Foundation is hard science fiction at its least aesthetic and humanistic

Friday, September 24th, 2021

Isaac Asimov began writing his Foundation when he was in his early 20s, after reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Toynbee’s Study of History and coming up with the idea of a Science of History that predicts the future:

This is an idea that only a very young man who hasn’t much experience with how inevitably wrong his predictions will turn out to be could dream up.

On the other hand, it’s also a really interesting idea. Foundation is hard science fiction at its least aesthetic and humanistic. Asimov wasn’t all that good at writing characters, but his mathematical psychohistorian Hari Seldon and The Mule who upsets Hari’s careful plans are useful shorthand references when talking about forecasting.

Posted in Media | 6 Comments »

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Charles W. Abbott says:

September 24, 2021 at 8:00 am

Thank G*d you’re back. You post so reliably that you missed a week and I feared for your health.

I glance at every post.

Also, your indexing and archives are a great public service!
Harry Jones says:

September 24, 2021 at 9:46 am

Bah to aesthetics and humanism. It’s a breezy read and it makes you think. I’ll take it over Kant any day.

Asimov used to be ridiculously over-hyped, but at his best he was pretty good. Not everything that’s over-hyped sucks.
Isegoria says:

September 24, 2021 at 10:39 am

Thanks, Charles. Real life definitely got in the way recently. I’m happy to see the archives appreciated!
Sam J. says:

September 24, 2021 at 11:33 pm

I really liked the book on the “The Mule”. I don’t remember which one it was; I read it a really long time ago.

Asimov was okay, but for world building I liked Herbert, Niven, and Pournelle better — especially Niven and Pournelle. There’s lots of others: Card, Varley, Pohl, etc.
Sam J. says:

September 24, 2021 at 11:34 pm

Isegoria, thanks for all your hard work.
Isegoria says:

September 25, 2021 at 8:26 am

Thanks, Sam, for appreciating it!

Gaikokumaniakku: Tangentially related: 3M22 Zircon: Debunking Misconceptions. At the link, a military expert criticizes Russian hypersonic weapons.
Phileas Frogg: History is a gift and its study a blessing; even the people whose effects I have come to despise are so obviously superior to our present milieu that one can’t help but feel a sort of scruffy abashedness in the presence of their biographies. And, of course, it gets worse the further back you go. One wonders at the impression a fully fledged Adam in the Garden, before the Fall, would have had on us scampering apes. Darwin got it backwards, we didn’t evolve from an ape-like...
Bob Sykes: LBJ also kept a cooler of beer in that Caddy, and he usually was drinking a beer while he drove around.
Jim: Design really is everything.
Jim: Superb excerption.
Jim: I predicted thith.
Phileas Frogg: “Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.” I wonder how much of this is social norms vs self-perception. Do the wealthy and educated feel in touch with (or that they should be in touch with) national and global events, or is it mere mimicry? How about the working-class? The two are necessarily mutually exclusive of course, but I wonder if there’s a different primary...
Phileas Frogg: As advances in weapon’s have improved the range and effectiveness of the individual soldier’s impact on the battlefield, the number of soldiers has increased in importance relative to the quality of any individual soldier. It’s the Thermopylae Principle in reverse because of weapons advancements. Reminds me of RTS balancing, where to effectively implement melee units developers need to give them either unrealistic speed or durability relative to the ranged capabilities of...
Bob Sykes: Calling Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s militia a mob is a bit much, but they were lightly armed and poorly trained. However, they defeated the US/UN mission to Somalia, or at least fought it to a draw. We’re still fighting Aidid’s grandchildren, and we still haven’t won. The war is now in its 4th decade, with no end in sight. Settling aside our Indian Wars (1607 to 1918). Somalia is the longest US war.
McChuck: Anybody who has ever played a wargame can tell you that your defenses can handle a certain amount of opposition, but when enemy numbers, regardless of quality, exceed that number, you get overrun. The mobs in Mogadishu back in 1993 weren’t well organized, weren’t well equipped, weren’t well trained, and weren’t well led. But there sure were a whole lot of them shooting at the Rangers.
Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...

Isegoria

Foundation is hard science fiction at its least aesthetic and humanistic

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