Untitled (Fansly)

finished this book today and I'm glad I'm done, it was kind of a slog

In Isaac Asimov's imagination of humanity 50,000 years in the future, important women don't exist, but paper newspapers do. 

I fully recognize this was written in a different time, and I honestly didn't try to read it through a feminist lens, but when you're telling stories that span centuries and you're constantly introducing new generations of characters, after a while it becomes really hard to ignore that every single character is a man. I mean, there are a LOT of characters. I honestly started wondering, genuinely, "Do women exist in this universe?" 
My question wasn't answered until more than halfway through the book when a tradesman briefly brings a woman out to model some jewelry then leave. Amazing. That actually made it worse, because then I knew women did exist, just none of them were important enough to be in the story.
Almost made it through the whole book without a woman ever speaking, but right near the end there is a scene where one character has to listen to his awful nagging wife for a minute. Thank god for that or I would have thought the book was sexist.

Anyways, ignoring all of that, the book still wasn't very good, in my opinion. It started off strong; I was interested in the very beginning of the book, where we get to follow in the steps of an immigrant from a rural planet as he first experiences the bustling galactic capital, Trantor, but any promises made by the descriptive and immersive narrative style of the first chapter were not fulfilled. The rest of the book is mostly dialogue with very little description of the world around the characters. Just men trying to out-smart and out-rhetorize each other. After each time skip there is a new cast of characters and each time you will quickly identify the "cool guy" that's going to embarrass and outsmart everyone else because he is just so cool and has so much foresight. Sometimes one of them actually does have a clever or interesting argument, but most of the time it's j