The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
A middle-aged dude re-reads old SF
The subtitle here is a riff on James Nicoll’s Young People Read Old SFF, where he recruited a bunch of folks from a younger generation to read and review classic works of science fiction and fantasy. This is not exactly the reverse, as Foundation was old even when I was young, but I couldn’t exactly pass up that nod, now could I?
I thought about doing this re-read almost two years ago when the TV show Foundation dropped, and actually went to our bookshelves to look through our Asimov books. I knew we had several of his books on the shelf, but somehow didn’t realize that they’re almost all Robot novels. I think we have two collected versions of those, plus the original short-story collection, and maybe one of the late Foundation crossovers? Something like that. Anyway, we definitely did not own the Foundation books, and I didn’t care enough to go to a store to buy them.
A month or two ago, though, we were out walking Charlie the pupper, and somebody a few blocks up had put out a big table full of free books. Which was mostly classic genre fiction, and included this battered copy of the original Foundation trilogy. This seemed like fate, so I grabbed it, even though Kate gave me a weird look. It’s been off-and-on bedtime reading for a while, when I have the brainpower left to read in bed.
I read these back in the 80s, around the time that Asimov published Foundation’s Edge, his 30-years-later sequel to the original trilogy. I read a lot of Asimov in that era, catching it exactly around the window for “The golden age of science fiction is 12.” To the extent that I remember any of it, I mostly remember hard-SF short stories, where he tended to do basically physics puzzles. I also kind of remember the late-period novels, where he reveled in the freedom to actually write sex scenes, with… mixed results.
The core of the Foundation Trilogy is a set of short stories published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding back in the 1940’s: Foundation collects a handful of shorts, while Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation were each a pair of novellas. These were famously inspired by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Asimov used to pitch Campbell on the idea of a setting with a collapsing Galactic Empire. This is sometimes more obvious than others— the first half of Foundation and Empire, “The General,” is pretty obviously riffing on the story of Belisarius (the name “Bel Riose” is kind of a hint)— but it’s a good idea with a lot of potential.
I remembered very little of these going in— basically just the framing story about Hari Seldon predicting the collapse of the Empire and engineering the rise of a replacement, which basically everybody knows, plus the big reveals of the second and third books. This made the first book by far the most successful of the lot on re-read, since the latter two are clearly written to build up and then solve mysteries, and don’t work nearly as well when you know who done it going in.
Reading these in 2023, maybe the thing that jumps out the most is how dated the future feels. It’s supposedly tens of thousands of years in our future, but they still use slide rules to do calculations, everybody smokes, and gender roles are pretty much what they were in 1950. This didn’t stand out to me when I was a pre-teen and they still had smoking sections on airplanes, but now, it’s clunky at a level that’s almost hilarious. Also, knowing the author’s reputation within fandom as a bit of a creep makes some of the descriptions of female characters a bit… uncomfortable.
The heavy hand of Campbell is also pretty obvious in these, as they feature some very plodding descriptions of the nonsense science of psychohistory and there’s a lot of babble about ESP. You can sort of feel Asimov pandering to sell his stories to his famous editor as much as to his readers. But, again, this is something that’s really only obvious from the perspective of an adult reader who knows a fair amount about the history of the genre.
On a more literary level, it’s striking how anti-climactic most of these stories are. Not only do they not feature whiz-bang action sequences, for the first book and a half, most of the conflicts resolve themselves without the characters actively doing much of anything. The crucial factors leading to the ultimate success of the protagonists are all actions taken off-stage, sometimes decades in the past. It’s very much in keeping with the theme of psychohistory— everything is vast, impersonal forces— but makes for a slightly odd reading experience.
In the latter half of the trilogy, this raises a potentially interesting idea, in the tension between the vast impersonal forces and the possibility of exceptional individual action, but doesn’t actually do anything all that satisfying with it in the end. His sympathies are pretty clearly with the impersonal forces, but the exact outcome remains a bit unclear, probably because he stopped writing in the Foundation setting around 1950. As I recall, the late novels read a bit like a prose version of the meme where the main character turns toward the camera and explains exactly what kind of Communist they are, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
As always with Asimov, the prose style is best described as “serviceable.” He doesn’t tend to lofty rhetoric or flowery description, and the few attempts at either are clumsy enough to make that clearly a good thing. These stand or fall on the core conceits of psychohistory and the collapsing galactic empire; when the focus shifts away from them, they get a little tedious. The last half of Second Foundation with its obsession about the physical location of the eponymous secret society really drags. It’s maybe the most squandered-potential moment of the series: in other hands, the idea of telepathic spies everywhere could make for a tense and compelling thriller, but this just devolves into parsing ancient texts for the answer to a question that just isn’t that interesting.
Anyway, re-reading these was interesting, but I’m not sure I’d recommend them. I certainly don’t see any way they would appeal to genuinely young readers now— the setting is so clearly Mad Men with a few props borrowed from Star Trek that I can’t imagine SteelyKid or The Pip vibing with it. And so much of the science backdrop is Campbellian nonsense that it’s impossible to take seriously as “hard SF” these days. To the extent that they’re still influential it’s mediated by a couple of generations of intermediaries, and they’re probably only worth reading for completists or genre historians.
This is perhaps the least surprising literary Take committed to Substack, but it’s what I’ve got. If you like it, here’s a button:
And if you want to complain or otherwise follow up, the comments will be open:
One aspect of it that stuck of to me is now how pro-nuclear the book comes off as -- not sure we'd see that today
IIRC, Asimov himself said, in the intro to the fourth book, which as you noted, he wrote thirty years later, that when he picked up the original three to remind himself what he had written, he experienced a "sinking feeling" that "nothing happens."
I can't dispute any of the points in your critique, but I always liked those books, even re-reading many years after the first time. And I did have the good fortune to read the Foundation books and the robot books in order, so that was a very satisfying moment when they all came together.