Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

Traditional Chinese translation with great cover featuring the author as Hari Seldon--appropriate, since Seldon, like all the smart characters in the book, is basically Asimov.

I first read Foundation 40 years ago. Like everything I've read by Isaac Asimov (and I've read a ton of Asimov), I found it rather dry and dull back then, and my tastes were much less discerning--back then I loved pretty much anything with a spaceship in it. This fix-up novel is basically a bunch of conversations where the smart character is the author's mouthpiece and the other characters exist just so the smart character can look smart.

Also, the very existence of women is not alluded to until 81% of the way into the book.* This being a society tens of thousands of years into the future, a reader could be forgiven for starting to seriously think that women have gone extinct (or abandoned the men like Entwives) in the book's setting, and that the interchangeable men--who all smoke and talk like 1950s American businessmen, and only two of whose names I can remember less than 12 hours after finishing the book--reproduce via cloning or something. Near the end of the book, a young woman appears and says nothing, but just looks mesmerized in the mirror as a piece of high-tech jewelry (made by men, I assume) makes her look pretty. A couple of pages later, the comedy-shrew-wife of a petty despot appears, and actually has a few lines just to make her be the awful harpy, and is immediately shut up by being given the same piece of jewelry. It doesn't keep her silent for long: she acts the shrew again for a page or two a couple of chapters later. And that's it for women in this book! I can't remember a single mention of children, either.

This is the problem with most classic SF: it may be interesting in a sort of anthropological tracing of influences and of bygone attitudes, but as literature, well, you can see why science fiction is still fighting to shed the prejudice that it's shallow, juvenile, and poorly written. Thanks a lot, John W Campbell.

Wow, women! Women who actually do things!

And how about the Apple+ adaptation? Well, it's MASSIVELY better--for one thing, women not only exist but play major roles in the show and in the narrative setting, and for another, there's a racially diverse cast of really talented actors who fill out the two-dimensional characters of the novel--but at the same time...saying it's massively better is not saying much. To be honest, I find the TV/streaming show ponderous, self-important, cold. It's beautiful. The cast are great. There's a great deal of imagination invested in it. But...it's still pretty dull. That's down to the writing and directing. The acting, the casting, the cinematography are superb, and just barely enough to keep me watching.

*I'm willing to admit there may have been some mention of them before that, or even a very vague allusion toward their existence, but if so, I missed it. And after noticing the total lack of female characters in the first few chapters, I was looking for them...and then looking for any mention at all, even indirect, that women existed.