I’m sure I read the Foundation series by Asimov back in high school. I don’t remember it at all. Should I read it again? What order are the books in? What do you think of the “new” Foundation books?
The first three Foundation books are some of my favorite Sci-Fi. The last two (which he wrote several decades later, and unlike the originals are not a collection of short stories) were pretty “meh”, I’d skip them if I were you.
Asimov wrote prequals as well, but I haven’t read them.
The classic trilogy is in order “Foundation”, “Foundation and Empire”, “Second Foundation”. The next one, years later was “Foundation’s Edge”. There have been others, and some in the “Robot” series which try and tie the two strands together, but I’ve never read them.
I tried re-reading the original trilogy earlier this year, but gave up. I just couldn’t stand Asimov’s leaden prose and cloth ear for dialogue. Given that I could remember much of the story-arc anyway, I didn’t think it was worth bothering with. YMMV.
Struan has the order of the first several correct. I’ve got the whole series at home, and can’t remember the order of the others.
My opinion – the original rilogy is overall the best. It takes some interesting twists and turns and isn’t bloated prose. The much-later sequels were overblown and generally not as good (although near the end, I think Asiimov got better. There are a few well-written parts in there). I don’t think much of his desire to tie the Foundation stories to his Robot stories – that looks too much like afinancial decision, to get people to by books from both series.
I vaguely remember Asimov including a suggested reading order in the foreward to one of the prequels (Foundation and Earth, perhaps?). It was the book in which he tied the Robot, Empire, and Foundation series all together in one big-ass “future history”. The order was chronological by story events, not published order.
I never read any of the non-Foundation books, but I remember being very annoyed by a scene near the end of one of the newer books. The scene, which took place on the moon, obviously referenced something from one of the other series and was treated as a big reveal (the chapter dramatically ended right after a character’s name was mentioned), but it made absolutely no sense to me as I hadn’t read either the Robot or Empire books. Parts of the newer books seemed like he was more interested in the wankery of tying the series together than in actually telling a good story.
As I recall, the original trilogy was excellent, and Prelude to Foundation was quite good. The others were so-so.
As for the “new” books, I won’t remember which was which, unfortunately. I can tell you that two were pretty good, and one (the first, by Gregory Benford) was absolutely awful and had one of the most irritating side-plots of anything I’ve ever read. I seem to recall thinking Greg Bear’s (Foundation and Chaos) was the best of the three.
Ah - when I was a kid I loved the trilogy. When I got older, I bought the first editions - took a lot of research to ensure I got true firsts; there’s lots of variants.
When I needed to sell some firsts to raise some cash, I went back to re-read some of the books - what matters first is the story, you know? The Foundation books, while nostalgic, didn’t hold up the way other books have for me. For the reasons Struan said. I held onto my first of I, Robot, but sold the Trilogy…
What a coincidence. I’ve been thinking about digging out my old copies and rereading them. It’s been at least 15 years.
The order of the entire (Asimov) series (chronologically):
Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation’s Edge, Foundation and Earth. I reread them every once in a while; I tend to start with Foundation, read to the end, then go back to Prelude.
Yeah, unless your tolerance for fiction with no literary value whatsoever remains at the high school level - which is not necessarily an insult given that almost every bestseller fiction book today is written that way - the original trilogy is quite literally unreadable. With some books you can’t go back. Asimov is particularly egregious this way.
Define “literary value”.
I think they’re a milestone just for the concept of “psychohistory.” Maybe someday . . .
I liked Foundation and Foundation and Empire. I found Second Foundation to be a bit twee, the character of Arkady being a bit too precious.
Foundation’s Edge was OK, and Foundation and Earth was an alright wrap-up.
To fully get what’s going on on the last two Foundation books, it helps to have read Asimov’s robot novels: Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, particularly the last two.
I have read Prelude to Foundation but not Forward the Foundation.
Oh, yeah, a familiarity with the standalone novel, The End of Eternity, helps with one particular passage.
Well, not literally. 
I liked them the first time I read them, which was in late middle school, and last year I found a box set of the trilogy for $10 at a used bookshop in town, so I snapped it up. I still enjoy reading them; they’re not at all great literature, but they’re very indicative of the state of science and popular zeitgeist when they were written. I like them as an adventure read, and a little time-warp back to 1970s (right)-style politics and science.
Well, “De Gustibus…” and all. I’ve re-read the original Foundation trilogy a few times, and find it very readable. It’s the ones he wrote later I have trouble with.
(And, to be honest, I suspect this has something to do with the economics of SF publishing. As I’ve remarked before, the older SF books I have are thin things – a thick SF novel from the early 1960s was rarity. But nowadays all sf novels have to be thick, for whatever reason. They’ve managed to “fluff up” the original books somehow – bigger print, wider margins, stuff like that — so that the original thin books now look like the latr thick ones. It’;s that way with all of them – Heinlein’s later novels sit on my shelf, visibly taking up the space of three or four of his old ones. Clarke, too. So Asimov had to write bloated books.)
It was Foundation and Earth, and yes the big reveal is meaningless if you’ve only read the Foundation books.
Nobody reads Asimov for the characters. They’re (with a few exceptions) very 2-D, and all their motivations and traits can be summarized in a sentence or two. This is enhanced by the fact that Asimov wrote the original Foundation Trilogy as a series of short stories for magazines, so adding a bunch of character development wasn’t really worth it.
Oddly I sort of liked this about the original Trilogy. It’s largely about the impotence of individuals in the face of the sweep of history, so it sort of made sense to make each character a kind of cliche that’s around for one or two of the short stories and then gone.
Exactly. A lot of Asimov’s forte was about problem solving, be it murder mysteries, logic puzzles (often involving the laws of robotics) or (as in the case of the original Foundation trilogy) situational tactics faced by characters in a series of historical crises. I can understand why his stories strike some people as cold or mechanical but that’s what I like about them. They’re all story and intellectual engagement with no sentimental wanking or character study. He also had a distaste for slowing down stories with boring, pointless love interests for which I’m always very thankful when I read him.
Bingo! This paragraph deserves to be inserted in any discussion of Asimov’s fiction.
Not that there’s anything wrong with “sentimental wanking or character study,” in the hands of someone who can do them well. But we get different things from different stories/authors, and it’s not fair to judge all fiction by a single dimension (plotting, or character development, or evocative writing style, or whatever).