Not an urban legend, but the whole "butlerian jihad" background of Dune. It really made me think about technology.

I always imagined the times before the jihad not as a terminatoresque apocalypse but rather as a really advanced civilization with similar problems to ours. People connected to their machines (like social media) and the ones in power wielding the power those machines enact over hummanity.

The jihad for me is not a war between man and machine. I imagined it more as a social uprising, a rebel movement to abhor the control of a few over hummanity using technology. There was violence for sure (Haven't read brian's books) but is not your normal "machines bad" war.

Off course after 10k years or more, the people of dune only remember the "machines bad" part. But the way society is made up and what people can achieve in dune, tells me that hummanity wanted to trascend what machines could do.

Yeah I wasn’t a fan either.

Edit: When I was in high school, my English/Lit teacher made a comment about how sci-fi in general has a lot of great ideas, but wasn’t known for its great writing. I disagreed at the time, because I had read some great sci-fi that was well written up to that point. Later when I read Foundation and a few other “Sci-Fi” classics I had to agree with her. Sure these are great ideas, but the writing sucks.

FWIW, there’s a lot of dickriding on Goodreads for popular en Vogue authors.

When the host of a popular true crime podcast published a book, before it even arrived in stores or for those who pre-ordered, it already had a 4 star rating. Neon Gods has a high rating when the writing is so painfully dry and there was only I think two real smut scenes?

I read I, Robot and some other collections of Asimov short stories in my teens, but didn't read Foundation til much later in life. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but unlike his other stories, it was from an academic perspective.

Reading Foundation you can see were different authors got their motivation, and you can see the "foundation" of modern sci-fi.

Along side that, Asimov has always been great at Man vs Nature (or Man vs Cold, Unfeeling Logic), and less about dynamic, three dimensional characters and internal turmoil.

If you are not into this style, that is about personal preference, not about quality of work.

PS OP saying essentially, "I'm a writer and therefore get to decide what is and is not good" is the most pretentious thing I have heard in a while.

I wanted to like this book so badly, but I just couldn't.

• The incredibly descriptive child abuse scenes
• The horrible character names
• The massive plot holes
• The fact that there is no way a mother wrote those scenes about her own kids and found it "therapeutic"
• The long scenes about things that never end up being relevant to the story (as you pointed out)

I was just so disappointed at the end of it. It felt like the only scenes that had any thought put into them were the sex scenes.

Also, I couldn't help but notice that the voice of Verity in her manuscript and her phrases were super similar to the speaking style of Lowen. Like... every person's personality and mannerisms felt the same.

I didn't say he did. I said that's how the novel reads. The Road is a tediously bland tale of two people slogging through the most generic possible apocalypse while failing to hold a conversation.

It's a dreary playlist of unimaginative atrocities that ends >!on a silly christmas miracle when the boy is picked up by The Last Nice People on Earth when his dad dies.!<

It's easily the most overrated book I've ever read by far.

So I also get severely depressed and need to stay away from depressing things. I read The Road because it's been highly recommended by multiple people.

I'll say this. It's one of the most depressing books I've ever read (the winner is still A Child Called It) and it for SURE still makes me sad to think about it sometimes.

That being said if you can manage to read it, I highly suggest it. This book is such a good book, and if anyone reads it and doesn't feel sad afterwards then they're not someone who can feel emotions to the same extent. Or they're just REALLY good at compartmentalizing. I got through it by reminding myself "This is fiction. This is fiction. This is fiction" 😅 Good luck! I hope you make the right decision for you, whatever that may be :)

OP, I think you kind of miss the point here... Close to none of the classics we know would be published today, you can't judge a book by this factor. Besides, it very much is about whether you enjoyed it or not. You don't really criticize the book in your post: you name subjective things you didn't like (boring prose, unintrestting characters, lack of proper pacing), then proceed to declare that Foundation is not a classic. None of us have the right to say that in general, even less so if your points are not concrete (aside from the pacing, I'll admit it is a bit weird). Finally, why were you expecting the author to cut right to the meat, as you said? As far as I can tell, books have only recently started to become so fast-paced. Not to say that all stories prior to the 21st century are snore fests; I think they simply have a (mostly) different style.

You sound triggered.

I read Wasp Factory about 20 years ago. Can’t recall too much - but vividly remember it fucking me up. Read Banks ‘The Bridge’ a couple times. Brilliant book. Less young teenage emotional scarring.

I'm not OP, but I too was indeed underwhelmed by Asimov. I genuinely thought I would enjoy it because I mostly read classic Sci Fi, and a ton of non-fiction, so from what I've read about Foundation, it seemed a good fit for me. But I found it badly written and a slog to read. I wanted to like it, but I couldn't.

I slogged through OP's post. It just dragged on, being overly redundent without actually adding insite past "I didn't get it."

It's good sci Fi. It isn't claiming to be literary fiction

Yeah, sounds like a good idea. Good thinking with the double sided tape!

I agree. Went several paragraphs at a time without processing the information because I would get bored of the nonstop trade negotiations and politics. I feel like each of the five parts could have been reduced to one chapter. I get that it was innovative for its time, but the themes it innovated are easy to grasp by modern standards, and it’s aged poorly as a result imo

TL;dr….OP wrote hundreds of words, but in their post nothing “happened.”

>You simply went in with wrong assumptions and expectations of sci fi as a genre, it's one that is more thoroughly rooted in its ideas than for its literary ability.

I did not know about this. I thought the primary purpose of fiction is to entertain, grabbing the reader with conflict and character depth. Everything else comes second. Foundation misses the bar in this regard. I like the ideas it explored like psychohistory, but I find that they could've been better developed and employed to tell a more engaging story than what we got in Foundation.

>Foundation is part of the Golden Age sci fi starting around the cusp of the start of WW2 onwards, an era of unprecedented technological development.

If you say so, I wonder what you think of Jules Verne and works like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It's not a perfect work, but still ahead of Foundation in my opinion. I think the Golden Age began with Jules Vernes era of Sci Fi. And works like Foundation, feels like a regression rather than progress from the previous era.

OP... are you the only good writer?

Not for the fragile. On one hand it's grotesquely violent and at first pass irredeemably grim and truly quite horrible to read. On the other, second-read hand it's still all that but the religious/metaphysical subtext comes out.

I don’t know that it’s triggering, but it did leave me with a sense of wtf did I just read, when I was done.

Incredible book but can be quite depressing. There is a reason the movie is almost black and white. There is no hope and is a story of true desperation. Some of the thoughts and statements of characters will rattle you if you have any empathy at all.

I love post-apocalyptic stuff but most books make it seem survivable. The Road is much closer to reality and highlights all the challenges of surviving.

If they do, they'll probably be back complaining that the Book of the New Sun is fantasy, not sci-fi, thus missing the point.

An absolute masterpiece.

I’ve have read it twice, brutal and amazing. My wife claims to have ptsd from it.

At your own risk…

I highly enjoyed foundation, my roommate finished it in one day. I much prefer it to Dune.

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