SciFi and Fantasy eBook Club discussion

Time has moved on and the ripples caused by the Mule have subsided. Seldon's recorded visions are seemingly back on track.

As the old Empire continues to collapse, does the story feel depressing or positive? Is it better to clear away stagnation or for the people on Imperial worlds, would they rather stay at a minimum level of civilisation? And how come we can still get our spaceships maintained and refuelled?

I liked selling the surface of a planet for scrap. That I felt was a nice touch :-)

In a decline the old people would be able to compare. The young wouldn't and would automatically assume that the old people are suffering from "It was always better in our day"

With machinery it really depends on how you build. For example a 1960s diesel engine can be repaired almost anywhere. A 2014 diesel engine with electronic this and computerised that needs specialists.
So if they cut a lot of the chrome and kept old reliable stuff mechanics could fix I've no doubt they could keep things going longer

I agree with you about the engines, I'm a diesel driver!

BTW Clare, nice job on the moderation here! You are one of the first people I've seen in any of my groups who is making a concerted effort to throw out ideas and discussion points for the readers.

Thank you Alycia! I haven't participated in other discussions so I didn't know what people were or weren't doing. This just seems like a reasonable style.

Any thoughts on the books or are you still reading?

Having read all three books, does anyone have a preference for one book over another?

Are the more concise stories in the first book more to your taste, or do you prefer the novella-length approach in the third?

Most importantly from an author's point of view, would be whether you feel inclined to explore the later-added Foundation books. Each of these books is a single story and in my personal view, as Asimov tries to unify all his works with these books he fails to add originality. Have you read anything else by Asimov, and do you approve of authors tying all their disparate works together in this way?

uh-oh-I had this down for December-am I mixed up????

You can read the books now, don't worry! I was notified to lead the discussion in October, I believe. There is a fair lead-in time for discussions so mixups can happen.

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

Clare wrote: "Having read all three books, does anyone have a preference for one book over another?

Are the more concise stories in the first book more to your taste, or do you prefer the novella-length approach in the third?

Most importantly from an author's point of view, would be whether you feel inclined to explore the later-added Foundation books. Each of these books is a single story and in my personal view, as Asimov tries to unify all his works with these books he fails to add originality. Have you read anything else by Asimov, and do you approve of authors tying all their disparate works together in this way?"

I very much prefer the second and third books to the first. I've read all other Foundation novels, and although some are quite good, none compare with the original second and third novels.

Then Paul, in a sense the author won, because you did go on to read more of his works and more Foundation-themed works specifically.

However the fact that you preferred works in the original trilogy, means that you are less likely to recommend the later ones, or won't recommend them as enthusiastically, so this is a lesson to us authors that we have to keep up the quality and originality. Thanks for your feedback.

That's a good point, Clare. I'm torn about whether I would recommend the novels after the first trilogy. It is indeed satisfying to get more of the story. But they also dilute a bit of the joy of thinking about the first trilogy.

In many series, the author has a concept which is itself a driving force at the start. Then the publisher or readers insist that the series should be continued, but the main characters are all settled or killed off, the main conflict has been stated and settled, and the loose ends are wrapped up to some degree.

A great example is Dune, in which Frank Herbert manages to kill off the main antagonists in House Harkonnen early in the series, leaving a vacuum in which House Atreides continues to develop the story. Many readers believe that the series is the poorer after the first couple of books.

Similarly, Asimov seems to have accomplished what he'd set out to achieve by the end of the Foundation trilogy, so the later books may have more scope to explore aspects of his universe, but in my view they lack the same tension.

I agree. Foundation's Edge - which was Asimov's next novel in the Foundation series after the original trilogy (and written decades later) - was the fulcrum. I rushed out to the bookstore to buy it the day it was published in 1982. I was so eager to read it I could barely breathe. But when I finished the novel, although I enjoyed it a lot, I knew that the Foundation series had come down a notch from where it was at the end of Second Foundation. By the way, you might be interested in my review of the original Foundation and Dune trilogies http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2012...

Thanks, I'll certainly take a look.

I enjoyed your analysis, Paul, and the charming postcard from Asimov!

I enjoyed Second Foundation and the trilogy as a whole. Do not understand the need for First Foundation to destroy the Second Foundation, didn't it bail them out of hot water by dealing with the Mule? Why not let them continue to be the backup team to insure the success of Seldon's plan?

Asimov is an interesting intellectual writer but I don't think his world-building is convincing. I've read negative comments on the later Foundation books so may skip them, but do want to check out his other works like I, Robot.

Seems dog in the manger to me too.
You can never have too many backups.

What you have to remember is that back-ups are great, unless of course you're the one being 'backed up'

The idea that there's someone actually running your universe, putting down the railroads for you to run on and actually in charge of your fate is probably acceptable if you're an employee, but not if you're a civilisation

Apparently a string theorist has found checksum code at the bottom of string theory. If he's right, he says we are all in a SIM anyway.

David wrote: "I enjoyed Second Foundation and the trilogy as a whole. Do not understand the need for First Foundation to destroy the Second Foundation, didn't it bail them out of hot water by dealing with the Mule? Why not let them continue to be the backup team to insure the success of Seldon's plan?"

Because the First Foundation was predicated on the infallibility of Seldon's equations. So the logic and raison d'etre of the First Foundation was just letting the equations play out - not doing anything to interfere with the inevitable workings of psycho-history.

The First Foundation learned this the hard way in the first half of the trilogy. But then the Mule's planes destroyed that illusion of the invincibility of Seldon's equations.

The Second Foundation was needed to set it back on course. But part of doing that was re-establishing the confidence of the First Foundation in its interpretation of Seldon's equations. To do that, the First Foundation had to eradicate anything that made them seem puppets to another power - including, ironically, the Second Foundation that saved them.

That paradoxical motivation is indeed on of the great intellectual planks - and, in my view, treats - of the trilogy.

Clare wrote: "I enjoyed your analysis, Paul, and the charming postcard from Asimov!"

Thanks!

Clare wrote: "Apparently a string theorist has found checksum code at the bottom of string theory. If he's right, he says we are all in a SIM anyway."

Now there is a good conspiracy theory starting off!

I always think that the Foundation predictions play to our thoughts of managed economies and social engineering. Governments use data from census reports and trends to put long term plans in place starting with the education and health systems. These predictive sciences may have no impact for ten or twenty years let alone the centuries in Foundation. If an education system is changed especially early years then it will be twenty years before any hard statistics appear to back up the numbers. Same with health policy. The massive reductions in smoking are impacting death rates now but it will be another twenty years or more before the real impact is felt in terms of reductions in health care costs for lung cancer. Then we will have increases in long-term health care costs because everyone is living longer therefore other conditions require treatment.

The Foundation series takes the logical extension of thes current predictions to a much higher degree.

David M17 - Asimov's other work is well worth reading - again the laws of robotics explored in I Robot provide a direct current technology challenge. If you think of automated weapons systems and the development of Artificial Intelligence - what rules will we programme in. We curently have supportive technoloy in terms of helping human decisions to be met but many self defence systems have automatic reactions i.e. harming another human in defence of a location or another human. Lots to discuss there!

OK, I must say Second Foundation was by far the better of the three original books. My criticism of the work as a hole still holds for me, but at least in this work doesn't feel like a short story and there are so many twists and turns in the reveal of what's going on that it was entertaining pretty much throughout.

However, in the end, Asimov still chose the plain vanilla solution to what's going on--the one I had guessed from the beginning. So even with all the twists and turns it still ended with no surprise to me, which was a bit disappointing.

I liked the first book the best since Seldon was still alive and there was the novelty of seeing the plan work. In the second it was entertaining to see it crash and burn, then the third because there was a mystery to unwrap.

Still don't like the 'let us murder all the members of the Second Foundation' stratagem, they weren't evil doers but had benefited the Galaxy when no one else could.

I think you have to see it in its time. Written in the 1960s in a post Korea pre-Vietnam world and written by a Chemist who had spent the Second World War in the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station

His attitude to wiping out someone he might have seen as a danger to freedom could well be different to ours :-)

Jim wrote: "I think you have to see it in its time. Written in the 1960s in a post Korea pre-Vietnam world and written by a Chemist who had spent the Second World War in the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air..."

The Second Foundation stories were written in the late 1940s, but your point still holds.

David wrote: "I liked the first book the best since Seldon was still alive and there was the novelty of seeing the plan work. In the second it was entertaining to see it crash and burn, then the third because t..."

That is close to how I see it too. Though I would say that the second book was my favorite. The third book I was a little bored until the ending saved it for me. Finding out who the head of the Second Foundation was had me laughing out loud.

Indeed, it's one of those twists which you can't tell whether it was planned all along or just occurred because of the author's sudden inspiration.

He surely didn't seem to be the type of person who you would see as being the head of the Second Foundation at all. But when you look back (of course after the book is done) when they mention that the man they had on Kalgan had been tampered with you can see that it probably had happened when they were under lock down and he handed him his papers. Little things start to fall into place when you contemplate upon it a bit. At least him being a Second Foundation man.

Once you've written the final page, you can still go back a few pages and sprinkle some clues. So that's not proof! But, Asimov being a bright guy, he may have planned it from the start of that book.

True, but I wasn't offering it as proof merely making an observation that the clues were there along the way for us to figure it out beforehand.

About Asimov making it up as he went along - here's what he said about that in a postcard he sent me back in 1979, after I mailed to him an article I had written about the Foundation trilogy.

Thanks for showing us the message!
I am sure some subconscious working out went on as well as the creativity in his conscious mind.

"He's making it up as he goes along!" ~ from Monty Python's Life of Brian