Foundation is a book you respect more than you feel. Asimov hands science fiction one of its founding ideas, then never bothers to give you a single person worth caring about while he works it out.
Start with what he got right, because it's real. This is, as far as I can tell, the book that made the galaxy-spanning empire a genre staple. That scale, a civilization stretched across a galaxy, rising and falling on mathematical inevitability, is so baked into sci-fi now that it's easy to forget someone had to invent it first. Psychohistory is a brilliant hook: the idea that you could predict the collapse of civilization the way you predict gas pressure. You can trace a direct line from this book to basically everything that came after it that thinks big. I get why it's called a masterpiece. But I don't get why it beat The Lord of the Rings for the Hugo's Best All-Time Series award. I just don't think it's a very good novel.
The problem is everything underneath the premise. The book is structurally a series of conversations: men in rooms outmaneuvering each other with cleverness, gaming out political leverage a few steps ahead of the reader, and Asimov never gives you a reason to root for any one of them over the others. No character grows, and none has much of a personality beyond "shrewd." The prose is dry to the point of being functional rather than alive, which might be fine if the ideas alone could carry it, but a two-hundred-page chess match needs stakes I can feel. And for a book that's ostensibly about the fate of an empire spanning the stars, the space setting barely registers. Swap it for feuding city-states and almost nothing changes. The scale is the idea, and that's where the ambition lives. The experience of reading it is a lot smaller than that.
Fine. Glad I finally read it. This is a book that's more rewarding to have read than to actually read, foundational in every sense except the fun one. (Sorry.)
