Hey Veeky Forums, Is foundation still a good read like it was many decades ago? It aged well...

Hey Veeky Forums, Is foundation still a good read like it was many decades ago? It aged well? I'm asking this because many sci fi books get a little more silly over time (flying cars without reason and a lack of cellphones and internet in situations that could be easily solved with them)

Also interested. Bought Prelude to Foundation and it told me to read
The Complete Robot.
Then:
Caves of Steel
Naked Sun
Robots of Dawn
Robots and Empire
Currents of Space
The Stars, Like Dust
Pebble in the Sky
That's eight books prior to Prelude and then the rest of Foundation. This is a 1988 copy so maybe even more printed posthumously?

just read Prelude to Foundation, and absolutely despised it.
Asimov can't write dialogue, or characters for that matter. Everyone's prim and proper, respectable, moved by logic. It's not a story so much as a flowchart, one that's leading to nothing.
For a book from the 80s, it offers nothing new. It may be stuck in a setting dreamt up in the 40s, but that should've been time for Asimov to improve. All I got from it was smug self-importance from an author who'd do better to stick to non-fiction, and now see all its fans as dumb pseuds.

In short, avoid Prelude. Maybe Asimov's qualities (of whose existence I'm doubtful) shine more in Foundation itself.

The first three books are tonally consistent and have an interesting plot
Foundation and Earth and the other one that takes place after Second Foundation have their moments but there's also shit like the random insertion of strongly implied BDSM and the introduction of a concept that literally undermines the concept driving the series
I have Prelude to Foundation but I'm in the middle of Aboslution Gap, BotNS, Stephen Baxter's Ultima and a few other things that are more interesting than Asimov's stilted prose and cardboard-cutout characters so I probably won't get around to reading it
My first reading of Foundation was mind-blowing, but now that I've read post-New Wave SF (i.e. SF that actually tries to be literary instead of just saying "Yeah teenage boys like it, it's good") it sort of just feels lame.

Of course, but keep in mind Foundation is a cerebral read. Despite being an intellectual wonder, Asimov is quite a sperg and he's unable to properly write and develop characters and his dialogues are tumblr tier at best.

>cerebral
If it were really cerebral then it would contain explicit discourses on Marxism
I, Robot is more cerebral than Foundaation

the prequels and sequels are filler and pretty underwhelming. the sequels are def better than the prequels though. prequels was mostly asimov caving to criticism of
>he's a shitlord who cant write STRONG WOMYN CHARACTERS
>there's no EMOTION in his book
>where's the HUMAN DRAMA
>etc.
the original trilogy is solid.

I absolutely hated the ending of Foundation's Edge. I still haven't read Foundation and Earth because of it despite having it sitting on my shelf for three years.

>he's a shitlord who cant write STRONG WOMYN CHARACTERS
>there's no EMOTION in his book
>where's the HUMAN DRAMA
>etc.
Well, all those things are true.

That's exactly what I thought. Even though some of his Ideas are interesting, it reads like a manual for a chemical experiment. Truly autistic.

Why are a lot of these sci-fi classics written so poorly?

Yeah, it's still pretty good. The anachronisms (like navigating faster-than-light spaceships with analog instruments) are more amusing than distracting and don't really have anything to do with what the novel is really about.

Only if you're a complete autist; that's the chronological order, which was stitched together years later with the publication of the Foundation prequels. Unless you've decided to be an Asimov expert, just stick with the original three Foundation books. They tell a self-contained story without highlighting the author's numerous weaknesses.

Why isn't my car's windshield bulletproof? Because it doesn't need to be. Less glibly, SF authors are basically paid for some combination of hack work and concepts. There are some SF writers who have literary merit, or at least pretensions. Feel free to read them if you're bothered by journeyman prose.

Read Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.

The first 3 books are incredible, but don't bother with any of the other books in the series that he wrote later.

>mfw I just finished Claw of the Conciliator and realizing just how deep Wolfe's rabbit hole might go

they're also com0letely asinine complaints

Why?
People like you are responsible for the sorry state of SF criticism and the offhand dismissal of the genre as non-literary. Foundation is a classic but it has terrible prose and cookie-cutter characters.

Asimov is not known for great prose or even great characters, he's known for great concepts and interesting ideas/worlds.

I know that, and I'm saying that that isn't an excuse--the presence of good concepts doesn't negate the absence of good prose.

also by the end of the Foundation series the good concepts have been consciously undermined by things that aren't interesting and are never expanded upon in any detail. 'R. Daneel Olivaw has been pulling the strings the whole time' is fucking stupid. Asimov undermines himself at every opportunity.

That's why people should only read the first 3 Foundation books.

It may not be an excuse to you if you see prose as being more important than anything else in the work, but I felt riveted reading the first Foundation book just in the world Asimov created (and I wasn't bothered by the prose). His style is fluid enough to tell the narrative and create the world as well. If you want good sci-fi and prose in one package, read Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke.

>WAAAAH I want it to be perfect!
Go read Ready Player One with the other infants. Asimov is bad at prose and characterization. There is no way around this.

I never said I wanted it to be perfect (in fact, you seem to be the one who wants Asimov's works to be perfect). I agreed with you that Asimov is not known for his prose or characters, and that doesn't bother me when I read Asimov. If it bothers you, then read something else. Not every book needs prose like Tolstoy to be great.

And I've never read Ready Player One.

asimov was obviously not capable of doing the things that people wanted him to do. they want asimov to write like NotAsimov, no shit he fails miserably