If written now, I suspect it would sink without trace. (Foundation - Isaac Asimov)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Date:	14/11/00 (78 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Imagination; once upon a time, it was good- C

Disadvantages: Scene- setting; dubiously bland on the whole; D

At this point, you may well wonder what the underlying principle behind the decision to review these books is. I mean, that was almost sixty years ago, for goodness' sake. Well, there are essentially three underlying principles;

Anything newly bought.
Anything already on the shelf that I feel sufficiently strongly about to sound off on.
Anything the Ed is too cheap to buy himself and wants a potted commentary on.
You can probably identify this as a clear example of the latter. Asimov's Foundation saga, although it occupied a fairly large slice of the time it depicted passing to actually write (and forms into a coherent greater whole, incidentally), has admirers writing sequels and extensions and developing ideas found in Asimov's files, is basically from the forties, so it's not new. On reflection- and as I'm sure any Traveller gamer will confirm- it's just too familiar, like a well- worn sofa, to have any strong opinion about in this post- everything day and age.

You should have already been able to tell that this isn't my website. I'm just doing this partly for fun, partly for, well, fellowship- read Martin Amis' Information to see what I mean. Nothing like that, of course, not really.

The story itself, one thing you have to beware is the tinsmith factor. Something that required a genius to do the first time can be done by a tinsmith the second time- once the precedent that it can be done has been established. The Foundation novels- the first three at any rate- were genuine first times, but they have their weaknesses and the subsequent three and prequels seem almost as if he is plagiarising himself. Perhaps he did degenerate from a genius into a tinsmith, in fact. Tell me that Arcadia Darell isn't intrinsically ridiulous and I have no choice but to assume that you believe Star Trek is completely possible and just around the technological corner.

Never mind. Here we are c
oncerned with the first in the order of writing in the very long series, Foundation itself. The scene should be familiar; a mighty Galactic Empire, encompassing everything, immeasurably strong, immensely old- and according to one man, Hari Seldon, about to crumble into oblivion through inability to support its own weight. Normally he would be dismissed as a nut. In this case, he is a mathematician, which may well amount to the same thing; but he has balanced and differentiated the historical pressures, and he is deadly accurate. A couple of centuries more life, thirty millennia of interstellar wasteland. So he- fraudulently (and why is it that beaurucracies are always portrayed as evil, rather than the truth- snowed under?) sets about arranging means to avoid the interregnum, by setting a team of scholars to draft a summary of all human knowledge to prevent the need for rediscovery. Also arranging to have them exiled on the grounds of endangering imperial security. Is this some kind of uniquely American obsession with avoiding telling the truth? Again characters never tell each other anything, except when it would make the plot go.

I mean, how do you, as an individual, go about living like this? Politeness is one thing, but this isn't british reticence, it's full blown Yankee line-them-up-for-the-dagger-in-the-back lying. Also character intelligence. The IQ of the characters only rises to respectable major-player levels when Asimov needs it to, and then never too high. All of it well below Asimov's. This is not excusable; cardboard cutouts do not an arresting novel make.

Of course the team of scholars is not supposed to safeguard knowledge, but provide a nucleus for the Second Galactic Empire. They have to struggle, wriggle, and weasel out of trouble time after time. Crises - plotted out by Seldon well in advance - with their immediate neighbours get more severe as the Empire begins to crumble and the Foundation's sphere of influe
nce expands.

On rereading, there are far better novels out there. Asimov is from the tea-and-chocolate-biscuit school of cozy apocalypses; I can say this safely now he's dead. Only in short stories does he rise to the searing heights of an idea pushed to it's limits - the kind of tension you can see coming through in every line of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. He telegraphs the course of the future from the very beginning. Just like Star Trek, you know the good guys are going to win. Foundation, if it had had no sequels, would have been an absolute classic. As it was, he got ever more absurd as it went on, to come up with new threats and oppositions. The foundation itself is also a clear candidate for Most Genially Corrupt Society In Serious Science Fiction - Tammanny hall rides again, in effect. How it supposed to produce anything other than barren, spiritually devoid lives- the kind of absence of value core that is causing American life to disintegrate from the inside out right now?

Although 'empire culture has lost whatever virility and worth it once had' I can't quite see how it would have been put together when it was in fact a going concern. Are we talking about some giant cosmic Albania or something? Asimov does not himself have the skills he attributes to Seldon as a knower and engineer of societies. Period.

You have to suspect him of not playing to his strengths. Here is a skilled faculty-level biochemist. So he writes about a universe without aliens. Huh? An emigre from Stalinist Russia writes a sympathetic novel of social engineering and absolute despotism. Huh? I think we have a clear case of getting with the wrong program. That said, some things - like Mallow at Korell - are superficially extremely funny. Shame it doesn't hold water on deeper inspection; economic but no military sense at all.

If written now, I suspect it would sink without trace. As it is it is severely dated - which
can be excused, said the fan of Conrad - but also quite badly flawed.

Imagination; once upon a time, it was good- C
Science; power to make symbolic gestures; D+
Scene- setting; dubiously bland on the whole; D
Characterisation; I wouldn't want them running my country; C
Overall; I preferred the original Nightfall ; C

Summary: