On Re-reading the Foundation Trilogy

It’s a weird feeling to be re-reading the same copies of the Foundation books that I wore out as a 12 year old. . .long before it ever occurred to me that one can actually write books oneself. (I didn’t get the Writing Bug till I was about 30.) What strikes me most in perusing them again is just how much of a prose style the lack of a prose style can be. In particularly, Asimov’s unornamented writing was what allowed him to be so damn SMART . . . he could pull the audience up to his level, instead of losing them or talking down to them. And he took narrative clarity to a level that few have rivaled since.
One senses that most Golden Age Science Fiction, were it to be submitted today, would be rejected out of hand–and with good reason. Not so with Foundation. Sure, space opera has come a long way since, in large part due to our proliferating knowledge of the universe. What would Asimov’s Galactic Empire have looked like if it were riddled with dark matter and forced to stare into cosmic event horizons? Maybe much the same. . . after all, Asimov wasn’t really writing about SPACE, he was writing about MAN . . and if you never read a single book on the Roman Empire, you’d still learn a ton about it by reading the Foundation novels.
Perhaps that’s the ultimate limitation of the trilogy, though . . . surely the most unlikely proposition Asimov was advancing is that humanity would reach the stars unchanged. Notions of post-human were barely on the radar screen at that point . .and yet Asimov somehow got there anyway, with the Mule’s psychic powers and the Second Foundation. The duel between the two that plays out across the first part of the third book is possibly one of the best SF novellas ever written . . . despite it being the single most illogical part of the trilogy. (If the Mule leaves Kalgan, he loses under any and all circumstances.) And it’s ironic, too, that the man who did such a great job at creating achingly real characters (no matter what the New Wave might have said) should have found his masterpiece in a character that wasn’t even human. I was kinda rooting for the Union of Worlds to beat the Second Foundation into rubble at times. But psycho-history prevailed in the end. . . .
David J. Williams is the author of the Autumn Rain trilogy, which concludes this May with THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT. Learn more about his work at www.autumnrain2110.com.