The story of our future begins with the Foundation. Named the best series of all time by the Hugo Awards, the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov unquestionably comprise one of the great masterworks of science fiction, unsurpassed for its unique ...

There were a spectrum of opinions about Foundation, but our main criticisms were consistent. The book felt outdated. Part of that were the characters and the plot. It was all very mid-20th century sci-fi, what with the only male protagonists and their endless confidence and the almost complete lack of any diversity at all. It wasn't so much offensive as it just felt thin and tired, and we weren't really sure why we would want to read another story about such figures. But perhaps more damning was the vision of the future was really anachronistic. We understood why Asimov made the choice he did from his time, but reading about a far future where people are still reading paper newspaper or obsessed with nuclear power as the cutting edge just didn't make sense in 2021, and it was hard to ignore. Most of us still recognized and appreciated the key thesis of the book: the idea of science as the savior of civilization, that public policy can mitigate bad outcomes without curing them completely, and a plot arc that jumped generations between chapters because it's a story of a civilization and not individuals. We also acknowledged that reading Foundation alone without reading the trilogy was not fair to the book, because the plot really takes all three books to land, and most of us had read the whole trilogy before and remembered the larger arc being well executed. Nonetheless, the majority of us questioned seriously whether we could have even finished this book if we read it for the first time today. This led us down a really interesting rabbit hole about science fiction of the past, and why some of it becomes hopelessly outdated while other stories remain relevant even if the futures they paint are nonsensical. In the end, we could appreciate how Asimov's work was critical historically, but we couldn't find the same joy in reading it today.