[Grumpy Old Man]

I was mugged into this by Busyknickers... :whistle

However, I have decided that you all need to read a seminal, massively important award winning book - the first in a series that won the highest accolade for its genre. Oh, and it's Sci-Fi.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation

Asimov's Foundation was first conceived and published in a short story in 1942, and describes a future that is more Flash Gordon than Star Trek. All of the social development of the last 65 years was unimaginable at the time, so rather than providing a vision of the future the book gives us a wonderful snapshot of the past.

It's not about spaceships and fancy gadgets and aliens who, for some improbable reason, all speak English with a Southern Californian accent. It has much more subtle themes, and it will be interesting to see what you all think of it.

And because the book has been reprinted countless times over the last half century, it is available in most libraries, dirt cheap as a second hand buy at Amazon (prices starting at 1p) and even in half the charity shops in the country.

[Busyknitter]

Bloomin' Heck. Our copy of that was got rid of by Mr BK in the Great Book Purge of 2002 - for some reason he decided to clear his shelves of all the indulgent reading of his youth. :rolleyes: Time for a trip to Waterstones.

BK
ps - If we are going to get along with this discussion at all, it's SF, not Sci-Fi! <_<

[Grumpy Old Man]

I take it that the Seldon Plan anticipated a devastating decline in the number of Asmiov readers...?

[Busyknitter]

OK, I bought the book and I fully intend to read it. But the last month has been so manic I haven't even had the time or the energy to read a cornflakes packet, let alone an actual book. I'll definitely post a comment on the book eventually. Let's hope it's sometime in the next decade.

BK

[Busyknitter]

Am actually reading now, so won't kill the thread yet.

[Grumpy Old Man]

And I've read the first four books of the trilogy.

:unsure:

[Busyknitter]

Grumpy Old Man, on Jun 5 2007, 09:36 PM, said:

And I've read the first four books of the trilogy.

:unsure:

Multiple choice test. There are 4 books because:

1) Asimov recognised a nice little earner when he saw one and decided to spin it out
2) Asimov couldn't count
3) Asimov had an ego the size of a galaxy.

[Grumpy Old Man]

Busyknickers, on Jun 5 2007, 10:03 PM, said:

Grumpy Old Man, on Jun 5 2007, 09:36 PM, said:

And I've read the first four books of the trilogy.

:unsure:

Multiple choice test. There are 4 books because:

1) Asimov recognised a nice little earner when he saw one and decided to spin it out
2) Asimov couldn't count
3) Asimov had an ego the size of a galaxy.

None of the above.

There are 6 books because several decades after writing the original trilogy he finally gave into pressure and wrote some more.

[Busyknitter]

fair enough.

3) still applies though

[Grumpy Old Man]

So does 1) and I have my doubts about 2)

[Busyknitter]

OK, time to finally start a discussion or alternatively put this thread out of its misery.

Have finished Foundation, which I last read about 22 years ago. It's worn the years quite well, still enjoyed it a lot. First half much pacier than the second half. Characterisation very weak, but that's nto what the novel is about so it doesn't matter.

Interesting parrallels with current attitudes towards climate change, do you not think? You can just imagine Seldon titling some of his work "An Inconvenient Truth"

One thing I didn't notice last time around (probably because I was on the other side of the faith divide then) is Asimov's almost axiomatic presumption that the only possible use for religion is as a tool for social engineering. That got on my nerves.

BK

[Grumpy Old Man]

Busyknickers, on Jul 1 2007, 07:48 PM, said:

One thing I didn't notice last time around (probably because I was on the other side of the faith divide then) is Asimov's almost axiomatic presumption that the only possible use for religion is as a tool for social engineering. That got on my nerves.

Well, you never studied sociology, did you? :P

He has a point - look at the medieval papacy, the foundation of the CofE, the development of civil religion in the USA in the 20th century... People actually believed that this presumption was true - Asimov was doing no more than tapping into the Zeitgeist.

This was an exciting theory at the time that Asimov was writing, way back in the days when social engineering was a new science that everyone believed would change the world... :glare: well, a still relatively untested 100-year-old theory that had finally filtered its way through to the people in power.

I think it is fair to say that "enlightened sociology" reached its apogee in the middle of the 20th Century, and Asimov wrote his book with the speculative assumption that it would continue to rise and accelerate. It didn't, obviously - but if it had, then the science of "psychohistory" is a logical extrapolation of Asimov's assumptions. And in psychohistory, everything is social engineeering.

As for the difference in pace between the two halves: the book was originally published in a magazine, a few thousand words at a time. Once Asimov had a secure contract he didn't need to work so hard to keep his readers, and was concentrating harder on paying his college tuition fees...