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called it "the point of departure for the full cosmogony of science-fiction future history. Asimov attributed his success as a writer to it. It continues to be reprinted; it continues to sell well Asimov did not keep accurate track, but he checked up a few years ago and found that by 1978 it had sold more than two million copies. It may be the best-known science-fiction work of recent times, at least among those works defined as hard-core science fiction. And it eventually transformed Asimov, to his surprise, into a writer of bestsellers.
On the other hand, critics have attacked the Trilogy for a variety of reasons. Professor Charles Elkins of Florida International University called it "seriously flawed," "stylistically . . . a disaster," its characters "undifferentiated and one-dimensional," and Asimov's ear for dialogue "simply atrocious." Its ideas, Elkins concluded, are vulgar, mechanized, debased . . . Marxism." Although not all the criticism is so negative, Elkins's comments are typical not only of Asimov's critics but of what literary critics commonly say about magazine science fiction as a body of literature.
Asimov himself has described the Trilogy as "in the older tradition of the wide-spanning galactic romance." But, strangely, the series contains little action and almost no romance. The stories offer no maidens in need of rescue and no involvement of man and woman in an emotional relationship. What do a couple on a honeymoon talk about? Politics. As for action, all of it takes place off stage, as in Greek drama. The Foundation galaxy contains a crumbling empire, decadent emperors, rebellious subject worlds, frontier hardship, and several major space wars that involve the destruction of several planets. But there are only three acts of violence, two of them in the same story.
How to explain the continuing popularity of the Trilogy? Why has the Foundation become a foundation? The student of science fiction who can understand the appeal and influence of the series may understand much that differentiates science fiction from other kinds of literature, and something about the basic appeal of Campbellian science fiction. The failure to provide adequate answers to these questions is the central problem of scholarship about science fiction. The circumstances of creation, for instance, may provide some measure of understanding, but much contemporary scholarship chooses to ignore such ephemeral issues, preferring to apply to science fiction the same timeless criteria applied to Henry James or William Faulkner or John Updike.
Another view might argue not for lesser standards but for different standards, for more useful standards. How can traditional criticism understand the Trilogy, for instance, if it does not take into consideration

 
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