It’s a slightly click-baity title, but as we’re still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?
My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. I’ve tried watching it multiple times and each time I have absolutely no patience for the pointless little scenes which contain little to no depth or meaningful plot, all coalescing towards that 15 minute “journey” through space and series of hallucinations or whatever that are supposed to be deep, shake you to your foundations, and make you re-think the whole human condition.
But it doesn’t. Because it’s just pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. Planet of the Apes was released in the same year and is, on every level, a better Sci-fi movie. It offers mystery, a consistent and engaging plot, relatable characters you actually care about, and asks a lot more questions about the world and our place in it.
To be fair to the man: The early Foundation stuff was written in the late 1940s and early 50s, and he later freely admitted (it’s in his second autobiography, I, Asimov) that as a huge science/science fiction nerd he had no idea how to write women and avoided it.
His earliest stuff just has women as little more than arm candy, his later stuff turns them into really weird sex objects that are no more believable!
You are quite probably right: I must admit I haven’t read much of anything of his for ages, but in my teens I devoured as much as I could. That was nigh 30 years ago now, though, and not only have what’s acceptable changed, I have grown up, too. :)
I reread the Caves Of Steel trilogy recently, the first was written in the fifties, the last in the eighties. The difference is striking but not necessarily good! The only woman of note in the last one does have more agency than the only woman (at all?) in the first, but she is more obsessed with sex than a 14 year old boy! It’s honestly a little bit creepy