I much preferred this to the previous book, especially the second half, called “The Mule.” In the original Foundation novel, there’s a feeling of inevitability, which is kind of the point. The fledgling Foundation faces crises, i.e. threats from other planetary civilations, but it always turns out that Hari Seldon predicted what was going to happen. When the crises are resolved, always in the Foundation’s favour, it’s revealed that it was the only way that events could have unfolded.
Foundation and Empire turns the idea on its head by introducing a character called “The Mule,” who conquers planets at an alarming rate, and threatens to take over the Foundation. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the Mule is unique, and since Seldon’s predictions only work on broad social events, the Mule throws the preordained plan into chaos.
In contrast to the “everything always works out” ethos of the previous novel, the Mule creates real tension and suspense. We experience the story through characters who don’t know what’s going to happen next… which is basically like most stories we read, but feels refreshing in this world of predestination.
This novel came to my attention during the Booker Prize shortlist period. On paper, it’s right up my alley—a literary novel with a space travel/sci-fi theme—and so, when it won the award, I became quite eager to get my hands on it.
The novel puts us on board the International Space Station, along with its crew of six astronauts, as they orbit the Earth. It covers a 24-hour period, during which they go around the world 16 times. There’s no plot really, other than a growing typhoon over Asia, and the fact that another crew is launching a mission to the moon on that same day.
The prose is well-written, with many poetic turns of phrase and lyrical passages. It does a good job of evoking the hardships that the astronauts go through: their sense of time is all out of whack because they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets every “day,” and they’re fighting to keep their bodies healthy in an envirnoment that humans are not built for.
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand. They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form. While they’re here food tastes of little. Their sinuses are murder.
But ultimately, I was disappointed with my reading experience. I found it frustrating because there was little narrative drive for me.
I’m really hesitant to say it, but I didn’t really enjoy this one… of course it’s revered as a classic and I don’t doubt that it deserves it, but could it be that its stature is due to the strength of the series that it started, rather than its own merit?
A big part of the problem for me is the way that the story is told mainly through dialogue. Almost every scene involves a few people in a room, talking about grand abstract political or sociological ideas. There’s very little shown of how the various crises play out on the ground.
What does work are the ideas themselves: it is a fascinating bird’s-eye view of how a future civilization would develop over time. At first, the Foundation is set up to create a compendium of knowledge called the Encyclopedia Galactica, but it turns out this goal is simply the means to another end: namely, to give a reason for a small colony of scientifically-minded people to grow and thrive. Inevitably, they run up against the forces of surrounding planets, and they have to use unconventional (i.e. non-military) methods to continue as a society, including the creation of a religion based on the seeming magic of atomic power; and later, the use of economic trade to control their adversaries. In both cases, it’s their superior technology that allows them to win; the story’s conceit is that because the Foundation started as an academic endeavour, it allowed them to have the intellectual resources to develop said technology.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I wrote out that last paragraph that the chain of cause and effect actually clicked for me. During my time reading it, I found it hard to follow because it’s told at such a distance, with characters that are more mouthpieces than people. The two prequel novels that I’ve already read managed to balance the sociological concepts with adventure and character, so I think that Asimov’s skill as a storyteller improved as his career went on.
I have fond memories of going to see this when it came out in theatres in 1998. Watching it now, I think I can see why… back then, I would have thought it was the coolest thing, when they introduce characters with a freeze-frame showing their name on the screen. And the scene where our main characters walk as a group in slow motion and glare smolderingly at all of the other students who have been taken over by aliens… so cool.
The way this film depicts high school students was exactly my image of what it meant to be cool when I was that age: be angry and swear all the time, and talk to teachers with no respect! And fighting off an alien invasion was exactly the kind of thing that I fantasized about as a kid.
How does it hold up? I think it’s still entertaining. And I couldn’t believe who was in the cast… Jon Stewart? Salma Hayek, who appears in only a couple of scenes? Daniel von Bargen, a.k.a. Mr. Kruger of Kruger Industrial Smoothing on Seinfeld?
Godzilla, Alien: Romulus, American Fiction, Oddity, Furiosa, Blink Twice
Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.
In this second prequel novel for the Foundation series, we follow Hari Seldon as he works on his theory of psychohistory, while the Galactic Empire of which he is a citizen begins to decline. There’s a race against time, because he hopes that his theories will lead to make a recovery plan, a way for humanity to continue after the fall. Much of the decline takes the form of political unrest, and also the more mundane processes of failing infrastructure. The machinery that keeps society running continually breaks down, and there’s not enough money to maintain it. I felt somewhat unsettled because it’s hard not to see the same symptoms in the real world.
The novel is divided into four main sections, each occurring about ten years apart. In each section, he has to solve some crisis, like the increasing popularity of a demagogue politician, or an assassination attempt on him and the Emperor, or simply the difficulty of obtaining the funding needed to continue his research. Along the way, seeds are planted for where the series will go. Sometimes, it feels a little perfunctory, like when a character just brings up the idea of establishing a second Foundation, without really going into detail about how they arrived at this idea. I can forgive a little bit of prequel-itis, as the actual stories were enjoyable enough on their own. Plus, I was actually left feeling excited to continue the series, because I’m looking forward to seeing how these seeds will pay off.
After watching the recent and presumably ongoing TV series, I felt the urge to revisit the classic sci-fi Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. I had read the original trilogy for a course in undergrad, and remember enjoying it back then. I don’t think the TV show is great, but I’m still fascinated by the core idea of “psychohistory.”
Briefly, and without spoiling too much, psychohistory refers to a mathematical theory, created by a man named Hari Seldon, which can predict the path of human societies into future centuries.
Prelude to Foundation is a prequel to the original trilogy. I’ve chosen to read the series in chronological order (as opposed to publication order), because Asimov himself recommended it this way. As the novel starts, a young Hari Seldon has just presented his ideas at a conference—kind of like a TED Talk, I imagine—and it has caused quite a stir. But, as Seldon repeats many times throughout the book, he doesn’t know how to practically apply psychohistory yet to make actual predictions.
I was reminded of this movie when news broke about Scarlett Johansson’s dispute with OpenAI for using her vocal likeness without permission.
I recall being underwhelmed by my first viewing when it first came out. Back then, I thought it was a simply a riff on the rom-com formula, which swaps one of the couple with an artificial intelligence1. In hindsight, I understand my lukewarm reaction as coming from my lack of relationship experience. At the time, any romance that I saw on screen, even between human characters, felt artificial to me because they were only characters, and I couldn’t see myself in them. The fact that one of the characters was a computer program didn’t make it any more artificial.
But now that I’m happily married, movies like Her work much better for me, because of course there’s a difference between connecting with a human and conversing with your phone. Of course the protagonist would be attracted to a personality that molded itself to his needs, after losing a marriage to someone he loved but didn’t love him back.
I was quite impressed with this short story by Tomas Hachard that appears in the Summer Reading issue of The Walrus. As the title indicates, it takes place in the future, and features a young girl named Clarissa who dives into an online historical archive, where she finds a journal of a girl living in our present day.
The future society that Clarissa lives in is rebuilding after a climate catastrophe called “the Deluge,” and the journal gives her a glimpse of life before the disaster: the people of that time didn’t know what would soon befall them, and they existed in a mentality split between fear and denial. Sound familiar?
But all is not well in Clarissa’s future either; as the story progresses, she starts to see the same signs of impending doom that she’s reading in the journal, and the two narratives kind of blend together in a way that I started to be confused about which was which, in a good way.
This story really triggered my climate anxiety, especially as I was reading it at around the same time as some horrendous flooding in Toronto.
The cyclical nature of the story is really effective in creating an ambivalent sense of the future. On the one hand, humanity has persisted, after the Deluge, and life seems to be relatively normal. But on the other hand, they don’t seem to have learned enough lessons from the disaster to prevent it from happening again.
This show caught my attention because I have fond memories of a road trip with my wife, during which we listened to an audiobook of Recursion, by the same author, Blake Crouch. The common thread between these two stories, and what I suppose is the strength of the author, is a mind-bending, twisty sci-fi plot, featuring a character who is motivated by a specific kind of romantic love, that of loyal, long-term partners. It’s this latter emotional element that makes me a fan of his work.1
It’s an unfortunate consequence of marketing that one usually knows a bit about the premise of a show before watching it. As a result, the first few episodes of Dark Matter feel a little slow, because we already know the basic explanation for what’s going on. I think it would be cool to dive in completely fresh.
Having said that, I need to reveal some spoilers ahead to discuss what I enjoyed about the show.
During the middle episodes, as the protagonist Jason explores the many worlds of the multiverse, the question comes up: knowing that there are infinite variations of every person, where each one made different decisions in their lives, what defines the core of a person? By the end, as those infinite variations of Jason appear in the “home” world, the show answers the question in a fascinating, tragic way: he’s defined by his desire to be with his family, and the one copy that we’re rooting for just happens to have been the one that we’ve been following. They all have equal right to their happy ending, but they won’t be able to get it.
Footnotes
I’m reminded a bit of Robert J. Sawyer, who I read a lot when I was younger. ↩
About Me
Hi! Albert here. Canadian. Chinese.
Writing software since 2001. “Blogging” since 2004. Reading since forever.
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