The first volume, at any rate, though I lost interest about a third of the way through when a character says, "I'm getting old. Sixty-two." Then I performed a benefit/cost estimate of reading the rest of the novel, which I found deficient for other reasons, and decided to throw the paperback into the trash.
Why do those Foundation novels have the reputation as classics, any way? Asimov could imagine a galactic empire lasting for thousands of years, the FTL travel to make it feasible, and a new science called "psychohistory" which can predict mass social behavior millennia into the future - but not radical life extension. Robert Heinlein at least had the cognitive plasticity to imagine how a society of long-lived people might come about, and how it could work.
Asimov also assumes that we would just find suitable Earth-like exoplanets all over the place, so many in fact that the characters in his far future had forgotten where humanity originated. While the modern census of exoplanets has only gone on for about 15 years, and it has observational biases in favor of "hot Jupiters" and exoplanets with orbital periods shorter than Earth's year, I suspect we won't find that many Earthlike planets in orbits around their respective stars' "Goldiliocks zones." The few that might exist won't have large moons like Earth's to stabilize their rotations, either, so that their axes would tend to wobble a lot and result in unreliable climate zones. Or they could get tidally locked, with only a ribbon around the terminator as potentially habitable. That doesn't mean we couldn't make them more habitable with enough engineering, however, but I get the impression that Asimov's exoplanets come practically in turnkey condition.
Ironically, Asimov and other scientifically knowledgeable people in the mid 20th Century accepted the existence of exoplanets as a faith position, based on no evidence at all, while at the same time skepticizing other people's evidence-free woo-woo beliefs. Just by coincidence the exoplanet belief had some resemblance to the reality when progress in observational techniques started to find evidence.
In general the sampling of the Foundation story I've read doesn't impress me. Perhaps I came at it at the wrong age, or in the wrong historical period. Gregory Benford, in a recent
profile in
Cryonics magazine, thinks highly of Asimov and regrets that he didn't get cryopreserved. Benford writes this poem:
ISAAC FROM THE OUTSIDE
by Gregory Benford
For years I knew Isaac from the outside,
through dread nightfalls and fresh daybreaks
over the galactic empire,
seeking as a teenage kid from Alabama
to know a future that hung foggy, shadowed.
Till I met him and in his penthouse high saw
Shades drawn against the immensity lurking over
Central Park. He would not lie in a bed against that
outer wall, he who deployed battle cruisers
through the starlit sevagram, and was a guy
who would not fly
in airplanes (one roller coaster was enough)
No, not tough
that way. Afraid of heights, yet he lived in a penthouse
because Janet wanted to,
for the view,
and once—only once—in a tux
high above Manhattan’s flux
he backed out on the balcony
for a photo, never looking around.
Or hearing the sound
of time’s sure falling.
Still, he saw the silky realm above,
even if those city-planet dwellers of Trantor
also feared their heavens. New Yorkers, all,
they loved their warrens.
Why not look further? I wondered,
while you debate the Galactic Empire’s politics
in comfy rooms.
He would not entertain, when I brought it up,
the odd, chilly idea of cryonics.
“I’ll die with my books on,”
he said, “and be gone.”
And the other dreamers:
crisp Heinlein, folksy Simak,
crusty Jack Williamson, wise Silverberg,
ever-young Clarke, even Fred Pohl in his rational rigor—
all wrote of passing like sunrise rays
through the cold nitrogen lens to see
landscapes beyond our gray reality.
But none I found would take a “free freeze,”
as one cryonerd told me.
Ginny Heinlein said he (and she) didn’t want him
to come back
from that dark silent cold,
though he was bold
and sure a better destiny brimmed ahead.
Bradbury sipped a cool dry martini
(having gotten two for Aldiss’ one)
and deployed the neighborhood argument:
“I’d be alone in a world I didn’t know,”
forgetting that’s the way he came in.
No warm wife or daughters, maybe
—though why couldn’t they come?—
yet fans aplenty, time-steeped in his voice, nostalgic.
There up ahead beckons a life
splashed across a bright new world,
and more–
vistas strange beyond the punctured metallic sky
huge above Metropolis.
So I wondered why he did not rage against
the fall of that night.
There’s much up ahead, he said,
But you’ll be…dead.
Whatever the odds, Isaac (and yes, they are small),
at the very worst you would lie in a sterile dry hospital
(bed on an inside wall, please)
amid all those strained dim faces dear to you,
your past peeling out behind,
a plot outline
run backward.
Morphine-soft air and coughing out your last,
about to endow your Foundation,
end of story, yes.
Yet the cryonics techs down the hall,
waiting for the last notes strumming
in the back of your woozy mind
at a still center, would give a gift:
you’d smile –
and go to that great deep release
with a thin sliver of hope.
