Another Classic
After much waffling, I picked up Foundation for reading material. It's another one of those "classic sci-fi books" from before my time that I never read when it would have made more sense to do so. I think if I'd read it in high school or thereabouts, it would have felt insightful rather than just observational.
In a general sense, it's about the fall of a massive galactic Empire and the attempt to minimize/rebuild society in the wake of that. So the several smaller stories in the book (scattered over about 150 years) take a look at things like politics, religion, technology, and the flow of human development/psychology on a grand (rather than individual) scale. I applaud some of the ideas there and the thinking they encourage.
It's not the general sort of story I want to read, though. Not because I find the thoughts distasteful, but because I crave more depth to characters and events. It feels to me like there was a shift in the 80's or 90's for sci-fi/fantasy novels. Before that time, Foundation doesn't seem out of place with its series of fairly short sequences of scenes, each with new characters, and topping out at well under 300 pages. These days, a lot of new books seem to come out closer to the 600-page mark as a very deliberate beginning to a trilogy. Not that there hasn't been more Foundation stories written, but there's a difference in methodology there that carries into the feel of the stories. You don't have a lot of time to get know these characters. Though I will say, some of them are well done for such little coverage.
So, yeah, here's another book that I enjoyed well enough and I can accept and respect as a genre classic, but I wouldn't pick it as a "favorite" of mine.
In a general sense, it's about the fall of a massive galactic Empire and the attempt to minimize/rebuild society in the wake of that. So the several smaller stories in the book (scattered over about 150 years) take a look at things like politics, religion, technology, and the flow of human development/psychology on a grand (rather than individual) scale. I applaud some of the ideas there and the thinking they encourage.
It's not the general sort of story I want to read, though. Not because I find the thoughts distasteful, but because I crave more depth to characters and events. It feels to me like there was a shift in the 80's or 90's for sci-fi/fantasy novels. Before that time, Foundation doesn't seem out of place with its series of fairly short sequences of scenes, each with new characters, and topping out at well under 300 pages. These days, a lot of new books seem to come out closer to the 600-page mark as a very deliberate beginning to a trilogy. Not that there hasn't been more Foundation stories written, but there's a difference in methodology there that carries into the feel of the stories. You don't have a lot of time to get know these characters. Though I will say, some of them are well done for such little coverage.
So, yeah, here's another book that I enjoyed well enough and I can accept and respect as a genre classic, but I wouldn't pick it as a "favorite" of mine.
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