Asimov's "FOUNDATION"

[Kegg]

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.

Not that different. It's a silly phrase. Typical of:

Captain Marvel's "Holy moley!"

Juvenile fiction.

So it's never wise to assume that what seems silly or trite to us was always seen that way.

It's never wise to assume the reverse. Just because something is silly doesn't mean people weren't both aware of that and presumably liking it for it. There's plenty of actually overused slang (gangster prhases from 1930s movies) that was clearly serious at the time.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

The question might fairly be raised why you're on a Star Trek board, if I may be so impertinent?

I don't consider TOS or TNG to be space opera.

They're more like a generic space opera setting, peopled with likable characters, that is used as the backdrop for a series of science fiction short stories, some of which are fluff but many of which are quite sophisticated, especially compared to other televised sci fi. Was the original pilot for TOS space opera? Not really.

DS9 got a little space-opera-y in its longer story arcs, but it was just so damn well executed that you had to like it. [Like the original Star Wars trilogy, in many ways.]

 

[Christopher]

Not that different. It's a silly phrase.

Yes, and sometimes people are deliberately silly, especially when concocting euphemisms that are suitable for public use in a society that values politeness and frowns on open profanity. The silliness of the euphemisms is a way of making them palatable.

Where do you think we got expressions like "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle" or "Holy mackerel"? Yes, they're silly, but that's part of the point. People have senses of humor, so people do, in actual fact, choose to use ridiculous euphemisms in real life.

Typical of:

Captain Marvel's "Holy moley!"

Juvenile fiction.

By quoting me out of context, you're misrepresenting the meaning of what I said. My point was that this phrase which originated in juvenile fiction actually did become popular for use in everyday life. People really did talk that way back then.

 

[Kegg]

People have senses of humor, so people do, in actual fact, choose to use ridiculous euphemisms in real life.

Great Galloping Galaxies was played seriously. That's simply ridiculous writing, and that's the really important thing here. I was just citing it as an example of the generally not-so-good writing of the series; a clunky bit of dialogue in a trilogy not exactly short of the material.

People really did talk that way back then.

They swore a lot more than some fictional accounts may have you believe, but this isn't about how people talk, is it? Nobody was saying 'Holey moley' to nuclear holocaust because it's sort of serious business.

 

[Christopher]

Come on. Do you really think that any author back then would have been allowed to have a character say "Holy shit" or something like that under any circumstances? Asimov didn't use that language because he was an inept writer, he used it because it was all he could get away with using given the censorship of the time. It's an illogical basis for questioning his competence, since it's a convention that any writer in that time and context would've had to follow.

 

[RAMA]

I just noticed that Roland Emmerich is directing Foundation!! He claims 3d is the only way to film the trilogy. Well I'm ok with that but isn't he the LAST director who should be working on this story? The only good news..the writer who wrote Saving Private Ryan is doing the script and is almost ready to turn in a draft. Maybe a good script can make it workable. Would we rather see an attempt..ANY attempt to finally get this thing on screenrather than not? I also look at the recent "I, Robot" and "Day the Earth Stood Still" as well as Avatar, ST, and District 9 as good genre movies with high action quotient that can be made WELL and popular..and they give me some hope.

 

[Christopher]

^You lost me by including the Day the Earth Stood Still remake in a list of good genre movies.

 

[Demiurge]

Yeah, Foundation as a whole doesn't really hold up that well anymore. The Mule was one of the greatest short stories ever IMO and really what elevated the entire work to legendary. And it was enormously influential, and in that regard is one of the most important scifi works out there, up there with Verne and Wells IMO as (if you'll excuse the pun) the very foundation on which scifi exists.

However, a lot of it is dated (as you'd expect for something 60 years ago) and a lot of it is hard to imagine now. The very premise that a scientific society capable of interstellar travel could lose it's ability to produce technicians capable of running it out of what appears to be simple ennui and apathy seems pretty absurd in the information age.

And Asimov I'm afraid shows a very poor understanding of human nature. There's a scientific arrogance that pervades the works that I don't care for - you can really see the break between reality and the depth at which Asimov understands the human condition in several cases.

I recognize its greatness, especially in the tropes that have expanded throughout scifi since, such as the ecumenopolis of Trantor, the merchant traders that are recognizable as the forebears of Han Solo and Harry Mudd, and so many more. Heck, you can even trace the genesis of the X-Men back to his conceptions on human mutations evolving super powers.

But outside of the Mule, I can't say I really liked the series that much. But then your mileage may vary.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I take it that it is an urban legend that Osama bin Laden is a fan and named Al-Qaeda (Arabic for "the foundation" or "the base") after the trilogy. I was just imagining him being captured turning up at the premiere when the movie opens in Kabul.

 

[Christopher]

It seems unlikely to me that someone whose personal ideology is based on a rejection of all things Western would be a fan of an English-language trilogy written by a Russian-American author and inspired by Roman history.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yes, I didn't find it credible when someone trotted out the story to me.

 

[Hyperspace05]

It seems unlikely to me that someone whose personal ideology is based on a rejection of all things Western would be a fan of an English-language trilogy written by a Russian-American author and inspired by Roman history.

It hasn't stopped Bin Laden from being a fan of Arsenal. (the soccer club)

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Here's the Guardian article that propounds the link between OBL and Asimov's trilogy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/24/alqaida.sciencefictionfantasyandhorror

I would have thought he would be more likely to be a fan of Dune.

 

[Holdfast]

I take it that it is an urban legend that Osama bin Laden is a fan and named Al-Qaeda (Arabic for "the foundation" or "the base") after the trilogy. I was just imagining him being captured turning up at the premiere when the movie opens in Kabul.

The whole movie is a CIA plot to capture him. This explains bizarre stuff like Emmerich being chosen to direct it. The extra explosions are bound to whet Osama's appetite to go watch it. And then? Gotcha!

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Well, there's going to be a new Dune movie as well so that doubles their chances. Now all we need is a reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and he's definitely toast.

 

[Christopher]

Here's the Guardian article that propounds the link between OBL and Asimov's trilogy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/24/alqaida.sciencefictionfantasyandhorror

If anything, I'd say that article debunks the alleged link. It discusses it, but then pokes holes in it. For one thing, it points out something I forgot in my own previous post: that Asimov was Jewish. Hardly someone a militant like bin Laden would embrace as a role model. And these paragraphs are telling:

By the time Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, his roster of jihadis had been computerised. Flying back to Afghanistan on a C-130 transport plane, he is said to have had with him, along with his wives and 150 supporters, a laptop computer containing the names of the thousands of fighters and activists who would help him further expand his struggle against the west. This qaida ma'lumat, this "information base", seems a very plausible source of the name.

Dr Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident and former Afghan mujahideen, thinks the term is over-used: "Well I really laugh when I hear the FBI talking about al-Qaida as an organisation of Bin Laden." Al-Qaida was just a service for relatives of jihadis, he said, speaking to the American PBS show Frontline. "In 1988 he [Bin Laden] noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organised and arranged for proper documentation."

Fascinatingly, the acclaimed biography of Bin Laden by Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, hardly mentions the name al-Qaida. Written before September 11, it does so only to emphasise that al-Qaida is the wrong name altogether: "A lot of money is being spent on a rapidly expanding web of Islamist charities and social services, including the recently maligned al-Qaida. Bin Laden's first charity, al-Qaida, never amounted to more than a loose umbrella framework for supporting like-minded individuals and their causes. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, al-Qaida has been portrayed in the west as a cohesive terrorist organisation, but it is not."

There's no doubt that the name came to prominence in part because America needed to conceptualise its enemy. This is certainly what Bodansky thinks now. "In the aftermath of September 11," he says, "both governments and the media in the west had to identify an entity we should hate and fight against."

So it seems that if bin Laden used the name al-Qaida at all, it was for a database system to organize his associates, not for the name of an actual organization. It's more a term that the West has latched onto than something bin Laden's own people use.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I'm more interested in knowing if OBL still follows Arsenal, and what he thought of the match the other night. "Did you see Porto's second goal? They were having a laugh."

 

[Christopher]

I imagine something called "Arsenal" would appeal to someone like bin Laden...

What is "Arsenal" anyway? I think I've heard the name mentioned as some kind of sports team in some British show or other, but that's all I know. I see in the post above that it's a football (aka soccer) team, but why is it called Arsenal? Is that a place name?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The club was founded by workers at the Royal Arsenal armaments factory at Woolwich (in south London) back in the 1880's, I believe.

 

[Hyperspace05]

I imagine something called "Arsenal" would appeal to someone like bin Laden...

What is "Arsenal" anyway? I think I've heard the name mentioned as some kind of sports team in some British show or other, but that's all I know. I see in the post above that it's a football (aka soccer) team, but why is it called Arsenal? Is that a place name?

Arsenal is one of the most famous and successful football/soccer clubs in the world. Here is their Wikipedia entry.