Regarding psychohistory: It's worth considering the era in which the books where written. The 1st half of the 20th century saw massive innovations in economic theory, physics, and information theory. It was not a big leap to predict that in 500 years time, humans would further advance macro economics. Personally I felt the books did a great job setting limits in the capabilities of the theory, and using its inherit flaws to drive interesting plot lines.
Edit: looked it up. Dickens and Dumas preceded Jules Verne in serials being turned into novels.
I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, the lack of women feels weird and makes it hard to enjoy.
To be fair, the later books in the series which were written in the 70s are much better in this regard.
> there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all.
Much of it do have women in it. As I go through them in my head, almost everything has some women in it, at least existing in larger world. Except "Old Man and the Sea" one character against the world kind of things. Hemingway has women in other books tho.
It is not, in fact.
https://blog.chrislansdown.com/2022/02/07/isaac-asimov-creep...
Can't confirm. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages.
The wiki was awesome. Some of the best world building I've ever seen.
The novels, however, were atrocious.
In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publication over 8 years, and later compiled into the books.
I was astonished.
Perhaps everyone else already knew this. But such a clear narrative through line to be written in discrete short stories. Very impressive.
It sounds like this may have been common prior to this era as well.