On a whim, I decided to revisit Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I’m into the second book now — Foundation and Empire — and while I like it just fine, it’s quite obvious that today’s science fiction has far outpaced the classics. And I suppose that can be expected as science itself discovers more.
So when you hear of planets in the series that lose their nuclear capabilities and having to revert back to coal and oil, you wonder how an interstellar race could do something so quaint. Sure, it was cool in the 40’s, but we’ve come so far since then. We have whole universes of imagination that, while they suspend reality, still hold the thrill of “hey, in 300 years, maybe we will be able to do that.” The thing about Asimov’s time is that he couldn’t imagine beyond where we sit today in many respects. It’s almost like writing a book 75 years ago that can’t imagine a computer that could fit in a suitcase by 2050. And even then, you get the sense that that word “computer” itself held some kind of magic to those early writers.
But it’s almost like watching a movie that you thought was so cool in 1978. Watch it now and you can’t imagine. Yeah, they painted Lou Ferrigno green back then and called him “the Hulk,” but have you seen the current Avengers version?
Writers like Asimov fired the imaginations that laid the foundation (no pun intended) of today’s science fiction, but they’ve been outpaced. Good reading 50 years ago. Today, maybe not so much. That doesn’t mean no one should read them, but expectations must be tempered for sure. Good for the memories, if you have them…
