[annyokie]

I tried like a dog to wade through "the Foundation Trilogy" because my first husband was such a fan. It was around that time that I determined that if you can't tell the whole story in ONE book, Bible excluded of course, than I'll read somthing else.

How many descriptions of instrument panels,etc does the reader need? We aren't flying the danged spaceship, after all!

[discostu]

Of course the Foundation Trilogy is horribly misnamed, it was originally a series of shorts (each of the "chapters" was originally released as a short story, which he then clustered into 3 books). Foundation was my introduction into sci-fi... Prelude to Foundation marked my primary switch away from sci-fi (I still read some but it's by no means my #1 genre anymore, bizaar comedy crime fiction by Elmore Leonard and that crowd is my #1 now). I know what you mean about the control panels, Asimov was the only "hard sci-fi" I ever got into, much prefered the style of people like Dick who just put it there and don't bother to explain it. Saw one author in an interview defending the style of not explaining, his answer was "when I write regular fiction I don't explain the internal combustion engine".