue of their superior thinking skills. To be successful in this universe, you must be male, unencumbered by relationships, logical, and unemotional.

For whatever reason, there is a long line of people at the library wanting to read this series. The waiting list for book two is amazing, so I don't think I'll be revisiting it any time soon. Asimov wrote such an astounding number of books that I can explore his work easily without continuing this series.


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