Foundation and Earth

Planet-hopping stud
resents doing the right thing
demonizes child.

This book amplifies all the weaknesses of the previous books in the Foundation series: terrible dialogue, clumsy authorial intrusions, uneven pacing, overt misogyny, and deus ex machina endings. My sense is that if Asimov had come of age in a later generation, he would have papered his office walls with the rejection slips he would most assuredly (and deservedly) have received.

This is not to say that this book (and, by extension, the others in the series) is not a triumph of imagination. I agree with the many others who say that the Seldon Plan, psychohistory, the fall and re-establishment of a pan-galactic empire, and the development of a technocratic civilization are intensely fascinating and exciting concepts. And the early books do have their flashes of brilliance in execution. The flaws are all in the execution.

As others have detailed here, Asimov is just not a great novelist. He's lazy, for one thing, as evidenced by the lack of editing. I complained in my review of Foundation about the needless repetition of key plot points, but here it's worse. If Trevise said it once he said it thirty times in this novel that he was embarking on his mission because he didn't fully trust the intuition that led to his momentous decision in . We get it, and, as relatively sophisticated readers, we can be trusted to retain this motivation for a few hundred pages of uncomplicated narrative. As well, as the characters make much of the need to visit and explore a number of planets, what was needed was a writer who could build worlds, and devote large sections of the book to these planets, their histories, and the secrets they could reveal as our heroes sought to assemble the puzzle of Earth. Instead, we got treated to endless days and weeks of travel on a needlessly small spaceship with Trevize acting like an absolute ass, Pelorat sniveling and groveling for his attention, Bliss alternately complaining and mothering, and the plot itself absolutely foundering. When we do eventually get to the planets, we get a few hours' visit, immediate peril, and very little reward for the effort.

A second problem in Asimov's writing is his incapacity for making small leaps in imagination. Sure, he can conceive of humans evolving to have biological power transducers in their brains and powers of telepathy that work across galactic distances, but he is utterly incapable of seeing a future where women are more than objects to be ogled, dominated, owned, and used (I won't even get into his problems with intersexuality other than to say I've never felt so embarrassed reading something that purports to be from a “Great Writer.” It's as though he introduces the characters of Bander and Fallom just to point at them and say “ewwwww”). He also seems to think that a galactic civilization 25,000 years in the future will still run on Commodore PET computers and a ca. 1982 BBS despite the fact that Moore's Law was well-established at the time he was writing. Everyone who was anyone in SF circles had had more advanced ideas about computers and technology for decades by the time this book was written, and yet Asimov still thinks the typical computer will be disk-based terminals.

My greatest regret is with the dialogue. If you're going to force us into a confined space with three characters for weeks on end, you can at least have the decency to write dialogue that doesn't sound like it came from a late-Victorian-era George Bernard Shaw drama. Pelorat's use of “old chap”, “dear fellow”, and “my good man”, not to mention Trevise's near-constant disquisitions, became so grating that I impatiently glossed over their discussions. Trevize's unbearably crass treatment of Bliss and Fallom were even worse. At one point, he orders Bliss to take Fallom into the other room and instruct them “children should be seldom seen and almost never heard.” I started to think his irascibility was part of some larger plot point – maybe he was being emotionally controlled, maybe he was losing his grip on rationality – but it turns out, no, he's just a dick. Could this really be Asimov's idea of a galaxy-saving hero, a surly, pompous, short-tempered, condescending jerk? Or was this Asimov's own personality intruding as it did with Hari Seldon, Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow and all the other strong men of Asimov's universe? I really wonder.

At the root of what makes this novel hard to like is Asimov's admitted motives for writing it in the first place: fan demand and filthy lucre. He didn't particularly want to return to the Foundation universe and it shows. I think his editor and publisher, desperate to get the book to market, or lacking the courage to challenge Asimov (or both), didn't have the willingness to make the extensive revisions necessary to turn this bloated, awkward, and dreary draft into a polished piece of SF literature that could provide a fitting end to the Foundation series. Shame.

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