Conceptual Fiction: The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.

This well-known series of books captures the best and the worst of speculative fiction in a single sweeping narrative. I will even coin a new term—the Asimov syndrome—to describe this distinctive combination of the high and the low. It’s all summed up in the dilemma faced by the reviewer who must figure out how to evaluate a literary work that mixes brilliantly creative conceptual thinking with lackluster writing.

Isaac Asimov started writing stories when he was around 11 years old and was selling them to pulp magazines while still in his teens. He began publishing the Foundation stories in his early 20s and the prose is much what you might expect from a precocious youngster, glib and shallow. The quality of the writing improves in later parts of the trilogy, but not by much.

One seeks in vain for a clever turn of phrase, an interesting metaphor, a description that is more than formulaic. The dialogue is well suited to pushing the plot forward, or sketching out various scientific or sociological ideas, but is mostly the type of canned exchanges you expect from a 1940s radio soap opera.

I dwell on these matters not to pick on Asimov—as you will see below, I enjoy many aspects of his oeuvre—but to point out a syndrome that is all too common in the sci-fi genre. This literary category was born in the pages of pulp fiction periodicals, and struggles to this day to rise above the marks of this humble lineage.

And yet... and yet... and yet... Asimov also demonstrates (maddeningly, beautifully, brilliantly) all the greatness of the Sci-Fi genre from a conceptual point of view. There is hardly a page in this work that doesn’t develop some exciting or provocative perspective on human affairs, group interactions, individual and social psychology, technology or values. Moreover, the ideas are always pushed farther than you expect, with second-order and third-order effects taken into account, almost the way archaeologists develop far-flung implications from potsherds and broken tools.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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