I’ve had Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series recommended to me a million and one times and I finally got around to reading the first book in the series, Foundation.

The premise of the series is interesting – Psychohistory is a science that combines statistics and psychology to predict what large populations of people will do.  A group of psychohistorians living at the end of an empire make a plan that they hope will cause a new empire to form after just a thousand years or so, instead of the usual tens of thousands of years later, thus preventing millenia of war, etc.  Key to their plan is the Foundation, a planet the psychohistorians settled and tasked with keeping all the knowledge that humanity had gained during the last empire.  Foundation will be a key player in a number of political crises that the psychohistorians have predicted.  If Foundation plays its cards right, the psychohistorians’ plan will succeed and a new empire will form in a relatively short amount of time, bringing stability and prosperity.  If it doesn’t, it’ll take a whole lot longer for a new empire to form.

Sounds pretty cool, right?  It wasn’t.  I won’t be reading the rest of the series – I hated Foundation.  There are three major political crises in Foundation.  In each of them, a cocky, rebellious guy outsmarts the current Foundation rulers and averts disaster and then spends pages and pages telling all the other characters how smart he is and being an ass to his enemies.  I felt like Asimov had written one political crisis section and then changed the names and a few details.  The characters weren’t likable or even particularly interesting – I had a hard time telling them apart.  Reading Foundation was like watching frat boys trying to prove their manliness to each other.

Another thing that got to me – women basically don’t exist in this book.  One character referred to a daughter that he hoped had died rather than be captured.  The wife of one ruler was in 2 or 3 scenes, but she served simply as an extension of her father.  Those were the only two women I noticed in the entire book, which had an extensive cast of male characters.  I know Asimov wrote these in the 50s and he was a “product of his generation,” blah blah blah, but it’s hard for me to get into a story when there is no character at all like me.  Plus, it makes me mad that women are so incredibly inconsequential in his vision of the future.