Foundation Failure

 

Well, I failed in my third attempt to make it through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

 

The book is regarded as a classic; though, to be honest, I am not entirely sure why. But it isn’t the first “classic” I haven’t been able to read. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad comes immediately to mind. Read it twice – once way back in high school and again around 2011 or 2012. Neither time did I “get it”, neither time was I bowled over in the presence of a masterpiece. It did absolutely nothing to me or for me, much to my displeasure.

 

There are lesser books that I wouldn’t label as “classic” which I tried to read several times but just couldn’t complete. Books that may not mean anything to you, but at one point or another (probably when first taking it off a bookstore shelf and walking to the cashier) I considered it a potentially intriguing or perhaps life-changing read. Books such as The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and My Big TOE by Thomas Campbell. By the way, TOE is an acronym for ‘Theory of Everything,’ and in this book it involves everything from mediation to reality to physics to transcendence.

 

Speaking of physics, I’ve tried Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics a couple of times. Despite an intuition that Penrose might hold the key to what everything is made of (in light of the relative failure of string theory), I have never made it more than 80 or so pages in until brain ache occurs. This silly topic of the building blocks of matter fascinated me to no end since a young lad. I went so far as three semesters in Seton Hall in a quest to find such answers for myself many, many years ago. Ergo, the book still sits on my bookshelf (actually, in my closet for some reason, along with that marked-up Einstein biography). It will be cracked open again at some point.

 

Surprisingly, Dickens has given me a hard time with, well, er, Hard Times. Also, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Both books I’ve tried and both books I’ve failed. Dunno. Like the Penrose physics books, I will conquer them in the near future.

 

So why did my third go-round with Foundation fall through? It wasn’t the old “everyone in the future talks like a 1940s Brooklyn Jew” that nagged me in my other Asimovian re-reads. I think it was simply that I found the story … forgive me … dull and boring. There were no stakes. There were no compelling characters. The futuristic science of “psycho-history” was not adequately explained, even with Star Trek: The Next Generation mumbo jumbo. And while I am by no means a literary feminist, the fact that the only female character in the first 120 pages was a secretary with no lines just didn’t sit well.

 

It’s sad to me that a great hero of my youth did not translate to my later adulthood. I loved Asimov as a kid. That Christmas gift five-paperback pack I write about often – The Bicentennial Man, Nine Tomorrows, The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and The Gods Themselves – along with I, Robot to help sooth a young boy with a broken arm, and Fantastic Voyage the same young boy bought in the Bookmobile, these books formed me and gave me hours of reading pleasure, moreso than any author in my youth. Will I read any more Asimov in this lifetime? Probably not. But I will enjoy those fond, nostalgic memories.