I may get my nerd license revoked for saying this, but here goes. I have never read Asimov’s Foundation series. When Daniel discovered this, he scoured the library and my dad’s old books looking for it. He wouldn’t let me start with “Prelude to Foundation,” which my dad had. It had to be “Foundation,” since it was written first. He finally found it in our library and I checked it out.
I started reading it last night. When I finished chapter 3, I suddenly thought “Wait a second, this book’s beginning is basically a bunch of description of the world. How did Asimov pull it off when the Critters authors didn’t?” So, I went back to chapter 1 to do some analyzing.
The first thing I discovered was in the first paragraph, catastrophe is hinted at. “He was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was.” Right away, I have a promise for a conflict, and that promise kept me reading.
The second thing I discovered was that the description is all told through the eyes of character Gaal Dornick. In describing a Jump through hyperspace, Asimov doesn’t just say, “it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar.” He says, “Gaal had waited for the first of those jumps with a little dread curled gently in his stomach, and it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little internal kick which ceased an instant before he could be sure he had felt it. That was all.”
Can you see the difference? Asimov attached Gaal’s emotions to the description, and its so much more interesting. I feel right along with him his amazement and disappointment at the things that are described. Looks like my analysis from before about how to include good description was right.
So, conflict and a character I care about are two things that seem to be essential from the beginning in a story that I read. I can do conflicts just fine (as far as I can tell). Creating likable characters, not so much. I’m working on it though, and I think I’m getting better. It looks like one thing that will help is getting the character’s emotional reactions into the story more.
You haven’t read Foundation?! You SHOULD get your nerd license revoked!
Seriously, though, Foundation was really some awesome sci fi, but there were some thing in it that Asimov didn’t do too well. For one thing, he wasn’t very good with his dialogue and character development. After a while, the characters seem to blend into each other. And the characters come and go. For example, after the first fifty pages, you never see Hari Seldon as a character again. It skips forward about a hundred years, and then 100 pages later, it skips to the next hundred years, etc.
The real strength in Asimov’s Foundation is the concepts that he examined. He wrestled with some of the classic questions of free will vs. fate, and did it through inventing some of the coolest sci fi concepts, such as Psychohistory. It’s kind of like using quantum physics to examine the question of free will; you can’t predict what one individual human being is going to do (like you can’t predict what one individual subatomic “particle” is going to do), but you can use the law of large numbers to predict what societies will do. But what does that mean about the individual? Can one person change history, or is history like a giant river that pulls us along like leaves floating on its surface? And how accurately can you predict something, either? What if an outlier comes in and changes some of your basic assumptions of the model? Can you build your model so that it’s adaptable? What do you need to change to do that, and what does that mean about free will?
The first book is a little bit slow and boring (IMO). I also didn’t like what I perceived as Asimov’s message (that history just flows on its own and can’t be stopped or changed–very 60s), so I put it down for a while. However, I picked it back up and started reading the sequel, Foundation and Empire, and around the middle of that book, I started getting into it! Things get REALLY interesting when The Mule shows up, and when he starts hunting for the second foundation! By the time you get to the last book in the original series, it gets really, really good! The second foundation is one of the coolest things in the series!
What I think is really interesting is how much other sci fi borrowed from Foundation. For example, Coruscant in Star Wars is basically Trantor without the domes. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is basically the Galactic Encyclopedia. It’s also really funny looking back at the technology disconnects, since Foundation was written before computers. It almost made me laugh to read about ships sending canisters to each other with paper messages inside.
Foundation is a lot different from today’s sci fi in that it focuses so much energy on concepts and ideas. Today’s sci fi focuses more on characters and the story. But Foundation is still one of the best sci fi series ever written, and sets the standard for the genre. It’s definitely worth reading!
Thanks for your thoughts on the Foundation series. Please understand that I never avoided it because I thought it would be boring! I just didn’t have time *cough*school*cough* to really seek it out. What I have read so far about Psychohistory is really interesting, and I’m looking forward to reading more.