Last night, while peacefully trying to drink a beer amongst the din of
the Enormous Room, I received a bit of criticism for not blogging often
enough. Blogging! — who has the time? More to the point, what would
I say? Not all of us spend our days yachting in Marblehead, or
eavesdropping on high school kids in the 'Bucks. Sad to say, I've got
precious little to write about that isn't related to epidemiologic
theory — and no one wants that.
The one thing I can offer is a book review. I've been reading classic
sci fi for the past year or so, for despite my general distaste for the
genre I occasionally find myself entertained. In particular, I'm a sucker for apocalyptic tales. So when I ran across Asimov's
Foundation in the library, I thought it'd be worth a run-through,
despite a decades-old memories of utter boredom.
As classics go, this is the biggie, the first of a series which won a
special Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series", beating out even
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This is a trilogy that was so
well-received that they twisted ol' Ike's arm to come back and write
another four books thirty years later. This is, perhaps, the benchmark
for sci fi.
This is a dull book. "I kept waiting for something to happen, and
nothing ever did," Asimov observed when re-reading his own work decades
later. I hear your pain, buddy. It's common knowledge that the series retells
the history of the Roman Empire ("cribbin' from Gibbon", in the author's
admission). That's not necessarily a bad starting point &mdash Herbert
cribbed from the history of Islam with great success in Dune
— but here the drama and the characters take back stage to a slow overview of the forces of historical change.
The book centers on the science of psychohistory, a marginally
interesting idea that sounds like something the author came up with on
the way over to meet his publisher after staying up too late reading
Gibbon (as indeed he did). For the psychohistorian, the
social future of the Galaxy so well understood as to be nearly predetermined — and as if to
illustrate this point, the book unfolds like a ponderous economic and
sociological Cliff Notes. To say that the action happens offstage would
be generous: the "action" consists, by and large, of decades-long
religious and economic trends.
Characters? Well, there are a few, although it's not easy to keep them
straight (only Hari Seldon stands above the wash of vaguely futuristic
names: Fara-Hober-Mallow-Gaal-Ankor-Hardin-Sutt-Jael-Asper). Worse
still, the book (originally a serial) tells one story after another,
decades apart. The pattern is deadening: each character is introduced;
has some minor, generally smug adventure involving another planetary
system; and then acts in what appears to be a foolish way for the next
twenty pages, after which it is revealed that all along he was following
a plan of such subtlety that both the sidekick and the reader were left
far behind. The chapter then wraps up by letting you know how the story
turns out, without actually showing you any of that process — for,
once you've seen the impeccable logic of the hero, there can be no
deviation from the plan. It's like reading a detective story where they
leave out the clues, so, while you might be impressed by the cleverness, you
didn't have enough information to deduce a damned thing yourself. It's
like watching a painfully slow demonstration of a simple chess strategy
that hinges on the opponent playing along at every step.
It's hardly fair to make fun of the technological primitivism of
Foundation. Like all marginal SF writers, Asimov's vision
encompasses only slightly upgraded versions of things with which he is
already familiar: Thus, a secret message is sent, twenty thousand years
hence, on a small piece of celluloid tape that burns away seconds after
it was read (a trick the author presumably lifted from Get
Smart). You can almost date the book by the abject reverence for
nuclear power, referred to in every chapter as a shibboleth separating
the still-civilized worlds from from the collapsing Empire. These
people can build spaceships with some sort of unexplained hyperdrive,
trading geegaws between star systems, but constructing a Chernobyl is
apparently beyond the ken of any but a True Scientist; and since the
book is premised on the idea of science fading, there are precious few
of those.
It seems a bit less unfair to complain about Asimov's gender roles — and he sure makes it easy. In
fact, no woman appears, even by mention, for the first couple hundred
pages, and then only briefly, as a prop for some radioactive jewelry
that (predictably) instantly silences her with
its beauty. Science fiction is not generally known for its
progressiveness, but this is ridiculous, and it only contributes to the
sensation of a series of lectures by rather dull, interchangeable men.
I shouldn't be so hard on Ike; it was probably tough to write a book
during the 1940s that, frankly, could just as well have been churned out
in 1997, so by that standard I suppose he was well ahead of his time.
Compared with other classics of the era (like Day of the
Triffids) it generally lacks that nineteenth-century H. G. Wells-ish
sense of being based on a foggy misunderstanding of any principle of physical science. And on the plus side, it kept me entertained for several hours — and
there are many more left, should I need more lessons in basic economics
and religious history.
And there you have it. Next up, I'll review Canticle for Leibowitz, which covers some of the same themes: the survival of science and knowledge in the long dark
period after the fall of civilization. The same themes, but, dare I
say, told much, much better.
