The Foundation trilogy Book

When Isaac Asimov learned that the World Science Fiction Convention would be giving a special Hugo Award in 1966 for "Best All Time Series," he believed that the category had been created specifically to honor J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Indeed, for a modern reader, it's surprising to learn that Asimov's Foundation Trilogy was once so highly revered in the canon of speculative fiction that it beat Tolkien's masterpiece for the prize. Such are the fortunes of a genre built on the challenge of looking forward: when the future actually arrives, even its greatest masterpieces are left looking like the relics of a hopelessly distant past.

The Foundation Trilogy is not the greatest multi-novel series to emerge from modern science fiction. Nor is it, by even a generous assessment, a masterpiece. Perhaps the series fared better in a time when the expectations placed upon sci-fi writers was that they would produce entertaining pulp -- when the novelty and intellectual reach of Asimov's ideas could distract from his lacking style. By today's standards, however, the work is almost hopelessly inept.

The premise is this: Harry Seldon, the greatest psychologist of the far future, predicts that the Galactic Empire will crumble ala Rome within a few hundred years of his writing. Using the "science" of psychohistory (his own invention), he foresees an intellectual Dark Age of approximately 30,000 years following this collapse, but he also calculates that this period can be shortened to a single millennium if the right people are in the right places to keep the flame of knowledge lit. Thus, he creates two "Foundations," groups that work behind the scenes to keep learning alive through the empire's fall.

The story spins bizarrely but predictably from there: wars, rumors of war, deranged mutants, psychologists with seemingly supernatural abilities, resolution. Asimov's unflinching faith in the potential of science is the real focus throughout. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we've come to understand that even closed systems are fundamentally unpredictable over any considerable length of time; in Asimov's time, there was still faith that science could predict the future of a galaxy-spanning empire over the course of thousands of years.

The naivety of the late 40s and early 50s, however, is not what prevents The Foundation Trilogy from being the masterpiece it was once considered to be. Asimov's plot isn't perfect, but it's functional. Rather, the work's real failings are literary. The characters are flat, cardboard cutouts of people, the great leaders of one generation virtually indistinguishable from the next (women, of course, are almost never to be seen, with the notable exception of a rather likable young heroine in the second part of Second Foundation). Nor is there poetry in Asimov's prose; instead, there are merely endless pages of expository dialogue occasionally graced with the most meager of descriptions.

Fundamentally at issue here is the fact that science fiction has earned the right to be considered literature, and that the canonization of works like Foundation serve only as unpleasant reminders of the genre's humble beginnings. It is not an altogether terrible work, and certainly worth reading for historical context alone, but advocates of contemporary science fiction can only hope that novels such as these will one day no longer be the standard by which the genre's literary merits are weighed.