They do. His female characters might as well have been written by an adolescent.
He's hardly unique in that. MZB's Mists of Avalon has similar issues from a different gender perspective.
Asimov looks especially crude now, with the distance of a few decades. I wouldn't be surprised if more recent fiction suffers a similar reassessment in time.
SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it. Character design is more likely to be an aspect of fan service - give the readers a fantasy they can identify with, maybe add some flaws for spice - and not so much an opportunity for self-reflection.
> His female characters might as well have been written by an adolescent.
I'm not sure his male characters are that much better.
Luckily, I don't feel that his books stand or fall by the characters in them. They are just vehicles used to explore the consequences of the technologies that Asimov presupposes.
> SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it
I don't agree with this assessment at all.
The best SF I've read has believable characters with real motivations.
Off the top of my head:
* Paul McAuley's Quiet War series
* Ken McLeod's Fall Revolution series, "The Execution Channel"
* Bester's "The Stars My Destination" - a recent read, and the character arc is cribbed from The Count of Monte Cristo, but the SF parafernalia is a backdrop for the character.
Mate, everything throughout history has been people-oriented. Almost every famous story throughout history has had a main character, because that's what humans find easiest to identify with: other people.
You are confusing 'character-led' with 'includes characters.' Plenty of stories are primarily about an abstract idea, place, or ethical lesson and the characters only exist to explain the ideas or move the plot along. This is in contrast to 'character-led' fiction, in which the primary focus is the character themselves and their development.
Quite a few early SF stories were gimmick-oriented.
As an example, one old short story - I've forgotten the name - involves a space race from Earth to Jupiter and back (or something like that). The participants usually go full blast 1/2-way there, invert to slow down, then repeat to get back.
The main character starts with an engine problem or something, can't catch up, then in a burst of inspiration realizes he can use Jupiter's gravity to swing around, at speed.
Everyone at first wonders if there's a problem, then when it happens they realize the brilliance of what happened.
My interpretation is the author had just learned about gravity assist ("first used in 1959 when the Soviet probe Luna 3 photographed the far side of Earth's Moon" says Wikipedia) and structured the entire story around that concept.
The people were secondary to the orientation.
While it's true what you said about almost every famous story, most SF is not made of famous stories.
(I would be grateful if anyone can tell me the name of the story I just summarized.)
> His female characters might as well have been written by an adolescent.
All of Asimov’s characters are broadly drawn embodiments of simple concepts; to the extent his stories have depth it comes from the interaction of those simple characters with each other an the constructed environment, but from subtly drawn, realistic characterization.
This is very much not limited to female characters.
Yeah, but his female characters like Bliss and Dors are especially embarrassing examples of authorial wish-fulfillment. He might as well have given Pelorat and Seldon his own name.
He's hardly unique in that. MZB's Mists of Avalon has similar issues from a different gender perspective.
Asimov looks especially crude now, with the distance of a few decades. I wouldn't be surprised if more recent fiction suffers a similar reassessment in time.
SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it. Character design is more likely to be an aspect of fan service - give the readers a fantasy they can identify with, maybe add some flaws for spice - and not so much an opportunity for self-reflection.