sasha

wow. wow. wow. isaac i was SO unfamiliar with your game. published nearly 75(!) years ago, foundation manages to deliver a science-forward speculative look at what a interplanetary future holds for the human race in a way that's still accessible AND bitingly funny. this book truly is the father of science fiction and i'm so happy i picked it up.

+1 star for: the prose! i was at all times giggling to myself while reading this. though we follow a multitude of characters through hundreds of years, there is still an underlying current of sarcasm that runs through them all that is portrayed in SUCH a funny way.

+1 star for: the trial of hari seldon! i was at the edge of my chair the entire time. with all of seldons crises we know from the encyclopedic foreshadowing that the main man will somehow masterfully outsmart the impending problem, THIS ONE IN PARTICULAR was the best (perhaps because it was the first)

+1 star for: the fuck ass names and lord dorwins lisp. i was SUFFERING through some of the spellings but the absolute satisfaction i got after deciphering what he was saying was just so top tier

+1 star for: space opera perfection

+1 star for: “The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receiving initiative, a freezing of caste, a damning of curiosity—a hundred other factors”.

and

“Since when does prejudice follow any law but its own”.

two of some frighteningly insightful quotes from this gem

-1 star for: white man nonsense. not a SINGLE important female character on screen other than the hateful wife and passing mentions of a mistress here or there. also every main character is just a super smart scrappy young white guy who gets his way in the end. after 5 times it gets really boring and repetitive. i know it's reflective of its time but once you notice you can't UNnotice. pretty disappointing representation from an otherwise astute look at the human condition. if this book had more variety in its protagonists and/or one less section it would have been a five star.

+1 star for: boil rhyming with doyle, made me giggle every time

+1 star for: actually getting me to make faces of horror and disgust every thirty minutes. people must have thought i was WEEEEIRD on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, on the bus, at work...

+1 star for: “so i'll be wed in the church of the holy incestuous mushroom?”

(3.5 stars)

+1 star for: THE ENDING??? wow the last 20% of this book felt like a blur, i couldn't put it down!

+1 star for: a happy ending! i was so hype when the fake out with anastasia was revealed. and HELLO??? 1,500 years alone for Astrid.... wow that reveal was so so so intense

+3 stars for: the Thunderheads contingencies for the animals!! loved it!!!

-1 star for: the overall format of the book. generally i like when books are either told out of order or have unique formatting in them but having BOTH was honestly a bit too much for me. i found it a little too confusing that at some points i just didn't care lol

-.5 stars for: MAKING MY KING ROMAN DAMISCH WAIT 117 YEARS TO BE WITH HIS ONE TRUE LOVE UGH HASNT HE SUFFERED ENOUGHHHHHH

+3 stars for: “his eyes are shut too tightly to know anything beyond his own anguish” PEOPLE DIED! I DIED!

+2 stars for: the pure SHOCK of finding out what Tyger was meant for, the FEEDING FRENZY, the great fucking resonance and the cliffhanger UGH

+1 star for: anastasia and maries relationship ugh im so soft for those two

-1 star for: THE DEATH OF THE GRANDDAME UGH MARIE YOU WILL ALWAYS BE FAMOUS “she was good. very, very good.”

-1 star for: such a slow start, this book deadass took me NINE months to finish cause it was such a slog at first

at about the halfway point i knew i was going to rate this book 1 star. it took a while to get how I feel now and felt reading this straightened out into words. so for now these are my immediate thoughts:

it is incredibly ironic that this book purports to be a looking glass into the worst of human nature when the author has made up these characters and experiences basically from scratch with no research into real victims and how trauma recovery actually works. the fact that it follows four men, three of which are queer and two of which are black, just feels so icky. like at no point does it feel that these stories and characters exist in the real world. besides the fact that their environments feel hollow, we get almost no depth from these men after they enter their thirties. i was actually astounded by the fact that once i started reading about them in their 50s i realized that at no point had the characters actually matured. i went back to read bits from when they were in their early 20s and their voices are the same, their thought processes are the same and their problems are the same. willem is beautiful and naive, malcolm becomes an almost ghostlike character with no agency other than ‘build beautiful house', JB stays a tortured artist and jude. god poor jude.

i can't say enough about how painful it was to exist inside his head. an unbelievably smart and kind person who at no point in this entire book think he is ever worthy of being treated other than a piece of garbage to be used and abused by everyone around him. it is sickening to be rendered a helpless bystander as jude is failed again and again and again by those closest to him. the people we are supposed to believe know and love him the best. i don't believe for a second that a DOCTOR and a PARENT and a SPOUSE and the alleged litany of friends we meet through the novel wouldn't have this man forcibly committed after decades of self harm and suicide attempts. besides the fact that they do stage an intervention nearly thirty years too late, i find it so hard to believe that we are expected to believe these people love jude.

i am no stranger to dark themes and topics being the focus of literature and media (hell one of my favorite shows is SVU) but to me the key element missing here (besides the fact that it very obviously entirely made up) is that there's no resolution. suffering and pain and disability and mental illness all happen without reason in the real world but that's just it. this book ISN'T real life. it pretends to be sure but it doesn't for a second feel like anything happening is real. horrible things do happen in real life but the extent to which we have to witness them in this book is almost laughable. at no point does anything in this book mean anything. showing suffering for the sake of the suffering CAN and HAS been done well in other media, however it has always meant something. whether to show the cruelty and darkest parts of humanity or to show the resilience of the human spirit. at every twist and turn i was just screaming WHY WHY WHY.

if i could give this book less that one star i would. it's only and i mean ONLY saving grace is the formatting. i like the non linear story telling, the structure of the parts and chapters and how we follow the characters throughout their entire adult lives. the writing at times is so beautiful that it hurts and other times it's so self absorbed that i giggled in disbelief. it is too long tho, this could have been 200 pages shorter at least. in fact this book should be 0 pages lmfao.