Foundation
Season 3
Between my viewing of seasons 2 and 3 of this Apple TV show, I managed to read the entire series of Isaac Asimov’s novels. I think that my experience with the books became a double-edged sword, because the constant comparison that my brain couldn’t help making was, on the one hand, entertaining for me, but on the other hand, highlighted some of the weaknesses of the show.
It was fun for me to pick out plot points and ideas as I watched, and to try to remember how it played out in the books. The show deviates a lot from the novels, so some of the references amount to simple name-dropping of a character who plays a completely different role in the story.
A Half-Built Garden
by Ruthanna Emrys
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In A Half-Built Garden, a giant spaceship lands on Earth in the near-ish future, and the aliens make contact with humans, proposing to rescue us from the climate crisis by welcoming us to their civilization. There are two species of aliens, and they’ve learned to live in symbiosis onboard space stations, choosing to abandon their respective home planets because of ecological decline. Conflict arises because the humans—represented by the narrator Judy and her family—have a desire to stay on Earth. The systems that created the climate crisis, in this imagined future, have been dismantled, and people are learning how to live in a sustainable society.
Having been a long-time Star Trek fan, I’ve seen many versions of the first contact story. In Star Trek, it usually plays out with the human protagonists meeting a previously unknown species of alien, and then learning a lesson by interacting with the aliens and understanding some crucial difference in their way of life. From a storytelling perspective, even though the human crew is living in a utopia future, they tend to represent the traditions that we hold in the real world, while the aliens represent more progressive ways of life. (For example, see “The Outcast,” in which Riker falls in love with a non-binary person.)
The interesting thing about A Half-Built Garden, which makes it unlike anything I’ve read before, is that the roles are almost reversed. The aliens run their society in a hierarchical way, with mothers holding the most power. It feels familiar enough to our social structures, whereas the human species have changed their society so much that they are the ones that feel alien.
The Singularity
by Dino Buzzati
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Last fall, I travelled to Italy and purchased a few books by Italian authors. The Singularity by Dino Buzzati tells the story of a secretive government project taking place at a military base. At the beginning of the novel, we follow an engineer named Ismani who has been recruited into the project, but is told nothing about what he’ll be doing. The first third of the book has a satirical bent, as Ismani and his wife try to cut through military bureaucracy to find out just one little bit of information about the project. It’s a futile exercise as one soldier after another dodges their questions, and I thought it was a little bit funny, but in hindsight, it does kind of feel like the author himself was stalling to get to the meat of the story.
Ultimately, it’s revealed that the secret project involves the creation of a supercomputer, and in a further twist, the scientist in charge of the operation has imbued the machine with the consciousness of his dead wife. To me, it became predictable rather quickly, because in our time, we’ve seen this type of story depicted many times. (For example, the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”.) But I have to give Buzzati credit for being prescient because he wrote this in 1960.
Foundation and Earth
Foundation #7
by Isaac Asimov
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I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.
I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.
The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.
Foundation’s Edge
Foundation #6
by Isaac Asimov
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Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.
The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.
For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.
Pantheon
Pantheon covers a lot of cool sci-fi concepts, the main one being the idea of “Uploaded Intelligence,” i.e. the ability to scan a person’s brain and have them live as a piece of software in the cloud. The conceit is fertile ground for exploring ideas like, what makes a person a person, and what makes this person this specific person? On paper, it’s right up my alley, but I didn’t enjoy the show as much as I expected to.
I think I had trouble connecting with the characters because the animation and voice acting felt a bit flat. The story deals with a lot of heavy emotions, like grief for a departed loved one, and the choice of whether to accept the Uploaded version of that loved one as the same person. But those feelings didn’t come through for me because the animation just didn’t have the same expressiveness as, say, Arcane, or anything from Studio Ghibli.
On the positive side, the action scenes are pretty fun to watch. The various Uploaded characters often “fight” each other in the virtual world. Technically, there shouldn’t be anything to look at, as it’s essentially pieces of software trying to hack into each other’s networks, but the creators of the show chose to visualize it as if the Uploads were superheroes. They fly around and use “powers” against each other… sometimes it feels almost like a Dragon Ball fight.
River
This Japanese comedy takes place in a spa/hotel in a small town, and follows the staff and guests as they get stuck in a mysterious time loop. A twist on the Groundhog Day formula, with a couple of key differences:
- the loop is only 2 minutes long, rather than the whole day, so we can see every iteration in its entirety, in real-time
- all of 10 or so characters are experiencing the same thing, which introduces an aspect of project management, as they assign tasks to each other and scramble to complete them within the 2 minutes
The first act is a lot of fun as the characters figure out what’s going on. Seeing how each person reacts is pretty funny… for example, one of the guests is a writer under pressure from his publishers, and he decides to use the time loop as a chance to rest, because it means that his deadlines will never come.
The movie surprised and impressed me with how it used its structure to illuminate emotional truths for some characters. For example, a young couple challenge themselves to escape from the others, by running away as far as they can. At first, it felt silly to me, since they know that they’ll always end up back where they started. But then I realized that the futility of the game was the point, and that it was a way for them to connect with each other, like a series of rapid-fire “dates.”
Along the way, the major characters wonder whether they caused the loop by wishing for time to stop. Everyone has a reason for fearing the future, and the natural response to this fear is wanting to just keep things as they are. The movie has a real “Monkey’s Paw” kind of message: there’s a fine line between staying in our comfort zones, and becoming stuck in a rut. We need time to move forward, even with all the scary uncertainty that progress brings.
Second Foundation
Foundation #5
by Isaac Asimov
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Here we are, at the end of the original Foundation trilogy. Over the course of reading the three books, I could sense that Isaac Asimov was gaining in confidence and skill. The style of the first novel was somewhat staid and dry, but by this third book, his writing had gained some flourishes, making it more fun to read.
By introducing the Mule and his powers in Foundation and Empire, the series added a new layer to the plotting. Both the Mule and the Second Foundation—a secretive parallel counterpart to the First Foundation that we’ve been following so far—possess mental abilities, which allows them to brainwash and control the actions of ordinary people.
Much of this novel feels like a spy thriller. Characters form alliances, but nobody can be fully trusted, because anyone can be a secret agent under the control of the other side. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the conclusion involves a series of scenes where an answer is revealed, only to be turned around with a twist, and the real answer being revealed… but then there’s another twist, etc. It’s almost comical how many times it undercuts itself, but I had a blast with it.
Foundation and Empire
Foundation #4
by Isaac Asimov
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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.
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
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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.