Foundation, Foundation #1
A great piece of thinking for sure, but 'Foundation' still has its troubles.
Asimov was a genius. There are few people who doubt that, even if they only had a small sampling of his work. His books cover a broad variety of topics, but they didn't lack depth. So it disappoints me to really notice the biggest blunder in this groundbreaking series ----And no, I'm not talking about computers.
I'm talking about women.
Go on and roll your eyes, but I'm serious. The first four parts were stories written and published in the 1940s, but is that really a legitimate excuse? At all? I'm not talking about a lack of a female main character, or supporting characters. There's simply no women at all until we get to the last section of the book (first appearing in 1951). Unless one counts Hari Seldon dismissing a prosecutor's figures in the very beginning for the amount of people working for him, because they include women and children. And when women finally do make an appearance in the last they are represented by a serving girl and a shrewish wife in a political marriage. Both are equally entranced by shiny baubles.
Furthermore, a major point in a Foundation victory is that women get restless when their appliances stop working. The women are counted on to not have a "jacquerie", but "important" people would pick up on the womenfolk's restlessness and assure a stop to the war after a long enough period of hearing their grumbling.
I understand and applaud the fact that 'Foundation' is a novel about ideas over characters, but what I first noticed as an odd quirk ("huh, no women"), became distracting, and then disheartening. Especially when you remember that he was writing stories featuring robo-psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin at the same time. Asimov was a visionary, a man of great imagination; so why couldn't he have thought that women would have become more than dissatisfied housewives after mankind took the stars?
I still like and enjoy the book, obviously. For a book that so deliberately kept away from the action, it's fast-paced and always interesting. It is a huge leap for SF. Best series ever? Not so much.
Foundation
Next: 'Foundation and Empire'
