Asimov's "FOUNDATION"
- Thread starter UncleRogi
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That's the old-school cover I grew up with lol, and was the cover still in the stores when I saw him speak way back in '79... My own reading copy was quite well-worn at the time and I bought that one new for the occasion. It is quite the culture shock compared to modern covers!
And I agree about the coolness level--I have a few other autographed books and things, but the only one that compares to this is a numbered Tom Canty print of Corwin of Amber signed by him AND Roger Zelazny...
And I agree about the coolness level--I have a few other autographed books and things, but the only one that compares to this is a numbered Tom Canty print of Corwin of Amber signed by him AND Roger Zelazny...
Thirded -- the only autographed book that I have is Excession by Iain Banks -- not really one of his best works.
You made milk come out of my nose on that one.
That's the old-school cover I grew up with lol, and was the cover still in the stores when I saw him speak way back in '79... My own reading copy was quite well-worn at the time and I bought that one new for the occasion. It is quite the culture shock compared to modern covers!
And I agree about the coolness level--I have a few other autographed books and things, but the only one that compares to this is a numbered Tom Canty print of Corwin of Amber signed by him AND Roger Zelazny...
Although I'm not a fan of that cover (the autograph is awesome) I love old-school sci-fi book covers. There was nothing fancy about them but they had a simple uniqueness of design. Nowadays, a lot of covers are crapped or photoshopped. Not a fan of those.
Only because he felt he had no choice. He wanted to find a way out of it. And if Asimov had lived long enough, that probably would have been the subject of the next book.
No, he had just figured out why his Black Box had made that decision. He still didn't have all the information, and in fact was already starting to realize it.
I don't think he cared either way, as long as he felt it upheld the Zeroth Law.
I agree, and this probably would have been dealt with, too; it's certainly easy to think of ways for Daneel to get around his limitations.
That's fantastic. And I like the cover, too.
Roger Macbride Allen's Caliban trilogy is excellent.
Foundation's Fear is interesting, though seriously flawed. Foundation and Chaos and Foundation's Triumph rival Asimov's best work.
And Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis is fantastic.
Agreed. It's hardly "expanded Foundation material" in any traditional sense, though!
Yeah, Psychohistorical Crisis is inspired by Asimov, but not a part of the Foundation Universe, and it's very good. The Caliban Trilogy is good, too. But the "Second Foundation Trilogy" is a disaster.
The autograph has a good story to go with it too...
I actually saw him speak at UConn twice, once in high school and then again my freshman year. One was on alternative energy and one on overpopulation. The 2nd time I managed to go backstage afterwards with my book and a crowd of other geeks and was one of the first ones to get something signed, so I was hanging out on the edge of the group watching him work the crowd [while the university president was trying to get him to leave to no avail lol]. I had a moment of inspiration and called out "How tall is Harlan Ellison?", to which he replied, without missing a beat or even looking up from what he was signing, "According to him or according to me?"
I actually saw him speak at UConn twice, once in high school and then again my freshman year. One was on alternative energy and one on overpopulation. The 2nd time I managed to go backstage afterwards with my book and a crowd of other geeks and was one of the first ones to get something signed, so I was hanging out on the edge of the group watching him work the crowd [while the university president was trying to get him to leave to no avail lol]. I had a moment of inspiration and called out "How tall is Harlan Ellison?", to which he replied, without missing a beat or even looking up from what he was signing, "According to him or according to me?"
I enjoyed this series as space opera when I was a kid, but it really doesn't do very much for me any more. [As space opera in general doesn't, I guess.]
It just seems like a great big thematic mess to me now.
The galaxy is just so large. The notion that it could be ruled as an empire is somewhat absurd to begin with. The further notion that such an empire would constitute "high" culture or a desirable state of affairs, and that anything else is "a dark age", seems doubly absurd.
A dark age with interstellar travel? Um, what?
We don't need a galactic empire to have a high culture here on Earth. Heck, we don't need united government on Earth in order to have a high culture here.
That means that to me the aims of psychohistory itself are a bit silly. "There will be 30,000 years of barbarism after the Empire falls!" Considering the amount of social change we've had on Earth in less than ten percent of that time, that seems a bit hyperbolic to me. So none of the planets of the former empire can have a valuable or worthwhile culture and society for 30,000 years, unless they are "saved" by one of the foundations or by robots or what not? Come on.
In the modern era, it also seems a bit out there to believe that something called "human knowledge" can be lost, and that we need "foundations" to preserve it. At the technological level of achievement shown in the first book, you could probably buy all "human knowledge" on a single quantum memory stick for $1.98. "Repositories of all human knowledge" would be so common that hustlers on 8th Avenue would be selling them on folding tables for crack money.
It just seems like a great big thematic mess to me now.
The galaxy is just so large. The notion that it could be ruled as an empire is somewhat absurd to begin with. The further notion that such an empire would constitute "high" culture or a desirable state of affairs, and that anything else is "a dark age", seems doubly absurd.
A dark age with interstellar travel? Um, what?
We don't need a galactic empire to have a high culture here on Earth. Heck, we don't need united government on Earth in order to have a high culture here.
That means that to me the aims of psychohistory itself are a bit silly. "There will be 30,000 years of barbarism after the Empire falls!" Considering the amount of social change we've had on Earth in less than ten percent of that time, that seems a bit hyperbolic to me. So none of the planets of the former empire can have a valuable or worthwhile culture and society for 30,000 years, unless they are "saved" by one of the foundations or by robots or what not? Come on.
In the modern era, it also seems a bit out there to believe that something called "human knowledge" can be lost, and that we need "foundations" to preserve it. At the technological level of achievement shown in the first book, you could probably buy all "human knowledge" on a single quantum memory stick for $1.98. "Repositories of all human knowledge" would be so common that hustlers on 8th Avenue would be selling them on folding tables for crack money.
Outside the Foundation, the ability to build ships and other technology was being lost. They could use relics of the Empire, but the interstellar travel wouldn't have lasted much longer if it weren't for the Foundation.
But what do you fill those repositories with? If we built one now, it would probably have the knowledge necessary for our current level of technology. But if you cut the supporting infrastructure out, you need a much more basic level of knowledge - what was commonplace a hundred or two hundred years ago, but which we don't really know about or use when the repository was compiled.
I don't think so. The point - at least, what I personally took away from the themes - was to parallel the fall of the Roman Empire, except to do this in space, on an even grander scale.
As such, each segment of the Foundation story (at least in the original set of stories) is a almost an essay/treatise on how the inevitable sociological sweep of history (rather than individuals within it) is what shines through. I don't necessarily subscribe to that theory, but Foundation employs that conceit to good effect. With one of the stories (Foundation and Empire, from memory), that's even spelt out by one of the characters who decides the Foundation should do absolutely nothing, as (psycho)history will solve the problem for them - the Empire in its decline cannot win an extended campaign because of its politics, regardless of the individuals involved in waging it.
Well, that's kind of the problem with it.
The "fall" of the Roman empire only led to a "dark age" in a very limited area of its former territory. And even in that area, in certain technological categories the successor states advanced on what had come before. The Byzantine and Caliphate zones experienced advances over virtually all technological and cultural categories. And - somewhat more importantly - the total area covered by the Empire has never been reunified, but it is obviously vastly more advanced in all areas now than it was in the 5th century.
That's just always been one of my pet peeves about space opera - and also some alternate history, and hybrids of the two like the General series - this idea that the collapse of a galactic political state could destroy the civilization of member planets. If there's some galactic civilization out there "falling" right now, we'd have no idea.
But then again I have always found the entire notion of interstellar empires to be militarily, economically, and politically absurd, so maybe I'm predisposed to find the theme of the Foundation series a bit daft.
Here's a pic of perhaps my biggest "geek totem":
And I know it's real, I got it signed myself about 30 years ago.
Sans autograph, that's the same Edition of the trilogy that I have!
That's right. The "Dark Ages" in Western Europe corresponded to a time of great dynamism and progress in most of the rest of the world. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire remained strong, Islam unified the Mideast, Shankara reinvigorated Hinduism by unifying Brahman orthodoxy with the diverse faiths of the Indian masses, Turkic nomads built a vast Silk Road trading empire, the Bantu spread agriculture and iron-smelting across sub-Saharan Africa, various civilizations thrived in Mesoamerica and the Andes, and in North America agrarian societies rose and unified the continent with extensive trade networks. China went through its own "decline and fall of the empire" a couple of centuries before Rome fell, but was resurging under the Tang Dynasty by the 7th century CE.
But the history education we get in America is insanely ethnocentric, so what was actually a localized period of decline, an exception to the overall global pattern of the era, is taught as though it were universal, as though the whole of humanity sank into darkness. And that myth informed Foundation and a lot of SF. I recall a Robert L. Forward novel referring to the period as "Earth's Dark Ages."
The original Foundation trilogy is not about the Galactic Empire's fall, but about the rise of the new "empire." The big idea being played with (not precisely explored, claims about SF "exploring" ideas are kind of overstated,) is the idea that human society and history has a lawful nature, amenable to understanding, even to manipulation. The importance of the mutant Mule is in raising the issue of the biological foundations of human nature and how it impacts this vision of comprehensibility. Many people, consciously or not, reject the very idea that human society and history are truly comprehensible, holding instead, basically, "Shit happens."
The desirability of Galactic Empire is no more questioned than the desirability of Manifest Destiny or the primacy of humanity in general in other works of fiction. The nuts and bolts of interstellar war and trade are not even considered. The absence of computer technology and AI renders the Foundation universe as obsolete as Star Trek. (The Robot novels and Daneel Olivaw do not successfully integrate AI and robotics in my opinion.) But as stated above, those are not what the original trilogy is really into.
The question is whether one accepts the second trilogy (I'm afraid the prequel trilogy never made enough impression on me to bother thinking about) as a legitimate continuation or a surreptitious rewrite of the themes. The reduction of human fate to the mysterious workings of a single human mind seems to me to be "Shit happens" on a megalomaniacal scale. And the ambiguous climax seems to be due to the fundamental impossibility of reducing such nonsense to a coherent plot.
Asimov may have felt, as a very succesful adult, very differently about the power of individuals than he did as a young man caught up in depression and war. But feeling is different from a consciously worked out theme. Unconsciously worked out themes are not the best kind of writing generally. Asimov had generally moved into nonfiction science writing, a lot of which is inevitably outdated (though some has just disappeared from the shelves.) The move back into fiction may have taken him to best seller lists but was not truly successful I think.
The desirability of Galactic Empire is no more questioned than the desirability of Manifest Destiny or the primacy of humanity in general in other works of fiction. The nuts and bolts of interstellar war and trade are not even considered. The absence of computer technology and AI renders the Foundation universe as obsolete as Star Trek. (The Robot novels and Daneel Olivaw do not successfully integrate AI and robotics in my opinion.) But as stated above, those are not what the original trilogy is really into.
The question is whether one accepts the second trilogy (I'm afraid the prequel trilogy never made enough impression on me to bother thinking about) as a legitimate continuation or a surreptitious rewrite of the themes. The reduction of human fate to the mysterious workings of a single human mind seems to me to be "Shit happens" on a megalomaniacal scale. And the ambiguous climax seems to be due to the fundamental impossibility of reducing such nonsense to a coherent plot.
Asimov may have felt, as a very succesful adult, very differently about the power of individuals than he did as a young man caught up in depression and war. But feeling is different from a consciously worked out theme. Unconsciously worked out themes are not the best kind of writing generally. Asimov had generally moved into nonfiction science writing, a lot of which is inevitably outdated (though some has just disappeared from the shelves.) The move back into fiction may have taken him to best seller lists but was not truly successful I think.
On a large scale, Human behavior is describable in mathematical terms; that was Asimov's hypothesis and it has been demonstrated in various ways since the original Foundation stories. Of course, like any complex system, Humanity is subject to chaos. But then, even chaos is describable mathematically.
As for Robots and AI, Daneel noted that Humanity had been manipulated to give up pursuing, and even thinking about, such things.
As for Robots and AI, Daneel noted that Humanity had been manipulated to give up pursuing, and even thinking about, such things.
The question might fairly be raised why you're on a Star Trek board, if I may be so impertinent?
This part I don't have a problem with. If you assume some sort of FTL travel; and lots of livable planets, and no sapient or otherwise problematic alien populations then it's possible a human government complex and elaborate enough could rule the galaxy in the far distant future. Those are a lot of 'ifs', but I don't see a problem with it as an idea if they're assumed to be true.
This isn't the same thing as saying it's the likely consequence of the 'ifs' being true, I want to stress, just a possible one.
But yeah, I won't particularly defend the rest of it. Even as a teenager, as stated, I was not fond of these books. They're all idea and poor prose (forget the lack of historical depth: Nobody has the right to have a character exclaim "Great Galloping Galaxies" and then pretend he's writing a serious narrative. Doesn't work that way.)
To modern ears, no, but the '40s and '50s were a different time. People didn't throw around the kind of graphic profanity that's common today, at least not in polite company, so they were more creative with their oaths. Captain Marvel's "Holy moley!" actually did become a popular expression in the '40s, and blues singers actually did use the phrase "Great googly-moogly," so alliterative, whimsical oaths were something people really used.
The reason things become quaint, hackneyed, or cliched is because they were used often enough that they became overused and a basis of scorn or ridicule. But they wouldn't have been used so extensively if people hadn't taken them seriously at first. So it's never wise to assume that what seems silly or trite to us was always seen that way.
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