Good Story - Terrible Production

The story is good - I read this almost 40 years ago, and now listening to it again.

However, the production is very low quality - the narration cuts out weirdly and some parts are not there (so a sentence will end midway etc). That makes it hard to tell if the narrator just stops randomly, or if the narration is missing a sentence or even an entire chapter.

Very disappointing production of a seminal work of Science Fiction by a master of the genre.

14 people found this helpful

Well read classic science fiction

Someone complained about partial loss of sentences, but citations from the "Galactic Encyclopedia" are actually truncated in the original text also and ends abruptly in the middle of sentences with a series of dots.... These quotations are meant only as glimpses, but when read aloud they certainly give the impression of having been cut by accident. Perhaps the reader should have said "end of quotation" or something like that. I too became annoyed and had to look it up in the first edition! As for lack of "character development", that complaint is true enough, but in my opinion it is rather an asset, not a drawback in stories of this kind. Asimov is certainly a somewhat overrated writer, but he is much more readable than some highly praised but dry and academic writers like Ursula le Guin. Carefully planned and thought out "caracter development" can sometimes be a drag. In short, I like the Foundation trilogy very much but it should perhaps be read as a delicious "period piece".

8 people found this helpful

A sweeping opera read immersively

William Hope voiced the characters convincingly and uniquely. Their attitudes, hopes and dreams were brought to life and the epic tale given flesh. I thoroughly enjoyed Asimov's vision of the inner workings of imperial death and rebirth.

1 person found this helpful

Awesome

Impressive story and excellent reader.
The reader makes the characters’ voices quite distinct, which is really beneficial for a story with long dialogues.

Seminal work but didn’t age all that well

The work is scientifically prophetic and a true masterpiece.

From a zeitgeist / social relevance point of view I found it disappointing since it seems naively optimistic about science, oversimplifying the characters in a strictly patriarchal way that doesn’t seem to allow for even of the fraction of societal change we’ve seen in the 70 years since it was written, let alone centuries.
Women scarcely feature in this story and when they do they are portrayed in the most infantile and stereotypic ways imaginable.

The narration is also disappointing, with the main characters having rather annoying intonations.

Skipped content

Good story and performance, but really jarring when paragraps are skipped mid sentence. For the great deal of the book this isn't a problem, but for a few places in the first chapter and one or two in kater chapters. That alone takes you out of the story and keeps eating away at you as you listen.

Just to stress the point that the actual voice acting wasn't bad.

The narrator of this book is superb!

The narrator is performing so well, the dialogues are hilarious and performed so well, I am sure Asimov intended to make it as it is presented here. Great work!

Interesting

The foundation projects our world beautifully. I can see patterns from reality. Besides, the words are interesting.
Yes

Classic!

What are you waiting for? Read it immediately, just to fill in the gap in your knowledge of classics.

Great book, performance a little hard to follow

The book is great, the performance is ok despite in some parts it screams or use an extreme accent that is hard to follow