It's suggestive, but the word is common enough that it's not absolute proof.
Jonathan Nolan developing Asimov's Foundation to HBO
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It's suggestive, but the word is common enough that it's not absolute proof.
Really? I've never, ever heard the word except in these two contexts.
Meh?
Not a word I use daily either.
I've used the word coruscating frequently enough, but I don't know that I've ever used coruscant.
I didn't know that. He was definitely a social person and managed to get out a lot despite it.
Right, topside was deserted. I remember Hari getting trapped up there somehow.
Yeah, but I don't think they had a problem with going outside. They all had huge estates.
It's not in everyday use, no, but if you read enough, particularly older stuff, you come across it from time to time. It's not like Asimov coined the word himself. So while it is certainly possible that Zahn got the word from Asimov, it's not smoking-gun proof in and of itself.
Agoraphobia doesn't mean fear of going outdoors, per se. It means a fear of unfamiliar or threatening environments. That can sometimes mean a fear of open spaces, but it often means a fear of going out in public or being in a crowd, or a fear of traveling.
Come to think of it, it was Lije Baley and his fellow Terrans who were afraid of wide open spaces, weren't they? Because they were raised in crowded arcologies, always surrounded by walls. So the Solarians' fear of personal contact and crowding was complementary to Baley's discomfort with openness. They're both agoraphobias, fear of foreign environments or being outside one's comfort zone, but they had opposite comfort zones.
I set out to prove the correlation with a search for some primary source material, but I may have proved your point instead. I found this quote from Zahn:
Zahn named the planet but does not mention Asimov. Instead, he gives credit to Lucas for the planet. Lucas had names for the planet well before Zahn's books, but none of those were "Coruscant." So while Trantor may have been an inspiration for Lucas, Zahn appears to just have been familiar with a word meaning glittering. Go figure.Zahn said:
Interesting. Thanks for doing the research. Seems like it was coincidental. But it ended up being so fitting that it's easy to see how a connection could be done, particularly with Lucas' inspirations taken from it.
Everybody should have be aware about reservations towards glitter, but consider the irony that the master of the Darkside, a broody mess of spite wrapped in he darkest of night lives in planet Glitter?
Did the Sithlord wage 2 decades as Emperor terraforming Coruscant to match his disposition, or did Palpatine think it was a bit of laugh?
Did the Sithlord wage 2 decades as Emperor terraforming Coruscant to match his disposition, or did Palpatine think it was a bit of laugh?
Sounds like a case of convergent evolution. As ATimson said, the word that comes to mind for a planetwide city (at least on the night side) would tend to be something along the lines of "glittering," and of the synonyms for that, "coruscant" probably works better as a place name than most of the alternatives. ("Welcome to planet Shiny!")
Well, Lambent is pretty good, I guess. Asimov used that one as the love interest's surname in The End of Eternity.
Well, Lambent is pretty good, I guess. Asimov used that one as the love interest's surname in The End of Eternity.
The Jewel of "____" is a phrase often used by pretentious wankers to describe cities.
That's what I said: The Earthlings of the Spacer Era were the agoraphobes. The Solarians were antisocial and had an extreme distaste for personal contact, but I don't recall any instances of panic. They were just disgusted with people.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I'll agree to that . In any case, it's certainly interesting how it turned out in the end.
We didn't get to the end.
The final book (chronologically?) ended at half way (500 years through the Seldon plan).
Even the books written after Asimov's death were set during Hari Seldon's life (or about Robots before the Empire.).
Actually it's been 15 years since I updated my facts on this subject.
I knew about these three...
Foundation's Fear (1997)
Foundation and Chaos (1998)
Foundation's Triumph (1999)
Although this is new to me...
"Foundation's Friends" A collection of short stories by a glut of different popular science fiction authors.
The final book (chronologically?) ended at half way (500 years through the Seldon plan).
Even the books written after Asimov's death were set during Hari Seldon's life (or about Robots before the Empire.).
Actually it's been 15 years since I updated my facts on this subject.
I knew about these three...
Foundation's Fear (1997)
Foundation and Chaos (1998)
Foundation's Triumph (1999)
Although this is new to me...
"Foundation's Friends" A collection of short stories by a glut of different popular science fiction authors.
The one worthwhile story in that collection, imho, is Orson Scott Card's "The Originist." It's about a scholar on Trantor during during the reign of Cleon I who wants desperately to join the Foundation on Terminus, but Hari Seldon doesn't want him.
I have Foundation's Friends, but I don't remember any of it. The Second Foundation Trilogy just didn't work-- there was really no point to it, and they introduced elements that completely undermined the concept. They should have just done their own thing, like the Psychohistorical Crisis guy did.
Yeah, what I liked about Psychohistorical Crisis is that it added new technology, like the fam for instance, but it didn't feel beyond the scope of what Asimov would have done himself.
Yeah, Psychohistorical Crisis felt like a loving homage, while the Second Foundation Trilogy felt like a movie franchise reboot by people who wanted to fix something that wasn't broken.