I really can't say. Lots of authors have good books and not so good books. Dickens later writings were good, but his earlies works like Pickwick Papers and Sketches by Boz were insufferable. Same goes for Joseph Conrad. Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, I think these guys generally wrote well. For Sci-Fi, H G Wells, Jules Vernes, Mary Shelly I'd rank over Asimov.

>You simply went in with wrong assumptions and expectations of sci fi as a genre, it's one that is more thoroughly rooted in its ideas than for its literary ability.

I did not know about this. I thought the primary purpose of fiction is to entertain, grabbing the reader with conflict and character depth. Everything else comes second. Foundation misses the bar in this regard. I like the ideas it explored like psychohistory, but I find that they could've been better developed and employed to tell a more engaging story than what we got in Foundation.

>Foundation is part of the Golden Age sci fi starting around the cusp of the start of WW2 onwards, an era of unprecedented technological development.

If you say so, I wonder what you think of Jules Verne and works like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It's not a perfect work, but still ahead of Foundation in my opinion. I think the Golden Age began with Jules Vernes era of Sci Fi. And works like Foundation, feels like a regression rather than progress from the previous era.

I'm in the middle of reading Pride & Prejudice. The only other Austen's book I've completed is Sense & Sensibility. And judging with these, I'll say Austen isn't a very good writer. There are flashes of brilliance here and there. But overall, her stories aren't compelling. And her prose is cumbersome and bloated.

It's not about whether I enjoined it or not. It about if it is a good story. Just ask yourself a question. Do you think that this book will be published if it were written today?

I didn't say I don't like Sci fi. I said Foundation is bad literature.