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couldn't get into Foundation

natejb

New Member
I have only read a handful of Asimov(most of which I enjoyed): a few of his robot books, nightfall, the gods themselves, and the first Foundation book. I have too admit I just didn't enjoy Foundation. Too me it seemed like an incoherent collection of short stories thrown together and disguised as a novel. The only merit the book deserves is that some of the ideas are ahead of their time. Anyway, there has to be some people who agree with me.
 
I liked it :)

The only troulble that I found with it is that it's very dated today but it's still a good story.
 
Personally I enjoyed Foundation (aka how to pervert Trek's prime directive).

Some people find it impersonal, reading like a dense logic puzzle. The fact that the foundation itself is the main character, not the influential personalities featured in the short stories isn't easy to get used to.

Others are put off by the fact it consists of a lot of a number of Asimov's short stories collected together, rather than initially being written as one cohesive novel.
 
What I have read of the series has been good, but after finishing each one, I wasn't eager to dive into the next one immediately. I've had to take a break between books. Though that's the way I read. I'm not usually too excited about reading another book of the same series or subject matter immediately. I need more variety.
 
Don't feel bad Nate, I couldn't get into it either. I was about 1/3 into the 2nd book when I decided I didn't much care anymore and wanted to move on to something else.

I think the only other novel that is hyped so highly is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. But that one lives up to it :)

Foundation was a bit too dry for me.
 
I think that Foundation's scope is accentuated by its tendency to follow the short story format, highlighting the pseudo-Marxist, determinist course of the civilisation's development, refracted through the lens of historical accident (as in the case of the mule), the way that characters are not held on to, but always referred to constructing a deep, coherent background to the saga. I loved it, as you might be able to tell.
 
I was going to create a Foundation thread but decided to bump this one instead.

I have been working through the series relatively quickly and I recently finished Second Foundation. The revelation at the end annoyed me.

If the Second Foundation was on the same planet as the first then how did they avoid detection by the First Foundation in the early years?

Overall, I like the series for the most part but I think Dune did the whole political intrigue thing better.
 
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