Maybe engineered with chloroplasts in place of melanocytes so they could photosynthesize? Could be an adaptation for colonizing worlds where food was scarce.
Or it could be a purely cosmetic gene-mod. Green is a nice color.
News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple
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Maybe engineered with chloroplasts in place of melanocytes so they could photosynthesize? Could be an adaptation for colonizing worlds where food was scarce.
Or it could be a purely cosmetic gene-mod. Green is a nice color.
Your local Foundation Fanatic checking in. I've seen the preview but, as ever, I'll wait for the actual product. One of the tales did touch on the fact of different races of man. They were called "Westerners, Easterners, and Southerners", for reasons lost to antiquity. Analogs to White, Asian, and Black respectively. The one thing that annoyed me most about the series was that the first three books took up about the first half of Seldon's thousand year plan. "Foundation's Edge" advanced things a little, but not all that much. Then he did not one, but two prequels. Then he died (blast). Then the "Killer B's" did their three books, but didn't really advance things either. A few short stories, by other authors, appeared in "Foundation's Friends", a tribute piece. As I recall, those were decent. Another author (Donald Kingsbury) wrote an unauthorized sequel called "Psychohistorical Crisis" that filed off the serial numbers. It had all the shortcomings of the original but little of the merits.
In what context? Were specific characters identified as belonging to the different groups?
Its been a while since I read Foundation, but I'm listening progressively to the old audiobook (due for a remake?) to get the feel of it after seeing this wonderful trailer.
David Brin claims to have wrapped all the loose ends up...but not satisfactorily for you?
RAMA
David Brin claims to have wrapped all the loose ends up...but not satisfactorily for you?
RAMA
The Killer B Trilogy is to Foundation what Discovery is to Star Trek.
They should have just made it a separate universe, like the Psychohistorical Crisis guy did, because it's not compatible with Asimov's works at all. That said, there's no reason why there couldn't be green, or any other color, skin in the future-- it should be as easy as getting a tattoo.
And I found Psychohistorical Crisis more inventive as a pseudo-sequel.
One of the themes of the original Foundation Trilogy was how people in the Empire were forgetting science and how to repair or create new technology. I know is a quite recurring trope in the SF literature, but rarely they explain how it could happen. They tried to give some kind of explanation in the prequel books, but I remember I wasn't totally convinced.
Your thoughts?
Your thoughts?
Given who's writing the series, what? Will they rename it to "Foundation Begins..."? 
The Killer B Trilogy is to Foundation what Discovery is to Star Trek.
The Second Foundation Trilogy, the title of which does not refer to the Second Foundation, goes from "not compatible" to "mostly compatible" to "compatible" over the three books, and until Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis was published, I thought David Brin's Foundation's Triumph was the best Foundation book since Foundation's Edge. The advice I've given people the last few years is to read a plot summary of Foundation's Fear online, then go ahead read Foundation and Chaos and Triumph. Like A Darker Geometry, his Known Space novel, Benford's Foundation's Fear is a decent Gregory Benford novel but it's not good at being part of the universe it was written for.
Benford was the worst choice to do a Foundation novel, his writing style is the opposite of Asimov's, not a good story teller. The other 2 writers are good.
Even without reading it I have to disagree. "Prelude" was the best Foundation novel (and I generally don't like prequels). Asimov himself thought so, so I am in good company.
I tried reading Benford's book but couldn't finish it. Same thing happened with a Robot novel someone else wrote. It made me realize that what I loved about these books was Asimov himself. I would rather read Fantastic Voyage 3 written by Asimov than a Robot or Foundation novel written by anyone else.
Even without reading it I have to disagree. "Prelude" was the best Foundation novel (and I generally don't like prequels). Asimov himself thought so, so I am in good company.
I tried reading Benford's book but couldn't finish it. Same thing happened with a Robot novel someone else wrote. It made me realize that what I loved about these books was Asimov himself. I would rather read Fantastic Voyage 3 written by Asimov than a Robot or Foundation novel written by anyone else.
Prelude is a good novel. I'm not saying it's bad. Its problem, imho, is that it has the same plot as Foundation and Earth. Prelude is a better novel than Earth by far, but their protagonists go on the exact same journey into humanity's past (Seldon on Trantor; Trevize in the galaxy itself) and find the exact same person at the end of their journey. After reading Earth, reading Prelude was a letdown.
There are good Robot novels. The Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen about a Spacer world on the brink of an environmental collapse is really good. I haven't read the Susan Calvin trilogy; I've heard that a bit revisionist. I still have some of the Robot novels iBooks published fifteen years ago to read; I've put them off because they're sequels to Robot City, and I haven't read those in a very long time, though I should probably just admit I'm not going to read these.
Disagree. I didn’t see any similarity between those books other than both being great.
And speaking of great Foundation books, the first 3 parts of Forward the Foundation are some of the best writing Asimov ever did. Part 4 was done when he got really sick so it’s not as good. And he died before writing part 5 though the book doesn’t really need it.
Caliban was the book I couldn’t finish, and I am not going to bother with the rest.
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In one of the prequels, when Hari Seldon was still able to walk, a doctor told him that sooner or later he would lose the use of his legs. She also explained that some time before there would be doctors capable of healing him, but now there were simply no more people with that ability.
Now I understand the problem faced by the author. We are making incredible progress TODAY in the field of prosthetic limbs and in the treatment of degenerative diseases and therefore it seems truly ridiculous that in tens of thousands of years someone is still forced to use a wheelchair. Still, making the cripples walk seems to me to be too useful a skill to let fall by the wayside.
Now I understand the problem faced by the author. We are making incredible progress TODAY in the field of prosthetic limbs and in the treatment of degenerative diseases and therefore it seems truly ridiculous that in tens of thousands of years someone is still forced to use a wheelchair. Still, making the cripples walk seems to me to be too useful a skill to let fall by the wayside.
I loved Psychohistorical Crisis. There was ten times more story in that one book than the whole Killer Bs Trilogy.
There were mainly two things that turned me off to the trilogy, one canonical and one thematic. The canonical one was the use of robots. There were no robots in the Foundation Era, and this was later explained as part of Daneel's long-game manipulations. The thematic one was their explanation for the humans-only galaxy. This was actually an amazing SF idea that would make for a good book or series, but it's such a staggering concept that its use as a B-plot was weird, since it really overshadows everything in the robot and Foundation eras. Plus, it's just way too dark for that universe.
I enjoyed the Caliban trilogy. I think that's probably the only tie-in I've read, aside from Foundation's Friends.
It was different yet familiar. The style and the names were definitely in the style of Asimov even while they were completely changed. I loved the technology he introduced too. I've always wondered, does anyone know how Psychohistorical Crisis came about? I mean, I know about the novella, and aside from the changes made due to it being unauthorized, everything seems to be in place to be a true sequel. I assume he at one point made a pitch for it, was rejected and they went with well-known authors instead.
