Prelude to Foundation

Way back in the last century, a young Big Anklevich got a three book omnibus edition of the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov from the Science Fiction Book Club. I read the whole thing, which wasn't even all that long...particularly since those SFBC omnibus editions always had the tiniest margins in order to pack as many words per page as possible. Less pages meant less printing costs.

I really enjoyed the Foundation Trilogy, and had it on my list of favorites over the years, but I never bothered to read any of the later books that came in the series. The first ones were written in 1951, 1952, and 1953. Asimov didn't come back to them until the eighties. That smacked of a sequel that nobody wanted, which we are plagued with these days in every big series from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to The Matrix to Scream to anything else that Hollywood thinks that they might be able to squeeze a few more shekels out of. So, I never did read any others.

Then Rish's friend Jeff moved to Germany. Jeff was a huge speculative fiction book reader, and he had a big collection of books. Rather than pack them all up and move them to Europe or keep them in a storage facility, he chose to just give them all away to anyone who wanted them. Rish only had so much room to accept books from his friend, and he took all of his favorites, but he also knew that I would love to have more books to add to my own anemic-in-comparison collection, so he grabbed boxes worth of books that he thought I might enjoy.

I thanked him, and used many of those books to fill my shelves. I have this aversion, though, to having a book on my shelf that I've never read. It makes me feel like a fraud. Here and there, I set out on a new effort to read the stuff I have up there so that I can say that I have read them all. That's how I found myself reading Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation.

It wasn't a magical return to a galaxy far, far away for me or anything, but it was pretty good. I find it to be an interesting thing that Asimov was doing in the end of his life. He was famous for a few different science fiction concepts, and he was weaving the universe together and uniting them all into one. 

My copy of Prelude to Foundation started with an author's note from Asimov that informed me what the proper chronology of his books were. The robots and Foudation went together, and he gave a nice delineated list of what was first, then second, then third, and so on. The funny thing is that hearing that list made me really want to read them all in that order now. I feel like I need to get to each and every one of them. I don't suspect that I will, but you never know.

Prelude to Foundation felt almost like a series of short stories stitched together, which shouldn't be surprising, considering that Asimov has written tons of short stories. He may well think in terms of short stories always, like Rish Outfield seems to. I like how he pulled it all together in the end, though. I won't spoil it in case you haven't read it yet, but the twist at the end was fun, and I liked it. 

Maybe I ought to try watching the TV series. I think I watched one episode of it, and didn't feel all that entertained, but maybe if I gave it another chance while I was in more of a Foundation mood...