Asimov is a science fiction novelist with no pretensions toward innovative techniques, hidden allusions, or occult symbolism. He is, as he professes to be, a popular writer whose work is immediately accessible to a wide audience.

It is worth asking, then, what it is about Asimov's writing that accounts for his popularity…. My argument is that Asimov's characters are at the center of appeal in his major fiction because they enrich and enliven the science fiction worlds he creates. (p. 135)

In Asimov's view, the stuff of science fiction is the human response to what science and the future have wrought, and this is indeed what his own novels are about.

The Foundation trilogy poses two special problems for a study of Asimov's characterizations—fatalism and fragmentation. First of all, the omnipresent specter of Seldon's Plan gives rise to the objection that Asimov's is a determined universe, and that...