After finishing season 3 of AppleTV+’s Foundation, I felt the itch to go back to the source material. It’s been years since I’d read Isaac Asimov’s original trilogy, and I wanted to revisit that sprawling galactic history that had so fascinated me the first time.
But here’s the thing I hadn’t noticed before, and it hit me like a ton of bricks as I turned the pages this time around: everyone is a man. Every bureaucrat, every scientist, every trader, every political schemer. Even the minor characters. Women are practically invisible in those early books.
Back when I first read the series, I completely missed it. Maybe it’s because the story itself is so captivating, with its galaxy-spanning rise and fall of civilizations, or maybe it’s because as a young reader (mid-teens) I wasn’t looking for what was missing. But now? It’s impossible not to see.
Does this revelation ruin the story for me? Not at all. Asimov was a writer of his time, and Foundation was more about ideas—psychohistory, politics, inevitability—than it was about fleshed-out characters. But it does cast a new light on the trilogy. The “future” it imagines is one where half of humanity is strangely absent from the narrative.
That’s why I think the AppleTV+ adaptation does something important. It doesn’t just modernize the story with visual spectacle or personal drama—it rebalances the cast. Strong female characters take their place on the stage, shaping the same epic narrative with voices and perspectives that Asimov either overlooked or simply didn’t imagine back in the 1940s.
So, as I reread the books alongside the show, I find myself in a strange position: still awed by Asimov’s grand vision, but also aware of the silence between the lines.
A silence that, thankfully, the screenwriters have done a great job imagining.
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