SciFi and Fantasy eBook Club discussion

I haven't moderated a discussion before, so let's hope I'm doing this properly. Please let me know if I should do anything in particular.

Let's start with the first book of this trilogy. The stories are the shortest of those in any of the books.

Psychlohistory is the name Asimov gives to a branch of sociology which studies the likely future movements and social conditions of groups. What would we call this today? Just sociology of the future?

Where did Hari Seldon qualify, since he is the originator of his field?

Why are there no vast banks of robots in this future?

No robots? Probably because human labour is so cheap and people almost infinite

Hari Seldon's qualifications? I get the impression it would have been at the capital because that is where everything happened

If it worked, I suppose we would classify it as a branch of anthropology.

But I doubt whether it would be feasible. One problem seems to be the chaos effect. A small change in one variable - say the actions of an individual - can throw out any predictions for the future.

To be fair, I seem to recall that Asimov touched on this with one character who behaved unusually. I haven't read the books in a looong looong time, but I seem to recall that this character was called the Mule.

Another problem is that there are huge externalities which would be very difficult to predict - a new technology or a challenge to the environment could totally disrupt any predictions. And it would be very difficult to predict these. How can we know what we are about to invent?

It's a great series and made a huge impact on me when I read it as a youngster. But it may be one of those things like the weather where the more we know, the more we realise that it is very hard (if not impossible) to anticipate more than a short time into the future.

I think we'd call it "psychohistory". It wouldn't be the first time that a word invented in SF came into common use. I agree with Will that it's not likely to ever be feasible: but I'm sure Asimov knew that. We're making great strides with weather forecasting (on one planet), and can now look almost a whole week into the future!

And yes, the Mule was a major part of book II: Foundation and Empire.

I think the only university mentioned is the University of Trantor (other than the one mentioned in the "About the Author" page!), but I guess your question is "how can he be a psychohistorian when he invented the field and there's nowhere that could have given him a degree in psychohistory." That's pretty common in the sciences, and I believe is one of the reasons almost all doctorates are just "Ph.D." rather than specifying a field. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as quantum physics. Now universities have whole departments with multiple sub-fields.

Finished! Enjoyable story and good characters (especially for sci-fi). Pretty cool concept that Seldon could use some sort of socio-mathematical planning to map out a future hundreds of years in the future, a ridiculous but entertaining idea.

Liked the 'Seldon conflicts' and Seldon's ghostly appearances giving advice to his followers. Look forward to book 2 and seeing where this story goes.

Thanks for the comments.

At what point during the trilogy does it become clear that the story can be read as an allegory for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?
Is this in fact the basis for the new sociology of the future which Seldon invents - that he sees society as doomed to repeat cycles, or that expanding empires must eventually contract?

One aspect of the stories which I enjoyed was seeing how the farther planets, with little in the way of resources, were becoming ever cleverer at inventing and building small gadgets. Asimov was probably drawing on comparisons among America, Russia and Japan at this time.

Clare wrote: At what point during the trilogy does it become clear that the story can be read as an allegory for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?


Just then, when you mentioned it!

I'm not sure I connected with the Roman Empire when I read the trilogy. As far as we can tell, all empires fall eventually. They either become too big to manage, their neighbours become more agile or their subjects rise up and drop a bomb down the exhaust port on the Death Star.

Rome does have the most spectacular decline and fall, and not just because Gibbons wrote a book about it. But the trilogy might also make you think about Egypt, Greece, Britain, the Soviet Union ...

Others who have read the books more recently may have better knowledge. It was a long time ago for me. Maybe not as long ago as the Roman Empire, but long enough for the memory to be fuzzy.

I'm sitting this trilogy out (only the third book is available in the UK for some weird reason...), but it looks interesting.

The answer to your question about why there are no vast banks of robots is answered towards the end of the post trilogy sequels.

This is my favorite scifi series. They way I've always thought of it is that The Empire will always eventually fall. They are just in the business of getting the new one up and running asap.

I would think that this area would be considered part of 'Mathematical Sociology', since Harry Seldon builds equations describing the statistical future history.

There's even a journal dedicated to the subject: http://www.mathematicalsociology.org/

"Mathematical sociologists use the language of mathematics to describe the structure, explain the events, and predict the dynamics of the social world. The effort is a inter-disciplinary, with contributions from physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, psychologists, economists, etc."

Wow..I wonder how many of these folks are Asimov fans?

I read this last summer, so some of this is a little fuzzy. There are already groups who do predictive sociology. However, those predictions are not usually more than 20-25 years in the future. Given that a new technology can radically change the population of the world over just a few years (see cell phones), I would think it would be rather difficult, if not impossible to predict further.

As far as no robots, it's possible that it is no different from today - robots are mostly industrial things. Those things in the home, for instance, auto vacuums and lawn mowers, are simply automations. Perhaps this is his attempt to view the world in a different way instead of always focusing on robots, which quickly take over a story.

Like many of you I read this years ago and enjoyed it then. The latest buzz word in IT around big data does draw some comparisons. Social media, browsing history, credit history, shopping history and now location data is used to predict your actions in terms of serving up adverts. The security services in multiple countries are using the data to profile potential terrorist threats. Data analysis and profiling leading to predictions of threats and warnings of imminent doom. Another example would be predictive analysis of global warming based on continuing human behaviour.

Governments have used census data to predict future demand for services for a long time going back to Roman times at least - some story about that in a very old book. A more linked sociological example may be the use of social data on marriage to change the planning regulations to build more houses.

Asimov's stories just take this further, of course the big data concepts are more recent. I agree that former empires were an inspiration for the series and societal descriptions. Like other authors of his period not all elements are true, hence the comments about disruption and unpredictability with which I concur.

Good points, Stephanie.
Of course, we know that the main group of people who have predicted the future have been science fiction writers. And some of those predictions have come to pass. So... maybe Seldon read SF in his spare time? We see little of his personal life but everyone has to have a hobby.

Yes, automated factory robots are very much present in our world, but few of us see them, much less interact with them.

Do you want a new discussion for the second book, or since the trilogy flows between the books, discuss them all here?
NO spoilers please!

I liked the way the earlier Hobb trilogy was handled, with a non-spoilery thread per book, plus a spoiling thread for the whole thing.

I've started a thread for the second part of the trilogy.

Clare wrote: "Thanks for the comments.

At what point during the trilogy does it become clear that the story can be read as an allegory for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?"

Aren't ALL SF tales of interstellar empire allegories for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

Will wrote: "But I doubt whether it would be feasible. One problem seems to be the chaos effect. A small change in one variable - say the actions of an individual - can throw out any predictions for the future. "

It's been a while since I read the book, but I think it would be possible to predict that some variable will cause big turns in events. Psychohistory can't predict what the crisis will be only that a crisis is bound to happen within a time frame. The mirco level is unknowable, but the macrolevel is discernible. The flapping butterfly wing in Puru may indeed cause a typhoon in Japan - or maybe it was the cow fart in the Ukraine - the psychohistorian could predict the likelihood a certain number of typhoons in a certain number of years will cause such and such a crisis to the Japanese economy by this or that date. Or maybe it will be earthquakes instead.

That said, I would have like Hari Seldon to be off - at least sometimes.

All empires (or great powers) will fall eventually. Before Roman, there was Egypt, for example. The Moguls are gone; the British Empire is no ; and China will probably eclipse America as the great power of the 21st century. But readers and writers seem to like analogies to Roman the best.

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Aren't ALL SF tales of interstellar empire allegories for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? ..."


If we knew the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire the allegories might be more convincing ;-)

Greg - maybe, maybe.

For me, The Foundation trilogy books are historical science fiction, in the same vein as Jules Verne's idea of shooting people to the moon in a gun, or Star Trek imagining that a computer would be a bank of flashing light plus a robotic voice. And that every woman in the future would wear miniskirts.

They represent what we thought the future might look like, at the time that they were written. So when we read them we have to make allowances for the more hokey parts of the science. Or the dress code.

The idea of an advanced computer being able to predict the future was prevalent in the 1940s to 1980s, which was when the series were written. And it's not hard to see why. Computers were impressive new toys that could do things that would be very hard any other way. And because of that we incorporated computers into science fiction - all powerful, all-knowing, cold, calculating.

The thought was that all we would need would be a powerful enough computer and we could predict anything.

Funnily enough, it was the availability of computers that scotched this theory. From the 1980s, we started to understand chaos theory more. It became evident that even the most powerful computer would struggle to predict the outcome of a chaotic system. Tiny changes in one variable would have a massive impact in the final outcome.

This can be seen most clearly in weather forecasting. Most weather forecasters have largely given up trying to make long range weather forecasts. The more we know about how weather works, the more we realise that long range forecasts are virtually impossible to make.

So we simply can't predict the number of typhoons which will hit Japan in any given year. We don't know if any of them will be severe enough to cause major damage. We don't know if a major incident would be enough to cause a change in the Japanese Government. And we don't know what impact a change in the Japanese Government would have in global politics. And on it goes.

The Foundation trilogy/ series is of its time. It fits into the early dawn of computers when we imagined that they would be able to do anything. But it also comes before research into chaos theory which casts a big question mark over how far we can predict into the future.

Interestingly, computers are being used for purposes that Asimov couldn't imagine, especially the use of big data to predict how individual humans will behave on a day to day basis. Far from being unknowable, it is at the micro level that computers excel.

But predicting the rise and fall of a civilization based on a formula? It was speculative fiction when it was written and it is even more so now.

We should enjoy it for what it is - one generation's view of the future.

Nearly month end so any final thoughts?
Would this book inspire you to read more Asimov, or not?

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Foundation. I found some brand new copies of the first three books at a used bookstore last weekend (I know, this is the eBook Group!). These are the Jan. 2013 trade paperbacks published by Harper Voyage.

I'm wondering if the eBooks suffer from the same thing: Horrible copy editing!

I'm finding SO many typos it's embarrassing. A self-published author would be crucified for mistakes like this.

Case in point, in the space of two pages one character's name starts as Manlio, then in two paragraphs changes to Manilo...and then goes back to Manlio. There are cases of "is" instead of "it," words with the first letter of the next word tacked onto their ending, and spaces omitted between words.

Such shoddy work--especially on such an old classic--is simply disrespectful.

I have to admit that this is actually the first Asimov I've read and I've been a bit shocked at how un-scientific it is. So many people seem to bring his name up when talking about the good old days when SF was based on scientific rigor.

And yet here we have FTL travel, atomic blasters, disregard to there being no gravity in space, and whole societies who have supposedly reverted back to coal and petroleum power and yet who can still inexplicably maintain multi-star system kingdoms via--I assume--FTL spaceflight.

Don't get me wrong, (aside from that last logic slip) I don't mind all this, and Azimov's 1950's fixation on atomic power [EDIT: 1940s actually as these stories were first published between '42-'44] and abundant use of tobacco products (not to mention the total absence of female characters) are but reflections on their time.

But I don't get how Asimov gets a pass from so many Hard SF purists, while modern writers who are, on the whole, more validly scientific still get accused of writing fantasy rather than SF by their use of "magic."

Overall, I've been a bit surprised at how well this holds up if you let yourself accept the inevitable dated quality of some of the tech.

Interesting to note, though, that writing styles have changed a lot. The number of exclamation points utilized here is way over the top by modern standards! [See what I did there?] ;P

Oh...and as to this being an allegory for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I'd say rather that it's an analogy for the rise of Western culture itself. It starts with the decline of Empire, moves on to theological rule over a feudal monarchy system, the rise of mercantilism, and...well, I haven't finished it but one of Seldon's predictions is the rise of nationalism, which started to become dominant in the 18th century, long after Rome fell.

You're right, Micah, about the datedness. At the time Asimov may have figured that SF was read by the kind of eager kid he used to be, and a minimum of science would suit them better than his work colleagues who would be in a minority of readers.

Lack of women - yes! In the second book we do get a woman, and while she is not a strong independent woman of today, she may reflect the roles for women Asimov saw. Again, the majority of SF readers were male, especially before Anne McCaffrey got started.
Editors in other fields, such as the fighter pilot books by Captain WE Johns, told authors to leave out girls and mushy stuff as that was not what boys wanted to read.

Sorry to hear of the bad preparation of your copies. This kind of work is often done in what we call developing economies for cheapness. It shows.

Micah wrote: "But I don't get how Asimov gets a pass from so many Hard SF purists"

Does he? I never considered Asimov to be "Hard SF" (though I see Wikipedia does... and it's never wrong). When I started reading SF, it was Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein, and in the day I would have considered Clarke to be the most "hard" and Heinlein the guy in the middle (now, a lot of his later work was pure fantasy, but the early stuff like "The Roads Must Roll" & "Waldo", and even The Door Into Summer, even though it involved Time Travel, was much harder.) Asimov was a scientist, but I never felt it particularly showed in his writing, while Heinlein was an engineer: and it showed.

Clare wrote: "Editors in other fields, such as the fighter pilot books by Captain WE Johns, told authors to leave out girls and mushy stuff as that was not what boys wanted to read. "

Biggles!! I'm so glad I lost those shortly after childhood, because I somehow think I'd not find them nearly as interesting today. In fact, I rather doubt I'd even find them readable.

You'd be surprised - I recently got a review copy of Biggles Learns To Fly for the centenary of the Great War. The original fighter pilot stories were written when they were pretty fresh in Johns' mind, and hold up well. Got to love those Sopwith Camels and Sopwith Pups.
The later books got pretty wooden and the all-male characters never developed, so what with attitudes of the day to add, I don't recommend revisiting most of them.

Johns wrote an SF Biggles book. The writers all experimented with genre-pushing at that time if they had a well-established cast.
Biggles Sees It Through
This book saw Biggles and manly chums flying over a mountain in Tibet which was made of a strange rock that confused their compass. A Shangri-La type adventure ensued. Good fun.

Asimov did in various stories give us astrophysics and physics, which were not his special field but clearly his interest. Resublimated Thiotimoline is the ingredient which best suits his biochemist background.

Asimov's essays include good ones on sections of the periodic table, such as the rare earths, and on quasi-religious hoaxes with scientific gibberish.

Of course, Asimov also wrote books of dirty limericks, so there you go!

My impression of him being reveared for scientific rigor may be totally off base. I could be conflating talks of Clarke being Hard SF with people talking about the classic writers of SF, which invariably include Asimov.

As for Heinlein, I think I've only read Starship Trooper, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Job.

Starship was in no way hard SF. I don't recall Stranger being concerned too much with tech at all but it did have psychic powers in it, so not so much Hard SF. And Job was a comedy and satire, unconcerned with science per se.

Still enjoying this book, BTW.

Although there is a huge plot hole in the early part that really bugs me.

I seem to never be able to praise without adding a "BUT..." on the end!

Heinlen was all about the adventure. Clarke was about the science. This is why nobody talks about Heinlein inventing something like geosynchronous satellites.
Asimov was great at short stories, less so at novel length IMHO.

I've avoided all of them for the most part.

Clarke was just way too dry for me. I read 2001 and loved it because it made the movie clear...but Rendezvous With Rama I've tried to read about 4 times and never get more than a few pages in.

Heinlein I've liked, but not loved.

Asimov was guilty by association! ;D

Philip K. Dick is much more my normal style.

But aside from the obvious datedness of Foundation, I'm still finding it stands up for the most part.

Clare wrote: "Heinlen was all about the adventure. Clarke was about the science. This is why nobody talks about Heinlein inventing something like geosynchronous satellites. "

No, but apparently he invented the waterbed (after being hospitalized), the waldo (ie, any remote manipulator - he invented both the concept AND the name) and the long list of things he put into The Door Into Summer (off the top of my head, I remember AutoCAD & Roomba, but there were a lot of things he got right).

I agree, he was about the adventure. But before, say, I Will Fear No Evil, he actually did good science.

And I would totally agree with you about Asimov's short stories.

Micah: try some of Heinlein's early stuff, if you haven't. I honestly couldn't stomach most of what he wrote after the early '70s. I reread The Door Into Summer last year and thought "Yeah! That's why I used to read Heinlein!"

Dick, otoh, is NOT generally my style. I was never into psychedelic drugs...

Back on topic - and plot holes in Foundation: yeah, I think that's one of the things that made his short stories better than many of his novels. I think there may be sinkholes in all his novel plots.

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Dick, otoh, is NOT generally my style. I was never into psychedelic drugs..."

Well...I can certainly see why PK Dick might not be to everyone's taste, but most of his work isn't about drugs or only to be appreciated by those who are/were into them. He was far more about identity (what does it mean to be human?) and nature/perceptions of reality, which is where drugs tie in, but his writing was more informed by his psychotic experiences, his paranoia and other mental health issues than just drugs.

He was more about ideas than tech, though he was one of the first people to write about immersive virtual reality and nanotech (of the nano assembler kind, although he didn't call it that) and insect sized surveillance drones and news aggregation software...probably a bunch of other stuff (as well as a huge amount of fantastical tech).

Oh, yeah, Asimov...I'm going to be reading the other parts of the Foundation trilogy after I'm done with this.

Asimov's 'hardness' was whatever he felt was appropriate for that story, although he was always more interested in the consequences of the gimmick than in the details of the gimmick itself.

Asimov had two main things: his idea of 'social science fiction' (taking a scenario (usually but not always technological) and seeing what that would do to/for society), and the idea of the scientific mystery (setting up the parameters of a problem and challenging the reader to work out what was going on). The science in his science fiction was therefore about scientific method, rather than fetishisation of technology or a phobia of the impossible. Many of his stories essentially read as thought-experiments.

Sometimes this means SF with blurry edges and impossible things. Sometimes it's outright magic (the George and Azazel stories, for instance, which are about a man and a magic-using demon). Sometimes it's perfectly plausible: "Nightfall", for instance, requires no magic at all, only an implausible (but probably possible) orbit.

Will: I think you don't give Asimov enough credit. First, while chaos makes things hard, Asimov recognises the problem is hard - that doesn't mean that trends aren't calculable, however. Chaotic processes often produce surprisingly ordered results, and indeed the whole point of chaos theory is that it can be used to improve predictions. For instance, in a microcosm of psychohistory, chaos theory is currently used to predict the formation of traffic jams.

It's not really about computers per se in Asimov, though: the breakthrough is in the mathematics, not in the development of supercomputers.

Incidentally, Asimov DID also predict the application of predictive computation to individuals. In "All the Troubles of the World", for instance, he explores the idea of a near-omniscient supercomputer that tries to identify the perpetrators of crimes before they happen.

Wastrel wrote: "Asimov's 'hardness' was whatever he felt was appropriate for that story, ..."

I completely agree with all of that Very well said.

Micah wrote: "Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Dick, otoh, is NOT generally my style. I was never into psychedelic drugs..."

Well...I can certainly see why PK Dick might not be to everyone's taste, but most of his work isn't about drugs or only to be appreciated by those who are/were into them. He was far more about identity (what does it mean to be human?)"

Quick! Recommendations! My experience is that a LOT of his work was psychedelic (and I didn't entirely mean drugs, though he was pretty open about using them, but his brain chemistry was seriously out of whack), but "what does it mean to be human" pretty much sums up my favorite field of SF, so suggest something non-psychedelic in that area.

Well, "What constitutes the authentic human being?" is how PKD himself phrased the question around which a lot of his work centers. He also said that "What is reality?" is the other big question he deals with, and that the two ideas are closely tied together, often intertwined.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is probably the one novel where he most overtly dealt with the being human question, what with its androids trying to find their creator and with the book's emphasis on empathy as the defining human trait. It's not a scientific question for him, but a philosophical one. When an alien acts more humanely than the humans in his stories...which is more authentically human? That kind of thing.

"Interstellar co-writer Jonathan Nolan is developing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series for ... HBO"

Would be interesting to see it, lots of big imagery.

I'm not surprised that the previous plan to make it fell through. It's pretty ambitious.

My advice: expect to be disappointed.

Then if it doesn't totally suck, you'll be happy.

There's a real problem with translating this book into film or TV: the whole point of a lot of it is to NOT be violent. Ergo, where's the action? I can't see how that's going to translate into TV without them pulling a Peter Jackson and totally transforming the original material.

TV just is too violent. That is not to say that all of it has to be that way.

It certainly doesn't have to be...but the general public, I think, is all about action, adventure, thrills, spills, and things going BOOM! for no adequately explored reason. I find it hard to believe that a faithful adaptaion of Foundation will have any staying appeal to a public steeped in vampires, zombies, and Star Wars.

Speaking of which...http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/02/opinion...
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BOOM! is good! But I don't think you have to totally subvert Foundation to get some BOOM! It IS about a civilization heading into the dark ages. While Asimov mostly only mentions the bad things peripherally, there are enough things going on to get some BOOM! Will it be enough for modern audiences? I don't know. You know, a vampire would be handy to narrate a story lasting centuries... :)

Lewis Beale is an idiot. Yes, it's true that Star Wars set a standard that has made it hard for more thoughtful SF to be made into film, but it certainly hasn't been remotely the reason why nobody has ever made an Octavia Butler movie (we can blame simple racism for that). And I reject both the notion that Star Wars wasn't about "ideas" and that "ideas" SF movies aren't being made. I'm also completely baffled by "Many of the great works of sci-fi have not been made into films -- ... William Gibson's "Neuromancer," among others -- partially because they are too smart, too dense and too thoughtful." Really? I'd guess contracts have been the problem with Neuromancer (wikipedia says the project's been in the works for years, and that there's been a completed script for a long time). There's nothing unfilmable about it, and it would have plenty of action.

Not sure where the idea that violence is needed comes from.

I remember 'Six Feet Under' going for five seasons (two more than would have been best). In Treatment lasted three! [though with a smaller budget, obviously]

Orange is the New Black seems to be going down pretty well at the moment. Or how about Mad Men?

Not saying there's no violence in any of the above - but none of them are violence-and-explosions-based.

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "I'd guess contracts have been the problem with Neuromancer (wikipedia says the project's been in the works for years, and that there's been a completed script for a long time). There's nothing unfilmable about it, and it would have plenty of action."

Yeah, I agree with you on that. I wasn't all that impressed with it as a book, either. It was OK, but it would have been much better had I read it when it first came out. It's hard to estimate it's amount of forward thinking reading it for the first time only a few years ago. But from what I remember, it didn't seem all that dense or complicated. And certainly action film/TV show material.

However, I do think SW taught a generation or more that SF was largely about the swashbuckling space adventures...dogfights in space, Indiana Jones type swinging over chasms, blasters going pew!-pew!-pew!-pew! all over the place. Pulp SF, essentially.

Of all the people I know who read SF, most of them stick to series: SW, Warhammer 40K, MechWarrior, etc. And most of them grew up on SW.

But it's not really to blame for all the evils of Hollywood. I really just stuck that link in because...well, troll bait I suppose. My bad!

Wastrel wrote: "Not sure where the idea that violence is needed comes from.

I remember 'Six Feet Under' going for five seasons (two more than would have been best). In Treatment lasted three! [though with a smal..."

Those also aren't SF. They're dark comedy dramas.