Foundation (trilogy)

The characters exist to deliver ideas: one reader finds they “had no growth, no real personality” that survives the time-jumps, and the prose is dry, with almost no physical description. It reads as linked novellas rather than a novel, the seams showing, the merchant-era section the slow patch some call “all talk, no action.” The absence of women is specific, one reader noting “no women characters at all until the fifth part,” and the one wife who appears is a nagging stereotype. The science is barely there as extrapolation, characters still smoking, so it plays more like costumed political fiction. And because it keeps jumping decades and casts, readers never attach before it moves on.