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.
What stands out as most dated to me isn't the technology, smoking or sexism, but rather the mid-century technocracy-uber-alles attitude and how casually it assumes normative values are objectively correct.
Democracy? We can't trust the public to know what's best.
Autonomy? Has to be crushed for the greater good.
Multipolarity? Are you nuts? A unitary hegemon is the only stable system.
I reread the original trilogy a few years back and felt it held up pretty well. The science in the science fiction is psychohistory, and the stories do a good job of exploring its ramifications. Jeremy Keith over at Adactio recently pointed out that a lot of ancient Greek tragedies, the ones involving prophesies like the Iliad or Oedipus Rex, are recognizable as time travel stories. Information flows back to the past, and the story either lets this change the future or accepts that the future cannot be changed. The pre-Mule Foundation stories are in this latter vein. The future has been forecast, but those present only understand part of it. They have no choice but to act, but they are mere players in the drama. The outcome has been foretold. As in Oedipus and many other time travel stories, the future in the Foundation books is unchangeable.
The setting with its spaceships, atomic powered washing machines and disintegration field ashtrays is decidedly retro but colorful. The story had to be set somewhere. It could have been set in an alternate ancient Rome or the conquistador fantasy land of California, but an imagined decaying future galactic empire worked just fine. It's the Graustark problem. If it's fiction, it is counterfactual. Sherlock Holmes did not actually live at 221B Baker Street in late 19th century London. If it were factual, it wouldn't be fiction.
I find a lot of modern science fiction with its relentless world building tedious. That's what made the later Foundation books unreadable. Jane Austen knew better than explaining the cash flow structure of Pemberley or exploring the loves, lives and dreams of its staff. She left that to Trollope or the writers at Masterpiece Theater. I like to jump into a story and infer the nature of the characters and their world from the narrative flow. For a long time, I couldn't read fiction without skipping ahead to page 50 and reading from there to the end. The introductory stuff drags, but modern writers seem to revel in it.
I read these at just the right age, so I’ll always love them. I’ve reread them a hundred times.
The tech was creaky even when I read them back in the 80s, but that never bothered me. What bothered me was the sharp decline in quality between Foundation and Empire and The Mule and then its collapse between Second Foundation and Foundation’s Edge.
The first two books still hold up, I think, because of a combination between a terrific settling - a collapsing galactic empire that doesn’t know it’s collapsing, told from the perspective of the last true scientific outpost stuck on the periphery - and the setup of each story: a crisis in psychohistory that the characters attempt to solve only to realize that Seldon already plotted it out hundreds of years prior. The introduction of the Second Foundation as a shadowy organization that keeps the Plan on track through subtle manipulations of politics, economics and what have you was terrific until it collapsed under the weight of telepathy and heat vision or whatever.
The series doesn’t get disappointing until Asimov tried a Grand Unified Asimov Universe, where robots from I, Robot start showing up and whatever and the basic rules of the Foundation universe were abandoned. Has any author ever pulled that off? Stephen King’s attempts were equally sad.
Just to add something - it’s really disappointing that the series stopped using the formula I outlined and that the show apparently doesn’t bother even trying. There are a thousand great stories you could set during the interregnum using variations on the theme. The Mule is a great example: what if a human came around who couldn’t be accounted for by psychohistory? It’s great stuff. I think there’s real potential in reviving the series
Timing is eerie ... just said last night [late coming to the TV series] that we should find the books and retry. This saves the effort - thanks! Other "right timed" books for me were Asimov on Physics/ -Math, also that 12 year old period. Not, lol, that they actually inspired me to work at the subjects, but I loved them. And made an actual physicist chew his arm off at a party once to escape me waxing rhapsodic and trying to launch a small talk conversation. Oops. Were they really that bad?
I reread the trilogy a couple of years ago. I was shocked at how dated the book felt. The term Vegan tobacco had me confused for awhile. until I realized that he was referring to tobacco that was grown on planet orbiting the star Vega. It really was the 1950s society with a lot of new technology. I have been watching the Apple TV production and it updates the social elements, but also completely get the story wrong.
I loved Asimov when I was a tween (1970s), but even then knew that some of the science was BS. When I reread some of the robot books long afterwards I was I was surprised how plodding the stories were, particularly the dialogue. The showrunner for the AppleTV+ series clearly saw this too and came up with a series that only uses the Foundation stories as set dressing, with lots of action and effects that would have had no place in the books. And I think it's all for the better. I think some of the author's contemporary works have aged a bit more gracefully, such as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.
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.
What stands out as most dated to me isn't the technology, smoking or sexism, but rather the mid-century technocracy-uber-alles attitude and how casually it assumes normative values are objectively correct.
Democracy? We can't trust the public to know what's best.
Autonomy? Has to be crushed for the greater good.
Multipolarity? Are you nuts? A unitary hegemon is the only stable system.
Human rights?
I reread the original trilogy a few years back and felt it held up pretty well. The science in the science fiction is psychohistory, and the stories do a good job of exploring its ramifications. Jeremy Keith over at Adactio recently pointed out that a lot of ancient Greek tragedies, the ones involving prophesies like the Iliad or Oedipus Rex, are recognizable as time travel stories. Information flows back to the past, and the story either lets this change the future or accepts that the future cannot be changed. The pre-Mule Foundation stories are in this latter vein. The future has been forecast, but those present only understand part of it. They have no choice but to act, but they are mere players in the drama. The outcome has been foretold. As in Oedipus and many other time travel stories, the future in the Foundation books is unchangeable.
The setting with its spaceships, atomic powered washing machines and disintegration field ashtrays is decidedly retro but colorful. The story had to be set somewhere. It could have been set in an alternate ancient Rome or the conquistador fantasy land of California, but an imagined decaying future galactic empire worked just fine. It's the Graustark problem. If it's fiction, it is counterfactual. Sherlock Holmes did not actually live at 221B Baker Street in late 19th century London. If it were factual, it wouldn't be fiction.
I find a lot of modern science fiction with its relentless world building tedious. That's what made the later Foundation books unreadable. Jane Austen knew better than explaining the cash flow structure of Pemberley or exploring the loves, lives and dreams of its staff. She left that to Trollope or the writers at Masterpiece Theater. I like to jump into a story and infer the nature of the characters and their world from the narrative flow. For a long time, I couldn't read fiction without skipping ahead to page 50 and reading from there to the end. The introductory stuff drags, but modern writers seem to revel in it.
I read these at just the right age, so I’ll always love them. I’ve reread them a hundred times.
The tech was creaky even when I read them back in the 80s, but that never bothered me. What bothered me was the sharp decline in quality between Foundation and Empire and The Mule and then its collapse between Second Foundation and Foundation’s Edge.
The first two books still hold up, I think, because of a combination between a terrific settling - a collapsing galactic empire that doesn’t know it’s collapsing, told from the perspective of the last true scientific outpost stuck on the periphery - and the setup of each story: a crisis in psychohistory that the characters attempt to solve only to realize that Seldon already plotted it out hundreds of years prior. The introduction of the Second Foundation as a shadowy organization that keeps the Plan on track through subtle manipulations of politics, economics and what have you was terrific until it collapsed under the weight of telepathy and heat vision or whatever.
The series doesn’t get disappointing until Asimov tried a Grand Unified Asimov Universe, where robots from I, Robot start showing up and whatever and the basic rules of the Foundation universe were abandoned. Has any author ever pulled that off? Stephen King’s attempts were equally sad.
Just to add something - it’s really disappointing that the series stopped using the formula I outlined and that the show apparently doesn’t bother even trying. There are a thousand great stories you could set during the interregnum using variations on the theme. The Mule is a great example: what if a human came around who couldn’t be accounted for by psychohistory? It’s great stuff. I think there’s real potential in reviving the series
Timing is eerie ... just said last night [late coming to the TV series] that we should find the books and retry. This saves the effort - thanks! Other "right timed" books for me were Asimov on Physics/ -Math, also that 12 year old period. Not, lol, that they actually inspired me to work at the subjects, but I loved them. And made an actual physicist chew his arm off at a party once to escape me waxing rhapsodic and trying to launch a small talk conversation. Oops. Were they really that bad?
I reread the trilogy a couple of years ago. I was shocked at how dated the book felt. The term Vegan tobacco had me confused for awhile. until I realized that he was referring to tobacco that was grown on planet orbiting the star Vega. It really was the 1950s society with a lot of new technology. I have been watching the Apple TV production and it updates the social elements, but also completely get the story wrong.
I loved Asimov when I was a tween (1970s), but even then knew that some of the science was BS. When I reread some of the robot books long afterwards I was I was surprised how plodding the stories were, particularly the dialogue. The showrunner for the AppleTV+ series clearly saw this too and came up with a series that only uses the Foundation stories as set dressing, with lots of action and effects that would have had no place in the books. And I think it's all for the better. I think some of the author's contemporary works have aged a bit more gracefully, such as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.