this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
168 points (99.4% liked)
Science Fiction
898 readers
1 users here now
This magazine is aimed at fans and creators of sci-fi and related media of all kinds. It includes all content related to the sci-fi genre and only content related to the sci-fi genre. The goal is to build a community for everyone who enjoys science fiction and related topics. This includes the obvious books, movies, and TV shows, but also original writing, the discussion of writing SF, futuristic art and designs, and the science and technologies that inspire the sci-fi genre. **Team Top 20**
founded 1 year ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a great admirer of Isaac Asimov, but Foundation - the book - hasn't aged well at all.
Asimov had some amazing ideas, but he had absolutely no idea what women even were!
To be fair to the man: The early Foundation stuff was written in the late 1940s and early 50s, and he later freely admitted (it’s in his second autobiography, I, Asimov) that as a huge science/science fiction nerd he had no idea how to write women and avoided it.
His earliest stuff just has women as little more than arm candy, his later stuff turns them into really weird sex objects that are no more believable!
You are quite probably right: I must admit I haven’t read much of anything of his for ages, but in my teens I devoured as much as I could. That was nigh 30 years ago now, though, and not only have what’s acceptable changed, I have grown up, too. :)
I reread the Caves Of Steel trilogy recently, the first was written in the fifties, the last in the eighties. The difference is striking but not necessarily good! The only woman of note in the last one does have more agency than the only woman (at all?) in the first, but she is more obsessed with sex than a 14 year old boy! It's honestly a little bit creepy
The Foundation series is honestly some of the greatest high concept science fiction to be written. But you're not wrong. That shit is hard to read now
A great many of the "old classics" really aren't very good, IMO. Some of them are downright awful, in fact.
One that comes to mind that has garnered me many downvotes in the past is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I disliked on pretty much every level. The characters were uninteresting, the worldbuilding was bad, the lunar culture made no sense and was an obvious "isn't libertarianism awesome?" author insert, the Earthside baddies were cartoonishly stupid, the military conflict should have never worked out for the Lunarians, and Mycroft was a lazy deus ex machina.
How's that for an unpopular opinion.
You're probably right. I absolutely adored Heinlein, Stranger in A Strange Land and Moon is a Harsh Mistress were probably my favorite books EVER other then Foundation and Dune, but this was also 20 years ago when I was a teenager. I'm scared to read them again since I'm sure they haven't aged well.
"The golden age of science fiction is twelve", as they say.
This may be a more popular opinion than you think.
A lot of his work makes me cringe internally, and I grew up on a steady diet of his stuff. I'm always thinking of "I'm in Marsport without Hilda" and it was supposed to be ROMANTIC? Bruh.
I'm curious what parts of Foundation hadn't aged well in your opinion.
Is it just because Asimov struggled to write women?