Urbaer reviewed FOUNDATION (Foundation Novels (Paperback)) by Isaac Asimov (Foundation (3))
One of the great masterworks of science fiction, the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are …
A Brief History of Space and Time
3 stars
Having read this as quite a youngster, it's interesting to come back and re-read 25 years later.
I, Robot was my introduction to Asimov (and I guess Sci Fi) but Foundation was my introduction to larger, longer sci-fi. In my recollection it could rival Dune in it's depth but a much wider universe.
Anyway, that's not the case. It's very focussed on small moments and a limited set of characters on a limited set of worlds. It's really a set of short stories that continue the Foundation's story. Each short story is a crisis which have been predicted and in which there is only one possible action that the character can take to resolve. And they do.
And this sort of thing is fun and interesting in a Lem novel, but here it tends to be "OK, you did the thing like it was predicted well done you." It's either …
Having read this as quite a youngster, it's interesting to come back and re-read 25 years later.
I, Robot was my introduction to Asimov (and I guess Sci Fi) but Foundation was my introduction to larger, longer sci-fi. In my recollection it could rival Dune in it's depth but a much wider universe.
Anyway, that's not the case. It's very focussed on small moments and a limited set of characters on a limited set of worlds. It's really a set of short stories that continue the Foundation's story. Each short story is a crisis which have been predicted and in which there is only one possible action that the character can take to resolve. And they do.
And this sort of thing is fun and interesting in a Lem novel, but here it tends to be "OK, you did the thing like it was predicted well done you." It's either blindingly obvious what will happen or so out of left field that you're not invested.
It's a very quick read and while the characters tend to be very flat and mostly just serve to argue with each other, there's some interesting stuff in here.
I think back in the day, there might have been some interesting concepts in here about how one culture can effectively control another culture (here through the use of religion and commerce), but I feel like others have explored it better since.
I had remembered that the setting up of the Foundation was a lot more of this book than it is and it's kind of weird that time jumps forward so fast when I think it'd be a lot more interesting to see how things pan out in real time for longer.
But even though you're getting these very compressed moments, the time jumps don't really take you to what I had presumed would have been the conclusion of the book. For some reason it just dumps you at a seemingly random point.
A quick google finds that these were published separately as short stories and were collected together, which I guess does explain a lot.
Overall re-reading it isn't as bad as I thought it would be.