Here's Laura's brief summation of our reading group from 2+ weeks ago:

The discussion of this month's book, "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov, was a little on the short side, which was just as well, since we also had to go through the process of nominating books for our next September 2003 through February 2004 reading selections. (I'm also going to keep the synopsis of the discussion short tonight, since I need to leave time to get to the nominations part of the evening). Most of the members agreed that the book fell short on characters (especially women, of which there was only one in the whole book), plot, and language, although a few people liked it anyway (or, as one member said, "It wasn't as bad as I expected it to be!") Discussion of the actual content of the book (as opposed to the history of the book, the merits of the book, etc., which we also talked about) tended to address the ideas and theories underlying the story. Andy, who nominated the book but was called out of town unexpectedly, emailed his thoughts, which mostly centered around the interesting possibilities of psychohistory and the parallels between the history portrayed in Foundation and the historical evolution of European society

If this book illustrated anything, it's the difference between discussing an sf book and discussing a classic, and the difference between what's considered a "Classic" in sf vs. mainstream literature. No one can defend Asimov's prose (although some were willing to cut him some slack since he was in his early 20's when he wrote this), the book isn't even a novel but an aggregation of five loosely connected short stories, everyone knows characterization doesn't matter in his era of Asimov, so when judged literarily against the likes of what we usually read, it falls far short. Compounding that is the basic idea of psychohistory, the ability to boil down predictions of the future into algorithms and number-crunching, which Asimov had come up with as the basis for one story, but Campbell and future editors were so smitten with that it became the jumping off point for a whole series of novels spanning 50 years of his career. I kept trying to keep the book in its proper context, to talk more about the circumstances under which it was written, why it was an important book, why it was voted the best sf series of all time, and that book 2, "Foundation and Empire" is much better. But as Laura said and I'd thought the same thing, as an introduction for most people in the group to true sf, it was a poor choice.