I got this book because it seemed like a cool edition of The Foundation Trilogy. I later discovered that it glows in the dark when I turned the lights off to go to sleep.
Thoughts on the sequels? I absolutely beyond love the first. Read it maybe 5 times by now. This last time didn’t want to end the adventure, so finally gave the second one a try, and was pretty badly disappointed. The first does such a good job with meanings within meanings and subtlety in dialogue (along with everything else it does right), and the second just seemed to be trying too hard at those things and ultimately failing.
@FuglyDuck@norbert@kbin.social The robot books featuring detective Elijah Bailey are all very good. The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire.
I couldn’t disagree more. The writing is absolute cringe.
For some reason I assumed Asimov would be a good writer, maybe because I read his “Last Question” short story a long time ago and thought it was brilliant.
But Foundation reads like it was written by a teenager. He’s obsessed with describing ghee whiz gadgets and doodads that I couldn’t care less about, the prose is plain and boring, and the themes and characters have not aged well. It feels like I’m watching the Jetsons, except it’s not at all quaint.
I was hoping to be able to look past all this and get lost in the epic scale of the story and universe he purportedly builds, but it just wasn’t there for me.
Sounds like you're kinda more after something a little less hard? Asimov is very much the quintessential "this could've been an essay" hard sci-fi author (though I will say, imo The Mule is a great character)...but then again I'd argue most hard hard sci-fi is like that. It's either an ethics or a speculative engineering/biology essay under the veneer of a story. It doesn't matter much in a short story because you don't have to set up anything beyond your core theme but stretching out into something more than 50 pages long can be a bit much for some people.
If you're after something longform from him that's not so...jargony, have you tried Caves of Steel? it's his attempt at writing genre fiction and at least I think it's pretty good. It's a murder mystery set in his general universe (though way before the Empire and everything) and tries to tackle the more social aspects and themes behind robotics.
@nikt@norbert@kbin.social I agree Foundation and its associates are not very well written. But the sequel Foundation's Edge (1982) is brilliant. He's a whole different writer. From the same period there are The Robots of Dawn (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985). I especially like the almost philosophical discussion, in Robots and Empire, between two robots about the meaning of Asimov's great invention, the laws of robotics.
Not really. Foundation is notoriously NOT character-driven, bit of a pendant to Dune’s hero-centered narrative. I love the world of Foundation, but it really is bit of a chore to read the books.
Foundation is basically all concept. If you do want to get into it, there's a dated but still entertaining (IMO) radio drama version the BBC did in the early 70s. You can hear it here.
@FlyingSquid@tdawg I heard the radio adaptation of the Foundation Trilogy when it first went out but don't remember being very impressed The 80 episode TV adaption that's underway sounds hard to swallow. We now have the original 3 books, two sequels, two prequels and 3 authorised books written by other authors since Asimov's death. To understand these later books you need to know at least something about Asimov's robot novels.
I personally have found them very easy to read. It doesn’t spend time on character development but it summarized the story well and moves on (jumps forward in time) before it gets boring.
That was the context times they were in. Nuclear sciences were new, and miraculous; but they didn’t quite know how dangerous it was to be around, so Asimov envisioned it was safe to have tiny little nuclear reactors powering personal shields around one’s neck
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !foundation@Lemmy.world
I know it's just the cover because the pages need to be exposed to light first in order to glow, but imagine if the entire book glowed so you could read it at night...