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Jason Pettus's Reviews > Forward the Foundation
Forward the Foundation (Foundation, #7)
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Jason Pettus's review
bookshelves: alt-history, classic, postmodernism, sci-fi
Apr 04, 2022
bookshelves: alt-history, classic, postmodernism, sci-fi
Read 2 times. Last read April 4, 2022.
2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
So here as we reach not the last of the '80s and '90s "bridging" novels that Asimov wrote at the end of his life to bring together his famous '50s trilogies "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," but indeed the very last book Asimov himself wrote from start to finish before dying in 1993, I thought it'd be worth taking a little time and really asking ourselves if these bridging novels were even worth the effort, given that they've turned out even just 40 years later to be such lackluster reading experiences (and spoiler alert, that was indeed the same case here, such a disappointing read that it almost is not even worth recapping). To understand why Asimov did this, you have to understand the similarly titled "Future History" series by his friend and peer Robert Heinlein, who wrote an entire series of short stories and novels primarily in the '60s and '70s that were all set along a single persistent 300-year storyline, just that he wrote the actual stories out of chronological order; they've lost a lot of name recognition over the decades in a way that Asimov's "Foundation" books never have, but it's important to remember that in 1966, when the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention decided to name an honorary Hugo Award after "Greatest Sci-Fi Series of All Time," Heinlein's Future History came in second, beaten only by Asimov's own Foundation series.
If you look at these three unrelated '50s series of Asimov while squinting and sort of half-frowning, you can sort of squeeze them together into one unified storyline, spanning not Heinlein's 300 years of the future but instead an entire 22,000, to an eventual populated Milky Way galaxy containing thousands of inhabited planets, where Earth has become the stuff of myth and legend, and where the main crisis is that the all-encompassing empire that has run the entire galaxy for the last ten thousand years is on its last gasp, and the only person who knows is an eccentric history professor who comes up with an intellectually clever way to help humanity prevent its own destruction despite itself. But that takes bending some roads in really curvy ways to get all the details to line up, including the fact that the "Empire" trilogy envisions an expanded humanity where not a robot is in sight, while the "Robot" trilogy (taking place thousands of years previously, in a day-after-tomorrow Earth) features tens of thousands of robots everywhere; and that in the "Empire" books, Earth is now supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, while no such indication is given in the "Robot" books.
That's where these eight books from the '80s and '90s came from, a desire to write all the twisty, exposition-heavy roads that lead from one trilogy to the next, and then attempts no less at taking the very last book and somehow trying to tie it back to the first book set 22,000 years previous. That's ballsy, to be sure, and it officially brings Asimov's timeline to an inarguable "megaseries" status, a great thing to leave behind for all of us in the future to think of as a single, monumental work from this genre pioneer and once massively popular author. It's impressive to be able to say "Asimov's Future History," and he deserves credit for devoting the last decade of his life and the last of his physical health to accomplishing this busy feat. But, as my almost exclusively disappointed reactions to the books have made clear, they've all been profound letdowns as actual reading experiences, franchise-propping scaffolding that exists for almost no other reason than to pass along story beats, and that really feel like the work of a worn-out old man who had nothing left of interest to say.
That by itself is tragic enough, but another bad thing these bridging novels deliver, that wouldn't have existed at all without these books existing, is Asimov's increasingly adamant refusal as an old man to ever look back at his old behavior or writing, or to ever think that an apology or at least a rethinking was in order. In fact, Asimov expressly used these last novels of his career to defiantly still engage in the exact behavior that his increasingly younger critics excoriated in his books, such as the subsumed racism of '50s-style "PG-rated" slurs like "boy," and the out-and-out sexism and sexual objectifiction of every female character. He didn't need to do that -- even if he wasn't going to be progressive enough to acknowledge his critics and change those references, he could've easily just stayed neutral on the subject -- so to purposely put them in is a legitimate "fuck you" from Asimov at the end of his life to the people who eventually became the "woke crowd," and who would eat him alive if he happened to be alive and in his nineties and still trying to publish now, like poor old creepy Woody Allen.
So where do we place these books? As the excuse that brings you and I together in this megareview of his megaseries? As a real mistake that left a bitter aftertaste to Asimov's career right when he should've been getting lionized? Good for several more awards and another several million into the Asimov estate checking account before the check-writer finally croaked? All of the above? For me, I like to think about how complex and interesting someone like Asimov's career was that we should still be caring about the arguments 30 years later; flawed to be sure, and sometimes very deliberately and not just a "sign of his times," but also impressive and prodigious, and that laid such important groundwork in the legitimizing of science-fiction that he simply cannot be ignored. Hell, there was a brand-new adaptation of "Foundation" on Apple+ just this last spring; I mean, a shitty and unwatchable adaptation, make no mistake, but there's something amazing to be said that people are still willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on his stories. So if the bridging novels are what's needed to tie together the historical importance and lasting power of these three original '50s trilogies, then I suppose that's not necessarily the worst thing, especially since after you read them all for the first time, you never have to reapproach the bridging tales ever again for as long as you live.
And that finally brings us to the reason I started this megareview in the first place -- because Asimov's original '50s "Foundation" trilogy was the first adult science-fiction I ever read, some of the first adult fiction that I had ever read at all, tied in closely to my nostalgic memories of being in my grandparents' house in the '70s and '80s and peering through my dad and uncle's old '40 through '60s sci-fi collection on the musty back shelves of the guest bedroom. I started reviewing the first Robot novel two and a half years ago precisely because I wanted to get to the point that I'm at right this moment, entering the original "Foundation" trilogy I loved so much as a teen and seeing how it now not only stacks up against the rest of the "Future History" megaseries, but also how it stacks up against time. We'll be talking a lot more about that in the next review, for 1951's Foundation which started them all, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me again next month for that.
Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986)
Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
So here as we reach not the last of the '80s and '90s "bridging" novels that Asimov wrote at the end of his life to bring together his famous '50s trilogies "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," but indeed the very last book Asimov himself wrote from start to finish before dying in 1993, I thought it'd be worth taking a little time and really asking ourselves if these bridging novels were even worth the effort, given that they've turned out even just 40 years later to be such lackluster reading experiences (and spoiler alert, that was indeed the same case here, such a disappointing read that it almost is not even worth recapping). To understand why Asimov did this, you have to understand the similarly titled "Future History" series by his friend and peer Robert Heinlein, who wrote an entire series of short stories and novels primarily in the '60s and '70s that were all set along a single persistent 300-year storyline, just that he wrote the actual stories out of chronological order; they've lost a lot of name recognition over the decades in a way that Asimov's "Foundation" books never have, but it's important to remember that in 1966, when the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention decided to name an honorary Hugo Award after "Greatest Sci-Fi Series of All Time," Heinlein's Future History came in second, beaten only by Asimov's own Foundation series.
If you look at these three unrelated '50s series of Asimov while squinting and sort of half-frowning, you can sort of squeeze them together into one unified storyline, spanning not Heinlein's 300 years of the future but instead an entire 22,000, to an eventual populated Milky Way galaxy containing thousands of inhabited planets, where Earth has become the stuff of myth and legend, and where the main crisis is that the all-encompassing empire that has run the entire galaxy for the last ten thousand years is on its last gasp, and the only person who knows is an eccentric history professor who comes up with an intellectually clever way to help humanity prevent its own destruction despite itself. But that takes bending some roads in really curvy ways to get all the details to line up, including the fact that the "Empire" trilogy envisions an expanded humanity where not a robot is in sight, while the "Robot" trilogy (taking place thousands of years previously, in a day-after-tomorrow Earth) features tens of thousands of robots everywhere; and that in the "Empire" books, Earth is now supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, while no such indication is given in the "Robot" books.
That's where these eight books from the '80s and '90s came from, a desire to write all the twisty, exposition-heavy roads that lead from one trilogy to the next, and then attempts no less at taking the very last book and somehow trying to tie it back to the first book set 22,000 years previous. That's ballsy, to be sure, and it officially brings Asimov's timeline to an inarguable "megaseries" status, a great thing to leave behind for all of us in the future to think of as a single, monumental work from this genre pioneer and once massively popular author. It's impressive to be able to say "Asimov's Future History," and he deserves credit for devoting the last decade of his life and the last of his physical health to accomplishing this busy feat. But, as my almost exclusively disappointed reactions to the books have made clear, they've all been profound letdowns as actual reading experiences, franchise-propping scaffolding that exists for almost no other reason than to pass along story beats, and that really feel like the work of a worn-out old man who had nothing left of interest to say.
That by itself is tragic enough, but another bad thing these bridging novels deliver, that wouldn't have existed at all without these books existing, is Asimov's increasingly adamant refusal as an old man to ever look back at his old behavior or writing, or to ever think that an apology or at least a rethinking was in order. In fact, Asimov expressly used these last novels of his career to defiantly still engage in the exact behavior that his increasingly younger critics excoriated in his books, such as the subsumed racism of '50s-style "PG-rated" slurs like "boy," and the out-and-out sexism and sexual objectifiction of every female character. He didn't need to do that -- even if he wasn't going to be progressive enough to acknowledge his critics and change those references, he could've easily just stayed neutral on the subject -- so to purposely put them in is a legitimate "fuck you" from Asimov at the end of his life to the people who eventually became the "woke crowd," and who would eat him alive if he happened to be alive and in his nineties and still trying to publish now, like poor old creepy Woody Allen.
So where do we place these books? As the excuse that brings you and I together in this megareview of his megaseries? As a real mistake that left a bitter aftertaste to Asimov's career right when he should've been getting lionized? Good for several more awards and another several million into the Asimov estate checking account before the check-writer finally croaked? All of the above? For me, I like to think about how complex and interesting someone like Asimov's career was that we should still be caring about the arguments 30 years later; flawed to be sure, and sometimes very deliberately and not just a "sign of his times," but also impressive and prodigious, and that laid such important groundwork in the legitimizing of science-fiction that he simply cannot be ignored. Hell, there was a brand-new adaptation of "Foundation" on Apple+ just this last spring; I mean, a shitty and unwatchable adaptation, make no mistake, but there's something amazing to be said that people are still willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on his stories. So if the bridging novels are what's needed to tie together the historical importance and lasting power of these three original '50s trilogies, then I suppose that's not necessarily the worst thing, especially since after you read them all for the first time, you never have to reapproach the bridging tales ever again for as long as you live.
And that finally brings us to the reason I started this megareview in the first place -- because Asimov's original '50s "Foundation" trilogy was the first adult science-fiction I ever read, some of the first adult fiction that I had ever read at all, tied in closely to my nostalgic memories of being in my grandparents' house in the '70s and '80s and peering through my dad and uncle's old '40 through '60s sci-fi collection on the musty back shelves of the guest bedroom. I started reviewing the first Robot novel two and a half years ago precisely because I wanted to get to the point that I'm at right this moment, entering the original "Foundation" trilogy I loved so much as a teen and seeing how it now not only stacks up against the rest of the "Future History" megaseries, but also how it stacks up against time. We'll be talking a lot more about that in the next review, for 1951's Foundation which started them all, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me again next month for that.
Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986)
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Started Reading
April 4, 2022
– Shelved
April 4, 2022
– Shelved as:
alt-history
April 4, 2022
– Shelved as:
classic
April 4, 2022
– Shelved as:
postmodernism
April 4, 2022
– Shelved as:
sci-fi
April 4, 2022
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