Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov
Dec 8th, 2007 by craig
Isaac Asimov “is perhaps the best known – and certainly the best loved – of all SF authors” says the back of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Well, not by this reader. I find his writing to be overly simple and lacking in development. Foundation and Earth was no exception.
While it may be that I would feel more magnanimous towards this book had I read the four Foundation books that precede it, I doubt it. I can’t imagine that I would have been able to stay with them. But I may have been more predisposed to some of the ideas of the book, and that’s about all this book has: ideas. There is very little story, the characters are stiff and undeveloped and the vista of humanity 20,000 years into the future is paltry. Because there’s so very little in the way of story to give away, I don’t consider it a spoiler to say that the end of this book is nothing more than a rehash of Asimov’s venerated robot rules. I didn’t feel warm and fuzzy about them in I, Robot and I don’t feel warm and fuzzy about them now. The book also suffers from the Captain Kirk syndrome: if there’s a female on a planet, a sexual encounter is requisite.
This is one I’m glad to put back on the shelf.
“So, how do you *really* feel about this book?”
Considering that I loved I, Robot, I actually do find this testimonial hard to believe. I, Robot had a wonderful combination of well-developed ideas that sound rather plausible and excellent character development, although the plot was a bit skippy, and I didn’t like the ending so much as the rest of the book.