Things I Like - Books

I recently finished reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series – for probably the 6th or 7th time. I come back to this classic every five or six years, just enough time for me to have remembered the basic outline but to have forgotten the details that make the story come alive (sometimes having a memory like a sieve is a good thing).

Set 50,000 years in the future, the series chronicles the efforts of humanity to avert the thirty thousand year long cycle of barbarism predicted to follow the approaching collapse of the Galactic Empire. Good thing they had the brilliant mathematician Hari Seldon who not only mapped out a plan designed to bring humanity through in only 1,000 years, but established two colonies to implement it. The books have the spaceships and futuristic gadgets that characterized
‘hard’ science fiction of the time, but what made me a fan were the human solutions employed to overcome the crises foreseen by Seldon during the 1,000 year rebuilding period.

The series started out as eight short stories that were published in Astounding Magazine between 1942 and 1950. These stories were later consolidated and published as three volumes – Foundation (1950), Foundation and Empire (1951), and Second Foundation (1952). Together, they came to be known as the Foundation Trilogy. In 1966, they won the Hugo award for "Best All-Time Series”. The award hasn’t been made again – kind of difficult to do when you’ve named it the Best All-Time Series. Maybe they assumed we had reached the end of Science Fiction?

30 years after writing the trilogy, Asimov’s publishers convinced him to write another book for the series. After all, the Trilogy only took things up through the first 200 years of the 1,000 needed to establish the second Empire. Foundation’s Edge was published in 1982 and was followed up by Foundation and Earth in 1986. In this last story, Asimov leaves humanity facing a completely new direction - unfortunately, one never explored by Asimov. Instead, the final two books in the series, Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993) are prequels taking place before the Trilogy begins. I really wish he had gone forward and finished off the remaining 500 years rather than filling in time from the beginning. His widow Janet Asimov indicated that Asimov wrote the prequels because he didn’t know how to go on from Foundation and Earth.

I don't know why I never noticed it before, but what struck me in my recent re-reading was the lack of female characters in the first volume. I know that Science Fiction was the undisputed playground of men (both authors and readers) back in the 1950’s, but come on. Did men of the future somehow figure out how to reproduce without women? Did women just not exist by this point? It’s not like the stories were taking place on space stations where it is conceivable that a mid-20th century mind might not have expected women to be hanging out. No, the majority of the story takes place on land where even the most sexist of men would expect to find a woman or two. Luckily, Asimov introduces strong female characters in the remaining volumes. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have finished reading the series if he hadn’t, but at least I could stop worrying about what happens to women in the future.

If you’re a science fiction fan and somehow haven’t read this yet, do yourself a favor and start the Foundation adventure now. It's the All-Time best SciFi series ever!