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Of course the Foundation Trilogy is horribly misnamed, it was originally a series of shorts (each of the "chapters" was originally released as a short story, which he then clustered into 3 books). Foundation was my introduction into sci-fi... Prelude to Foundation marked my primary switch away from sci-fi (I still read some but it's by no means my #1 genre anymore, bizaar comedy crime fiction by Elmore Leonard and that crowd is my #1 now). I know what you mean about the control panels, Asimov was the only "hard sci-fi" I ever got into, much prefered the style of people like Dick who just put it there and don't bother to explain it. Saw one author in an interview defending the style of not explaining, his answer was "when I write regular fiction I don't explain the internal combustion engine".

Elmore Leonard is great. I am a fan of true crime, she said a bit ashamedly. Ann Rule is great. Jonathon Kellerman is a great crime novelist, a little too PC, but you can't have everything.

Per Asimov: I'd much rather read Ray Bradbury (Farenheit 451, etc). It's a bitch to write a good short story. He and John Cheever are kings of that genre albeit in different ways.