I picked up an old hardback copy of Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi Foundation trilogy at the local library several months ago and finally got around to reading it during my illness.
The books are fascinating, in spite of their problematic elements, and clearly Asimov paved the way for later sci-fi authors, much as Tolkien did in the fantasy genre. For instance, the Galactic home planet of Trantor is “one big city”–something that the new Star Wars prequels completely ripped off with the planet known as Coruscant.
But one disappointing aspect of the books was Asimov’s dismissive view of God and religion. As wikipedia describes him:
During his childhood, his father and mother observed Orthodox Jewish traditions, though not as stringently as they had in Petrovichi; they did not, however, force their beliefs upon young Isaac.
As I pointed out here, parents will teach their children some belief system, and so unsurprisingly Asimov became an atheist, since his parents seem to have been practical atheists. In other words, while they didn’t “force” their ostensibly Jewish beliefs on Asimov, in fact they “forced” their atheistic beliefs on him and he became indoctrinated into atheism.
And this comes out in his books. Religion, one that looks remarkably like Catholicism and even includes concepts like putting a country under interdict, is a tool used by his canny protagonists to gain control of people and planets and to cloak their scientific superiority in mysticism.
But, like with Frank Herbert’s Dune series, the real problem with the rejection of God in the Foundation series is that ultimately we don’t have characters or people or even a galaxy that we care a lick about.
Let me explain: The noble purpose of the protagonists in the series is to save humanity from 30,000 years of “dark ages” (which will occur when the Galactic Empire crumbles). The hero has an idea that could reduce those thirty millennia to only one millennium. But the godlessness of the characters and the meaninglessness of individual lives in the story’s unfolding makes one question whether it matters if “humanity” suffers for 1,000 or 30,000 years. In fact it is unclear that people’s lives under the Galactic Empire were any worse than what they are during the Dark Age portrayed in the book.
Like with Dune, then, you end up with characters fighting for a “humanity” that has no ultimate purpose, no eternal truth, no imprint of the divine on it. When none of the characters are truly good, you end up not caring which “side” wins. Because both are equally bankrupt and vicious, only with differing ideas about irrelevant things like how the Empire should be built.
Asimov forged the path that many other atheistic sci-fi authors have followed upon.
One cool thing that came from reading this series, however, is a new book idea I thought up. I’ll sketch the details of it out in another post.
Overall, I would recommend the books as interesting old sci-fi, with creative ideas (like the mathematical field of “psycho-history”) and an epic story in terms of time scale and vision.
It’s been many years since I read the Foundation series. I was away from the Church at the time, so I may not have noticed the lack of meaning in the characters that you did. I’m not so sure I agree about Dune. Duke Leto Atreides struck me as a man of honor. Paul, too, although he gets caught up in the machinations of the Bene Gresserit. By the time of Children of Dune, much of that humanity is lost.
Brian, welcome to my blog and thanks for commenting!
Regarding Foundation, since each chapter or few chapters jumps ahead at least one or two generations, new characters have to be constantly invented since the old ones have died, so there isn’t really a way to get invested in a character, but in spite of that (a necessity given the series’ epic scope), by the end I didn’t really care if the Second Foundation mental manipulators won or the more pedestrian First Foundation people, whether Hari Seldon’s mathematics was vindicated or not.
Regarding Dune, I agree with you completely on the first book. The Atreides family is honorable, and the Duke and Gurney Halleck and Duncan are men of courage and virtue. But as you mention, as the series continues the humanity and virtue devolves. By the last books in the series (written by Herbert’s son and another sci-fi/fantasy author), all traces of any goodness are gone and have machines vs. unvirtuous men/clones that I had a hard time caring about.
God bless!
Devin
That seems a pretty good assessment of the Dune series (I won’t comment on Foundation, since I haven’t read it yet). Frankly, I enjoyed the first book, kinda liked the second, thought the third was o.k., and found the fourth one to be a joyless slog. This is largely because the characters’ motivations seemed less and less interesting, because the characters themselves were becoming worse as people (does Leto II still count as a “human” character?)
JC,
Thanks for commenting! Always enjoy reading your writings on Ignitum Today.
Yes exactly about Dune. And the ones actually written by Herbert himself (the first six I recall) are all better than the prequels/sequels written by his son and the co-author guy. Of those, I would only recommend reading the “House” prequels: House Atreides, House Harkonnen, House Corino.
The final books that end the saga they supposedly based off Frank Herbert’s notes, which they found long after he had died. But in the end its the machines vs. the people and the finale is quite bizarre. Even long-time Dune fans found it deeply unsatisfying, but I saw that coming since by that time no one cares about the characters, most of whom are clones (gholas) of the old original characters.
Devin–Thanks on the IT comment.
Might I recommend a third work with which Foundation and Dune might be contrasted? “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is yet another story spanning the millennia, yet it manages to make us care somewhat about the characters and their goals. This is because there is ultimately a purpose behind the monastery and its preservation of the remains of the old civilization (and not merely a decrease of a “dark age” from tens of thousands of years to one thousand years). Oddly enough, I’ve heard dismal things about the sequel to this one, too: because the author turns away from the monastery and its (frankly, religious) struggles against the dark age to the (frankly, secular) struggles of the pope as secular ruler to reclaim his territory for secular reasons.
JC,
I’ve read Canticle for Leibowitz once and enjoyed it. I couldn’t connect the symbolism for everything that he was doing in the book, but it was really cool. I love the three epochs of the story making an epic tale.
I didn’t read the sequel and was sad to learn that apparently Miller committed suicide eventually.
We read Canticle for Leibowitz for a parish book club. This was helpful: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/canticle.html
The religion “looks remarkably like Catholicism” because Asimov modeled the backdrop for his Foundation stories on Edward Gibbons’s tales of decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Trantor=Rome, that’s pretty obvious but what’s Terminus modeled on – Ireland? Benedictine monasticism? Something else?
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