Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge sci fi fan (anyone on HN who is not?) and gave Foundation a go, and found it to have flashes of brilliance but overall to be lifeless and frankly pretty boring.

It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.

To be fair, there was something strangely appealing about it, and by the end I found I quite liked it even with its flaws - probably because there were some really imaginative concepts underneath (the Foundation I suppose).

View on HN

> It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.

This could probably be attributed to its pulp origins -- it wasn't originally a set of novels, but a bunch of pulp serials that were in the same universe.

Yeah. It can't really be compared to something like Dune. It's a different format. Although I love Dune, I read most of my science fiction in short story format, so Foundation seems normal to me.

I remember an interview where Asimov had a fan tell him all the interesting parts of his stories were glossed over. And it's true for action scenes. He always does all the backstory and intrigue, then the action starts and he tends to skip to the conclusion of the event.

I think given this, that Asimov was about drama an the unfolding, in a SF backdrop; TV is a very good venue.

>the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail

But that's part of the unique strength of the early Foundation books. What makes the experience powerful is that the reader's imagination is left to fill in the gaps. The trick was to write a sufficiently epic framework, which succeeded because inspiration was drawn from Gibbon's famous account of the decline and fall of Rome.

A TV series faces a different logic. Little is left to the visual imagination and one is left trying to imagine what the characters are thinking, yet as deng pointed out there aren't any main characters in Foundation (apart from Seldon, who's mostly a sort of narrator in any case).

I read the series as a twelve or thirteen year old and loved it, but when I tried rereading it a few years ago I came to the same conclusion.

As mentioned in another comment, it began as a serialized work, and it never really escapes Asimov's "make it up as you go along" style, resulting in quite a meandering series. I think it would have to be a very loose adaptation to make it interesting.

I agree with that assessment, and it's pretty much Asimov's style. I don't really get why Foundation is considered by so many to be he best work. Personally, of the stuff I've read anyway, I think it's The Gods Themselves.

I find Asimov's language to be very un decorative, or as you put it, boring. What I enjoy in his writing is the ideas, story and characters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com