The Foundation Trilogy, Day 1: SpaCe-SPAN

Now that I've covered very early Science Fiction with Wells, it's time to move into the twentieth century, and that's where choosing what to read gets hard. The list of famous and iconic Science Fiction authors is pretty long, for one thing. A lot of well-known, respected authors didn't make it onto my planned reading lineup; Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, etc. For another thing, have you ever noticed that Science Fiction authors seem to write a lot of books? Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like even when I'd finally decided which authors I wanted to make sure to get to, I still had a lot of books to choose from.


Authors first, though. And I decided that after The War of the Worlds, I wanted to read something by Isaac Asimov. He's one of the classics. I'm pretty sure he's also the only author referenced in a great quote from my favorite TV show which is meant to parody technobabble ("I've realigned the Penrose Tubes and jettisoned the stream of Einsteinium through the Hawking Converter, thereby reversing the Oppenheimer Effect and propelling us through the Asimov Space Curtain") (Mystery Science Theater 3000, Season 7, Episode 6, "Laserblast", in case anybody's interested).


But which book(s) to read? With Asimov, there are a lot to choose from. So I thought it'd be best to consult a widely-read mentor with very valuable opinions who would undoubtedly be reading these posts. She suggested that I read the Foundation Trilogy. So that's what I'm doing.


There are seven books in the Foundation Trilogy (a statement which makes no sense and is therefore really fun to make). This is because the first three books were published in the 1950s and known as the Foundation Trilogy for thirty years, until Asimov randomly wrote four more books in the 80s. However, this month I'll only be reading the original trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.


Which brings us at last to the first review. Having read the first half of Foundation, the first book, what are my initial thoughts?


Um... well... at least the characters have names.


You might've noticed that I didn't post yesterday. I meant to, but it didn't end up happening because I had trouble getting into this book.


Allow me to attempt to describe my difficulty by comparing this book to other things.


One of my very first thoughts upon starting the book, popping up around page 2, was, "Ooh, this is like Star Wars!". It takes place in a society consisting of millions of planets united under one centralized government, incidentally called the Empire. People move between planets by traveling through hyperspace. The planet where the seat of government is located consists of nothing but a single city. People with existing names like Lewis and Yohan hang out with people who have names like Salvor and Hari. There are definite similarities.


Especially to the prequels.


Now, I know that everybody hates the prequels (I've actually never had a problem with the prequels, but that's a different discussion). There are a lot of common, constantly repeated complaints against the prequels. One complaint against them which I've heard surprisingly infrequently is how talky they are.


See, the original Star Wars trilogy follows a pretty basic outline: there are some bad guys, there are some good guys, they all have interesting story arcs to follow, eventually the good guys win and we all go home happy. There's a lot of fighting and adventuring and flying around in spaceships, with occasional pauses for character drama. It's pretty straightforward storytelling.


The plotlines in the prequels are a lot more complicated. The distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys are less clear, and as many battles occur in state rooms and audience chambers as they do on battlefields and in space. The prequels feature shifting alliances, multiple different treaties, double agents, double-crosses, decoys, fronts, and situations which are not what they seem. And all this leads to a number of lengthy discussions of policy and strategy and elaborate schemes. So I have seen one (like I said, this seems to be a surprisingly rare complaint) person on the Internet say that watching the Star Wars prequels feels like watching C-SPAN.


And reading Foundation feels like reading C-SPAN.


Granted, I can't say that with any real certainty, having never actually watched C-SPAN (real quick, in case anybody doesn't know, C-SPAN is a specialty political TV and radio network which broadcasts things like Congressional and Parliamentary meetings; as one might imagine, it's infamously boring). But I'm saying it anyway, because it has a nice ring to it.


The whole book so far has basically been various different groups of people discussing politics, psychology, or both. When war looms, brilliant manipulators use political machination to prevent actual fighting. Political unrest is quieted through the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the acting government. Men move calmly and confidently along a path marked out for them decades earlier by a group of psychologists so good at their jobs that they could flawlessly predict the future of human progress and considerately arranged everything precisely the way it needed to be arranged. How nice.


The trouble is that it doesn't make for very exciting reading.


Because every issue so far has been resolved through diplomacy and/or manipulation rather than open warfare, and because the reader enters every new plotline knowing the basic eventual outcome (the psychologists being kind enough to give us glimpses of said outcomes), the book basically amounts to various groups of scheming businessmen having long, roundabout conversations with inevitable conclusions. You go into every new situation knowing who's going to get what he wants and who's going to be proven wrong. Everybody talks things through behind closed doors, things that we already knew were going to happen happen, and we move on to the next bit of the story. There's no suspense and no action. And, like in The War of the Worlds, there is almost no character development. Like I said earlier, these characters at least have names, but in many cases all you know about a character is his name, maybe something very basic about his appearance, and, of course, his political affiliations and aspirations. So not only is the whole book so far made up of nothing but discussions of events and the sly countermeasures being taken to make sure events don't get out of hand, they're events I don't really have any reason to be interested in.


Having said all that, I am trying to be optimistic about the second half and the other two books. There have been a few throwaway comments by various people which could imply that policy alone isn't going to work forever. I feel like there might eventually be some more interesting content. I guess I'll see tomorrow (if I have enough willpower to read further).


Until then.


~Pearl Clayton