There's a big difference between "important" and "great". I'm not denying that the Foundation series could arguably be the most important science fiction ever written. But when it is set up as the greatest series of all time? That's disappointing (read: lazy). The truth is, the Foundation series really isn't very good. Interesting at points, yes. Groundbreaking to the genre, I guess. Unique, yes. But it's a literary mess filled with mathematical, social, cultural, political, and historical nonsense. It's a sequence of didactic dialogue whose only plot device is a deus ex machina. Er, Seldon ex machina. No, Gaia ex machina. Um, Daneel ex machina? Seriously, that's it. That's all it has. This isn't a Star Wars situation where we're all kind of in on the joke. People take Foundation seriously. People fawn over this series (just Google "greatest science fiction of all time"). I get that we read science fiction to escape and dream, but you have to turn your brain completely off for this reading experience to work. If it had stopped as a series of related short stories written by a 20something Asimov, it would have still been important, and I would be much more positive about it. But, much like Dune, it became caught up in itself and outstayed its reasonability.
For the sake of space, I'm just going to stick with the 5 primary books of the Foundation-era universe: Foundation through Foundation and Earth. I won't complain in the slightest about the retconning (certainly in his combining the universes of Robot and Empire with Foundation). I have no problem with that at all. I'm much more annoyed with the incoherence of the basic elements of his main plot. (And that's not even approaching it as a theist! The theological propositions presumed with impunity and swallowed wholesale are very . . . oy.) I'll divide my review into these categories. The point is to show that these aren't just personal foibles on my part (even as a Christian) but disturbing injections of a troubling worldview that minimizes humanity and shows a real lack of awareness of the process of history and its writing:
The Ridiculous Oversimplification of History One of my favorite old sayings is "For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail." Yes, this approaches chaos theory/butterfly effect, but it is quite applicable. The premise of Foundation seems to be that history can be controlled by manipulating a few people's decisions at a few key moments. Well, let's explain why that idea is ridiculous. The easiest and quickest way to stick chaos theory into Foundation mythology is Edward Lorenz who summarizes, "The present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future." The idea behind chaos theory is that the slightest discrepancies in initial conditions (including simple rounding errors in observation) lead to enormous changes in the outcome. When one adds the "for want of a nail" saying, it then means that any slightest change in any condition along the way would result in catastrophic changes to the outcome. Asimov isn't a fool. He tries to create plausibility for his main plot driver by turning "psychohistory" into a clever mathematic that is based on the largest possible population sample (in his case, billions of humans across the galaxy). Person behavior is unpredictable; crowd behavior is slightly predictable; mob behavior is predictable. Classic sociology (but that's later in this post). It would almost be forgivable if the entire series weren't based on the idea.
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AuthorIf I ever say something in here that doesn't make sense, please ask me to clarify. It always makes sense in my head, but that doesn't necessary mean anything to you . . . Categories
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