Since I opened this wound in a Bluesky aside myself a few minutes ago, and therefore have only myself to blame, and also because I completely have lacked brain focus all day today and therefore have been firing at random targets, a few words about the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov and the recent (possibly still ongoing) television-series adaptation of same.

I'm not actually going to talk about the TV series here because I haven't watched it and I don't intend to, unless some very powerful body of evidence comes along that changes my mind. You might as well know that in advance. But I do need to say a few words about the books, and that's germane to my rejection of the series. Buckle up. This may be a somewhat bumpy ride.

When I was a child, and did not yet know I was a girl (despite early clues, I only fully realized that a few years after finishing high school), women did not yet write science fiction openly.

No, that's not true. There were exceptions, obviously, not even counting the ones who wrote under aliases. But the glory days of the women whose F/SF presence was formative and important to me was my second wave. Some of them had been around for a while (e.g. Tanith Lee, Ursula LeGuin) but I didn't find them until I was a tween; others apparently didn't really become known until then (e.g. Robin McKinley, Mercedes Lackey). The first wave of my fantasy and SF reading -- say, ages seven to nine, I was an extremely precocious reader -- was books from the standard leftovers-from-the-golden-age crowd -- notably, Heinlein and Asimov. I read a lot of Heinlein and Asimov when I was a kid.

Both Heinlein and Asimov are kind of problematic in various ways now, and the interesting thing is that I am far more willing to mount a defense of the former than the latter. It's interesting because it represents a reversal. For years, I was not prepared to defend Heinlein simply because it was so fashionable to shit all over him and I just didn't have the energy, but I was prepared to fight you over Asimov. I haven't felt like that for quite a while now.

And this is coming, mind you, from someone who not only owns and has read Asimov's two enormous volumes of autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt -- multiple times! -- but also owns and has read his later I-am-not-going-to-live-much-longer-let's-recap I, Asimov. I'm not ignorant of my subject, is what I'm saying. I know probably as much about Isaac Asimov as anyone does who is not his daughter or wife (his second wife; his first wife, well ... )

But it became clear that despite his many good points, and even excusing his enormous ego (to be fair, he was always quite frank about it), Asimov had Bad Ideas About Women. I'd like to hope -- and the evidence suggests -- that his second marriage to Janet Jeppson knocked a lot of that out of him, but by then it may have been too little, too late. And these days that sort of thing is pretty indefensible.

I can separate the art from the artist, of course, and knowing what I know about Asimov doesn't stop me from re-reading and enjoying some of his works. I own quite a lot of them, and sometimes I need to curl up with I, Robot or Asimov's Mysteries as comfort food. Or, yes, the first book of the Foundation trilogy. But just the first book.

[Look, the point approaches, like a light in the distance!]

The first book, Foundation, is episodic. It's episodic by nature because it was written as a series of individual stories that were first published in one of those SF magazines of the kind we no longer have (and I'm not going to go look up which one; you have Wikipedia, don't you?)

The gist is, Hari Seldon, pioneering psychohistorian, has predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire, which isn't much of a feat because everyone knows the rot has set in ... but Seldon says it's coming faster than anyone thinks. This does not endear him to the current Emperor, but Seldon doesn't care because 1) he knows he doesn't have much longer to live and 2) he is not the kind of guy who notices that kind of thing; he's one of those borderline-autistic geniuses who speak truth to power simply because they're that blunt with everyone, and too oblivious to realize it is politic not to.

Seldon proposes that a foundation be set up at basically the opposite end of the universe from Trantor, where the Imperial throne is, on a planet aptly called Terminus. The purpose of this is not to prevent the fall of the Empire. That's inevitable. The purpose of it, ostensibly, is to shorten the period of ignorance and chaos -- the galactic Dark Ages -- which will follow the fall of the empire. The foundation will do this by codifying knowledge. Their work will be a gigantic Encyclopedia. Basically, the foundation will be the monks keeping knowledge alive via their records and such.

This gets the Emperor's approval (the emperor is happy to send all these dissidents away to the ends of the universe and doesn't care whether they ever produce anything). Then Seldon dies (offscreen, implied). Seldon DOES NOT APPEAR -- alive, that is -- after the first story in the set.

There is a large time gap between each of the stories in Foundation. This is extremely important, for both positive and negative reasons, which we'll get to. In the second story, the foundation has reached the point where it's beginning to produce its first volumes, but the mayor of Terminus, Salvor Hardin, who is my favorite character in the books and comes across as somewhere between Harry Truman and Groucho Marx -- a no-nonsense, brass-tacks, straight-talking wiseass -- doesn't give much of a damn about that. He's concerned about the four systems adjacent to Terminus, all of which are better armed than they are, all of which covet Terminus' knowledge and technology and think Terminus would look good in their portfolios as a vassal state.

Hardin gets absolutely no help from the Encyclopedia crew, who think all that messy political day-to-day-running-the-place stuff is beneath them, but he solves the problem himself. (Interestingly, his solution is not given in the story! It's not until an aside in the next story that you find out he simply pitted those four systems against one another, each determined to not let the others have Terminus.)

Meanwhile, there's a Vault on Terminus and there's a room in it that is sealed and no one's sure what's in it or what it's for, but it's about to be a key anniversary of Terminus' founding, so people have gotten wind that maybe Something Important Will Happen. So they all show up and, lo and behold, suddenly a Holographic Hari Seldon Recording shows up and starts talking.

The first thing he says is that he does not, and never did, give a good goddamn about the encyclopedia. The purpose of Terminus is still basically what he said it was, but the encyclopedia is irrelevant to that; it was an excuse to get them away from the Emperor. Terminus is really there to keep civilization going as the empire falls; and to that end, they will face several major inflection points as the situation evolves. Psychohistory has predicted these. They come to be called "Seldon crises." Hardin just eased through the first one, and his I-fucking-told-you-so is palpable.

The rest of the stories in Foundation follow this formula. We skip ahead to the next crisis, and how it was solved, and we meet the people who solve them. Some of whom are interesting characters (none as interesting as Hardin IMO). All of whom, I suppose it is needless to say, are men.

In fact, I cannot recall that there is a single named female character in the entirety of the first book. There are a couple of wives and concubines, including one whose acceptance of a gift is important to the plot. But they are not fully realized characters, not even to the extent that Asimov was capable of a fully realized character at all.

The second book, Foundation and Empire, is in two parts. It was apparently based on two stories that saw publication as such, but either they were long stories or each was considerably expanded when it came time to write the novel. The first is about this civilization -- the Foundation-based civilization -- which has now spread far enough from its end of the universe that it's encountering the dying remnants of the Empire, and clashing with them. It is mostly concerned with Bel Riose, a General of the Empire, and it is not very interesting.

The second part is about the fucking Mule. The Mule is a mutant, a mind-manipulator. As such, it makes him a wild card -- psychohistory is only capable of predicting trends and mass actions; a single rogue actor cannot be prophecied, and has the potential to wreck the whole plan. When a Seldon Message comes along which is not about the right crisis (it concerns the war between the traders and the other Foundation factions, which would have indeed happened if the Mule hadn't messed with the timeline), everyone realizes they are off-course.

I'd say the problem here is that the Mule is an obnoxious character on which to pin a story, but the real problem is that the Mule is barely a character at all. We see very little of his internal workings -- in fact, for most of the story, he's in disguise. The only good thing about this story is that it introduces us to Bayta Darell, who is 1) An Woman and 2) has a core of iron. In fact she is Asimov's second-best female character ever (which admittedly is not saying much). She's what keeps this story going, to the extent that it keeps going at all.

Bayta kicks ass and takes names, but does not stop the Mule. He gets away, saying he's already ruined the Foundation (true, somewhat) and he will find the Second Foundation (we'll get to that) before any of them does, and destroy that too. Bayta says he's full of shit and they'll be ready. That's where the second book ends.

The third book is based on something Hari Seldon said way back at the beginning of the first one. He said they would found two Foundation worlds (always good to have a backup), and the location of the second one was ... obscure. Deliberately so. The third book, Second Foundation, is about people's efforts to find it: The Mule's, which fails (and ends fairly badly for him) and the Foundation's, which also fails -- kind of. It's complicated. Again, this was apparently first published as two separate novellas, and they must have been pretty long ones.

There is one and only one reason to read Second Foundation: Arcadia Darell, Bayta's precocious granddaughter, who gets herself completely entangled in the latter story. Arcady, though a bit too good to be true, is also an interesting and well-formed character, leading one to wonder what Asimov could have done if he'd bothered to write women more than once every blue moon.

I am open to any and all measures to make the latter two books watchable, because they are certainly dull going as books and have, it seems to me, lots of room for improvement. But Foundation is dear to me, and the problem is, I'd like to see it filmed (or televised) with its episodic structure intact ... which I think would be a nearly impossible sell today, because the conventional wisdom among the people who pay to make this stuff is that the audience is too stupid for that. They figure, "OK, episode two takes place five hundred years later, and everybody you liked in the first episode is long dead" is not gonna fly with the average viewer. Maybe they're even right.

But, damn it, the time gaps are a large part of what makes the first book interesting! They're what redeems the damned thing. If you don't do that -- because you want to get value from your expensive actors and the audience wants to be able to see the people they like in more than one episode -- then you lose pretty much the only thing Foundation has going for it.

As for the casting, I don't give a shit about that. Want to make Gaal Dornick a woman? No problem. Damn thing could use more women. Even the pigboys can't possibly object, because you don't see Dornick after the first story anyway, at least in this universe the way it's supposed to be filmed! Are you getting me? Cast anybody you like; but keep them ephemeral. All of them are ephemeral. If I only get Salvor Hardin for two stories -- oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that, he's the only major character in two of them, and the second one's got his best scene -- and I can bear up under the strain, then you can too.

It's never going to happen the way I want it to happen. I know it. And so I won't watch it. (And even if it did happen the way I wanted, it still wouldn't solve the problem of how to save the second or third books. There, focusing those series around the Darells would actually be a positive, because they're the only interesting things in them.)

Anyway. As ever, I have Opinions. Aren't you glad I didn't talk about Heinlein?