I finally hit the point today where I decided to drop reading ‘Foundation and Earth’, and felt the need to make a post to see if anyone shared my feelings about this book.
The original 3 books of Isaac Asimov’s foundation series (Foundation, Foundation’s Empire, Second Foundation) are among my favourites. They are a compilation of short stories exploring the organic evolution of a society/organization built around offsetting humanity’s greatest dark age after the fall of a galactic empire.
The format these stories helps with their enjoyment greatly. Each story helped to set up logical, worldbuilding consequences of where the last story left off, and chronicle a natural evolution of societal institutions and how they would lead to the reemergence of a post-dark age society.
While they introduced new characters and their struggles against the institutions that were failing their specific eras, the real fun was in seeing how each individual crisis was solved through the clever thinking of the viewpoint character.
Each of these stories was meant to represent such logical progressions in patterns of history, that it was capable of being predicted for well in advance by the mathematics of a pseudo-messiah.
While not necessarily a hard sci-fi, until the crisis of the last book, which involves an unaccounted for anomaly in the form of ESP, the series is pretty grounded in realistic worldbuilding.
The fundamental pretense of being about to predict history in advance via mathematics may require a suspension of belief, but I could defend that with enough historical records and meticulous advances in social sciences, it isn’t impossible to form a unifying theory of group behaviour that could be contingent on statistical probabilities.
The last two books (Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth), written far later in Asimov’s career (and as told in the forward of the former, for a boatload of cash) followed a different format. They were long-form narratives following two (later three) specific characters, as they journeyed across a series of locales in their investigative work, first to hunt down a conspiracy affecting the new galactic government, and then later to find Earth, as it remained a loose end in the viewpoint character’s mind.
Foundation’s Edge was good, not great. Part of it is a story of two diametrically opposed social institutions being forced into battle with one another, and ultimately falling prey to a wildcard third one. The third institution is somewhat contrived, but the story still had some interesting intrigue.
They also introduce a character who feels a little too “male fantasy” for my liking. A psychic hivemind woman who’s primary descriptions and actions imply that she is very attractive, who exclusively (and suspiciously) is romantically compelled by the somewhat elderly, professor character. I don’t wish to say this is unrealistic or unfeasible, but part of this felt a little too much like a self-insert “getting the babe” for my liking.
The story also leans further into ESP, though does so in a way that is at least fascinating. The form which the hivemind takes was different than most other media depictions (like the Borg, Zerg, etc…), and so it was at least intellectually interesting. This drifted the story away from the grounded worldbuilding I spoke about prior, but at least it had something going for it.
There is a conclusive end to the series here, in the form of a decision the main character is forced to make about which institution to rule the galaxy. I find the forced decision contrived as an end for a series about the natural progression of history, and felt a little more like how I would expect a “choices matter” videogame to conclude.
Which brings me to Foundation and Earth. I forced myself through two fifths of this novel, and I have finally just given up and read a summary of the rest.
The inciting incident is weak. It was merely that the main character had an ‘intuitive feeling’ that there is something important on Earth. The rational being that it is still a mystery to him, the other characters, and the historical record.
The format of the story is largely the just moving from planet to planet while the protagonists try to gather clues on the location of Earth.
This ‘episodic’ format isn’t necessarily bad, but it is missing the kind of lore that made me fall in love with the original trilogy.
Where I finally got sick of this series was when they go to a specific planet with a lot of sexual repression. The main character ends up being detained by a woman who appears to be a Spartan-like bureaucrat, but the conflict is resolved with hot, freaky sex.
Hot freaky sex without nuance too, I might add. Most of the viewpoint character’s thoughts are about how rockin’ that bod is for an older lady, and more serious psychological exploration into this situation never really comes about.
Despite having deep respect for Asimov’s work, and for his impact on culture at large, when I got to this point in the book, I felt like I was reading the work of pervy old man who was untouchable by his editors.
I tried reading past this point, but after a few more pages of what felt like maid-and-butler dialogue, I finally decided that this is too much fluff when I have many other books to read, and just gave up.
Despite my stern dislike of this last book, and my general qualms with the previous one, I haven’t seen many opinions online which have shared my viewpoint.
With two other serialized sci-fi series that I love (Dune, and Ender’s Game), there are very strong opinions about where to stop reading the series. Yet I have seen much less discourse on the matter about the Foundation Series.
I’m curious as to other people’s insights on the series. Did I miss out on any really interesting pieces on dropping where I did (including skipping the prequels), or did I miss a general consensus to finish after the third book?
What are people’s thoughts?
by CactusOnFire
7 Comments
It’s not exactly obvious but there’s a massive (nearly 30 years) gap between the 3rd and 4th books and as you note, it really does show given the massive differences in the books.
I still ended up enjoying the whole series of books but they definitely take a massive turn and they are almost just different stories in the same universe.
Put your courage to the sticking place and suffer through these scenes, read the book to the end. I can’t assure you that it’s worth it, but there is a form of twist.
Do people typically not count *Prelude to Foundation* and *Forward the Foundation* in the (extended post-trilogy) series?
I was pleasantly surprised by the fourth book. I thought it was a great succession. The fifth book suffered from horny old man syndrome. Awkward sexuality similar to the last odyssey book, where clarke felt the need to discuss circumcision.
I think the last 2 books (Prelude and Forward to the foundation) are much much better. The writing style in the epiloguecbooks is really heavy with long and boring dialogues, plus the story is not really satisfying, especially if you didnt read the robots books before
I like the Foundation books because they are idea books — all of them.
Both Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth follow the same story, actually, and I loved both books because they hit upon and discuss two ideas that I think are both interesting from a science fiction standpoint and in a modern political and personal philosophical context.
It’s been a while since I read it, so I don’t really remember the horny old man syndrome (will take your word for it) but I do remember that not every stop on the way to Earth was all that interesting.
That said, two of the main conflicts are fascinating to me.
>!Both books fundamentally revolve around Trevize’s selection of Gaia as the future of mankind — an incredibly collectivist community. It’s in sharp contrast to Trevize’s own personal perspective, IMO, and in general in pretty sharp contrast to a lot of writers of this era where concerns about the community overriding the individual reigned supreme. So much of both books is about this conflict — the individual versus community, and you can see it in several of the stop on the way to Earth. At the end, Trevize figures out WHY he selected Gaia and it’s both interesting in a very science fiction way but also very much ironic in the moment in contrast to another character’s motivations and very relevant to much of the human behavior laid out in the whole series. It’s a great ending, IMO, but YMMV. !<
>!Much of the book bridges a connection to a lot of Asimov’s other works, including the ending, so if you’ve read a lot of his stuff, there’s lots of Easter eggs.!<
>!The other big thematic elements it hits are a highly relevant discussion about both the effects of AI and the lengthening of life, and how humanity reacts to both advancements. It’s interesting to me how relevant this discussion is now when it was such science fiction then, but speaks to how these kinds of advancements may fundamentally change what it means to be human … or if we are human as we know it anymore.!<
I read the prequels but didn’t find them as interesting.
oh yeah, the later books are really bad; the prequel books are a little better I think, but they are also prequels, so they lack the satisfaction of following up the story
I think that Asimov in the 80s realized that the Second Foundation would always be the bad guys and would need to be replaced by something else; in principle I don’t disagree with the premise of the sequel books, it’s just that two guys in a space ship navigating the galaxy and sexing up the local girls is not exactly what I expected of Foundation
there’s also the funny idea that the galaxy is so big that in tens of thousands of years of a space faring civilization nobody visited the systems of the first colonizers, but the facade falls apart as soon as one guy has a personal spaceship