This well-known series of books captures the best and the worst of speculative fiction in a single sweeping narrative. I will even coin a new term—the Asimov syndrome —to describe this distinctive combination of the high and the low. It’s all summed up in the dilemma faced by the reviewer who must figure out how to evaluate a literary work that mixes brilliantly creative conceptual thinking with lackluster writing.
Isaac Asimov started writing stories around the time he was eleven years old, and was selling them to pulp magazines while still in his teens. He began publishing the Foundation stories in his early twenties, and the prose is much what you might expect from a precocious youngster, glib and shallow. The quality of the writing improves in later parts of the trilogy, but not by much.
One seeks in vain for a clever turn of phrase, an interesting metaphor, a description that is more than formulaic. The dialogue is well suited to pushing the plot forward, or sketching out various scientific or sociological ideas, but is mostly the type of canned exchanges you expect from a 1940s radio soap opera.
I dwell on these matters not to pick on Asimov—as you will see below, I enjoy many aspects of his oeuvre—but to point out a syndrome that is all too common in the sci-fi genre. This literary category was born in the pages of pulp fiction periodicals, and struggles to this day to rise above the marks of this humble lineage.
And yet . . . and yet . . .and yet . . . Asimov also demonstrates (maddeningly, beautifully, brilliantly) all the greatness of the sci-fi genre from a conceptual point of view. There is hardly a page in this work that doesn’t develop some exciting or provocative perspective on human affairs, group interactions, individual and social psychology, technology or values. Moreover, the ideas are always pushed farther than you expect, with second-order and third-order effects taken into account, almost the way archeologists develop far-flung implications from potsherds and broken tools.
Asimov claimed to be inspired by Gibbon's massive and extravagant historical work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . In truth, there is little comparison between the two. (Most notably, Gibbon was a masterful prose stylist, who hardly ever wrote a lackluster paragraph in that 3,000 page magnum opus.) But the sheer audacity of a lad scarcely out of his teens constructing a future history spanning the fall and rise of empires in a multi-volume work, with constant shifts of setting, characters, conflicts, centuries . . . well, that tells you a lot about this ambitious author. Asimov may have changed a lot in later decades, but never lost his zeal for covering everything—as measured by his output (more than 500 books) or his odd, and perhaps unsurpassed claim to be the only writer to publish books in 9 out of the 10 Dewey Decimal Categories. Even in his goals as a grown-up, he displayed the naïve hubris of an adolescent who just succeeded in shaving for the first time and is planning to fly an F- 14 Tomcat tomorrow.
The only Dewey Decimal category he missed was “100”—which includes books of philosophy. This omission is peculiar enough, since Asimov is one of the most philosophical of the science fiction writers. In fact, the Foundation works remind me more of the German philosopher Hegel than Gibbon. Asimov’s development of the concept of psycho-history is quite Hegelian, and his whole worldview in these books is extremely dialectical. Of course, the concepts that underpin these novels are dubious in the highest degree, but Asimov’s ability to construct stories that, like the Hegelian antithesis, emerge from the mixing of opposites, is invigorating.
Hari Seldon, the great psycho-historical prognosticator, is one of the most interesting characters in science fiction. Here Asimov rises above the limitations of his pulp fiction background, and creates a memorable figure—although mostly because he makes Seldon in his own image. Seldon’s is full of brilliant insights and conceptual leaps of awesome proportions. If he wrote books, they would be very much like the kind Mr. Asimov has left behind.
In the final pages of the trilogy, Asimov even introduces that greatest of sci-fi rarities: a female protagonist. Even more striking, she is a fourteen-year-old girl, Arkady Darell, who has fate of the universe, more or less, resting on her shapely shoulders. (Hannah Montana, eat your heart out!) But there is an even more fascinating character in these books: The Mule. I will say no more, since the specifics of this character are tied to surprising shifts in the plot of the Foundation trilogy. But this intriguing and shadowy villain proves that when Asimov put his over-heated mind to work in constructing a dramatic character, rather than in some strange technological twist, he could come up with something Shakespearean. (Okay, maybe only Chekhovian.)
Like it or leave it, this tripartite work is the grand monument in Asimov's oeuvre. He tried to recapture the magic of the Foundation trilogy years later, returning to this inspirational theme of his youth—but the mature Asimov was unable to match the unbridled energy of this grandiose early effort. It is a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. And, to a certain extent, this is the heritage of the sci-fi genre as a whole. The challenge remains to live up to conceptual brilliance of this pioneering author, while aspiring to a literary style that breaks free of pulp fiction formulas. Asimov only took us part way on that journey.