Foundation by Isaac Asimov

I wanted this to do for me what Dune did when I read it a few years ago…

I wanted to feel like I was being pulled into a world of excitement and intrigue and universal complexity and meaning and mess.

I wanted to be as excited by this as I have been by the space operas of Doris Lessing, of Ursula K. Le Guin, of Ann Leckie, of Samuel R. Delany, of some of the others I’ve read in the past few years…

And though I enjoyed this enough, yes, certainly enough to not immediately throw out the subsequent volumes in this series that I have in the home, I left this strange “novel” (it’s not really a novel) feeling little more than gently underwhelmed…

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In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov published a series of short stories and novellas set within the same fictionalised far-distant and interstellar future, which he collated into a trilogy of “novels” in the early 1950s. Several decades later, he added four more volumes to the series.

This one, Foundation, was published in 1951 as a book, though it contains five distinct pieces, one of which was new here but the rest were originally published between 1942 and 1944.

The most notable thing about anything in this volume – particularly compared to the other space operas I’ve previously read (see list above) is that until p. 183 of this 230 page book, not a single woman appears in the narrative, and until p. 187 no woman speaks, and the only woman who does speak is in maybe two short scenes and is – of course, of course, of course – evil.

There’s something, then, conspicuously dated about a text set in the far future that has descended into pre-industrial homosocial sex-based apartheid, yet never mentions this directly.

Asimov – for all of the intricacies of his galaxy-spanning society with various factions and institutions and empires – couldn’t imagine a society where women existed, which does feel a little – at best – embarrassing, and is so conspicuous here that it’s almost bizarre, given that it isn’t written as if of narrative note.

Maybe, as the Foundation series goes on and as the 20th century ran ragged around Isaac Asmiov, maybe he clocked his erasure and moved forward with a more diverse cast of characters? Or maybe not.

This, more than anything, was my most memorable takeaway from the book. A

nd I’m so so so sorry if this has offended any readers who’ve arrived here because my blog has once again been shared on a right wing message board as an example of “woke mind virus” or whatever it is they’re calling not being an irredeemable dickhead this year. Women are people, boys (they’re all boys, probably), and if you’re inventing a sexist future society and don’t mention its sexism, you look a little suspect, too…

It doesn’t look intentional, is what I’m saying, Asimov friends, it looks like Isaac just completely forgot women existed until deep into creating this fictional future. Whoops. Yes.

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What you get here, then, is five stories, spanning about a hundred years of time.

The first story (the earliest-set, yet (I think) latest written) sets up the world we’re about to explore: a historian-philosopher-statistician has essentially figured out how to map and predict the future, based on science… He fakes a crisis in order to get himself and a shitload of super smart [man] scientists near-exiled to the edges of the galaxy prior to an inevitable and imminent empirical collapse, where he establishes a science-led society which he believes (slash knows, because his statistics-based augury is essentially fool-proof when he makes his manoeuvres to guarantee what will happen for the next few hundred years) will eventually rule the entire galaxy, once wars and strife and decline have all faded and spread out from the Imperial core.

His organisation is the eponymous Foundation, and he leaves instructions and vague plans in writing, as well as a hologram of himself that will pop up from time to time to pass on information/confirm whether or not his descendants and adherents have worked through time as he expected/knew they would.

The other four parts of the “novel”, then, show four of these crisis points, and how politicians and space adventures and merchants and scientists and a growing religious community (like a boys-only Bene Gesserit who can’t tell the future) manage to wangle their way for more and more success and power for “Foundation”.

Given that there are multiple more books in this series that all have “Foundation” in the title, it’s pretty obvious that the stories in this book are all going to end with the happy resolution of the science-loving space community. So, alas, there isn’t really much threat or worry.

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Is this an interesting multi-planet “world”? Are these interesting stories?

Perhaps, yes, but Asimov isn’t really quite good enough at characterisation for five different sets of characters to really quite satisfactorily “live”, so other than the handful of characters who appear in multiple stories here as young and then old, or who are the only characters consistently around for each story’s 40/50 pages, everyone in the background tends to feel flat, pointless, a plot point not a person…

There aren’t rich inner worlds here in the minds of everyone who touches the page, and though there is some neat plotting and some fun scheming, it’s plotting and scheming mostly done by blunt characters rather than richly drawn people-feeling devices.

You may disagree with the entire premise of this and suggest that people don’t read genre fiction for the rich inner emotional lives of humans, and that a story like this should be about desribing spaceships and space journeys and planets and forms of government and future technologies and the plottings of these institutions… And maybe, sure, maybe that’s what this is for… but there are plenty of writers – I’ve named a few above here – who are able to both fulfil the needs of a heady genre-based imaginary and unfamiliar world, while still managing to create characters – aliens, humans, robots, etc – who feel and move and emote with a rounded realness.

This, then, is a genre text that exemplifies why people – my younger self included – tend to snobbishly dismiss SF. This isn’t, really, about people, which makes me wonder, then, what it really is about, and what is it for?

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As I mentioned, I have the rest of the initial Foundation Trilogy on a shelf here, and though I’ll likely persist as this was a quick, easy, read (and sometimes that’s a useful thing to have in ones life), I won’t be doing it with any of the excitement that I’ve returned to the texts of lots of other writers of space fiction.

Foundation is a SF text that forgets that characterisation is hugely important in a work of fiction, and also forgets (until near the end) that women even exist.

It creates a flat text, really, more like a 2D Hollywood backdrop, rather than a rich, textured, complex world.

It’s stating, rather than showing or even telling. This is my fictional future world, Asimov says, and though it’s intriguing, exciting-enough and interestingly constructed, it’s also deeply disappointing.

Unless you have even more reading time than I do, then I probably wouldn’t recommend it at all…