I really like that word. It's also a travesty that this blog has been posting so long with nothing about Isaac Asimov, the Grandmaster of Science Fiction.
There are two criteria for a work to be science fiction: one is that it has to have some science fact to it, that it uses or changes somehow to make the story, and it also should have some kind of social commentary. Why do I bring this up? Because the science fact in the Foundation is Math. Yes, you read that right, Math.
To be more precise, it's actually statistics, (which is a subset of math anyway). The main character, Dr. Hari Seldon has discovered a way to use probability to guess the most likely future for the galactic empire. What he found is that the galaxy will most likely have a 20,000 year dark age between the collapse of the first empire and the beginning of the second empire. To ensure the Dark Age only lasts 1000 years, he creates what is called the "Seldon Plan" for the galaxy. Nobody knows what it is, except for the people of the Second Foundation.
The First Foundation (or just the Foundation) is a group of scientists charged by Hari Seldon to write an encyclopedia galactica, or a book of all the knowledge in the galaxy.
I know this series sounds really boring, but I promise that it is not. The Galactic Empire in the Foundation novels has often been cited as the inspiration for the Galactic Empire in Star Wars. They are very similar: Trantor is the capital planet of the Foundation empire, it is a world covered in one big city, and it is as close to the center of the galaxy as an inhabitable planet can be. Coruscant, the capital planet of the Star Wars galaxy, shares all of those characteristics.
The first book, Foundation is actually four short stories that Asimov wrote in college. They describe the origins of the Foundation, and its rise to power in its corner of the galaxy.
The second book, Foundation and Empire, is a story about a man named simply “The Mule” who has the power to alter people’s emotions. Seldon’s plan could not randomly predict someone with that power. Even though the Foundation doesn’t know Seldon’s plan, they know that they must remain control what they already had (they cannot cede any territory, lest the whole plan possibly being thrown off).
The third book, Second Foundation, is two stories: the first is the Mule’s search for the Second Foundation, and the second story is Arkady’s search for the Second Foundation. Arkady is the daughter of a prominent First Foundationer.
All three books have plenty of action, and have interesting conclusions full of neat twists. They are less thought provoking than a Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick book, but that’s fine because sometimes, we just need a fun adventure to be immersed in (Asimov probably needed an escape from all the studying he did while majoring in biochemistry).
What I like about Asimov’s stories is that he comes up with some kind of concept, like Psychohistory or the three laws of robotics, and then tries to find exceptions or flaws in them. This is especially prevalent in Foundation and Empire when the Mule is taking over the galaxy. Seldon could not have predicted that, so now the whole plan is skewed. It’s an interesting conflict: you have a madman trying to conquer the galaxy, but the deeper implication is that the Dark Age may last longer, or the future may not be as predictable as we hope it is.
This trilogy is a subset of Asimov’s much larger “future history of the Milky Way galaxy series,” which spans seventeen (yes, seventeen) books, starting with I, Robot. I have read nine of the books, in no particular order, and they are all enjoyable on their own. If you know the premise behind psychohistory, then it doesn’t matter if you read book one, then two, then negative 2 (being the first prequel book), then four (being the first sequel book) etc.
I’ll write more about the sequel and prequel books later, because the original Foundation book is really the best place to start. Prelude to Foundation is a good book for fans of the series, but it would not really be a good place to start it. Overall, I highly recommend this series to anyone who even remotely enjoys science fiction, since the story is really good, and they are pretty easy to read, too.
Foundation
ISBN# 0553382578
Foundation on Amazon.com
Foundation and Empire
ISBN# 0553293370
Foundation and Empire on amazon.com
Second Foundation
ISBN# 0553293362
Second Foundation on amazon.com
Showing posts with label Future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Future. Show all posts
Friday, September 3, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
On Brand Loyalty
One of the topics for the new Futurama episodes was the "eye-phone," a phone that everyone in New New York had to have. This is an obvious spoof on Apple products and the insane loyalty some people have for them. Personally, I dislike Apple, and loved the episode. I'm a Science Fiction Nerd, and I'm a PC.
But why? Why do I like PC's so much?
The answer is that they have earned my loyalty one way or another. I like the layout of PC's and they are cheap compared to Macs. I like Target because it seems organized and clean. Other than that, most businesses seem pretty much the same. Every bank offers checking accounts, savings accounts, and will sell you a loan. Every sit-down restaurant has roughly the same menu and atmosphere. Every candidate running for governor has roughly the same platform.
Begin tangeant from my what I'm writing about:
If you read the "issues" page on any given candidate's website, they all sound the same. Take this example:
Now read this one:
Now which one is Tom Emmer and which one is Mark Dayton? They are both pro-education, they both acknowledge that our schools aren't good enough, but they are otherwise on opposite ends of the political spectrum. (The answer, if you are curious, is that it doesn't matter because neither one of them would be a good governor anyway).
/tangeant
I guess what I'm getting at is that your loyalty should be very expensive. If you get bad service somewhere, don't go there again. That's what makes capitalism the most democratic system on Earth: you vote with your money. If you keep going back to the same place over and over, bad companies will not be slapped by the Invisible Hand. My favorite quote from the Futurama episode was this exchange between the eye-phone salesman and Fry: "it's $500, you have no choice of carrier, the battery can't hold a charge, and the reception isn't very-" It's at that point that Fry interrupted the Eye-phone salesman and told him to "Shut up and take my money!" I think that's an accurate representation of the idiotic loyalty Mac fans have to their computers. "It costs twice as much as a comparable PC, and it doesn't work as well," "Shut up and take my money!" Mom put it best at the end of the episode: "Idiots!"
But why? Why do I like PC's so much?
The answer is that they have earned my loyalty one way or another. I like the layout of PC's and they are cheap compared to Macs. I like Target because it seems organized and clean. Other than that, most businesses seem pretty much the same. Every bank offers checking accounts, savings accounts, and will sell you a loan. Every sit-down restaurant has roughly the same menu and atmosphere. Every candidate running for governor has roughly the same platform.
Begin tangeant from my what I'm writing about:
If you read the "issues" page on any given candidate's website, they all sound the same. Take this example:
Since the pivotal 1983 release of A Nation at Risk, we have known that America’s schools are falling behind those of other industrialized countries. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves part of a truly global economy with workforce needs changing and businesses facing employee shortages in critical areas such as engineering, science, and health care.
Now read this one:
I will insist that some of my additional state funding be used to increase public school teachers’ salaries. The average Minnesota teacher’s salary is 3.3% below the national average. Good salaries are essential to attracting and retaining the best teachers possible, who are essential to the best public schools possible.
Now which one is Tom Emmer and which one is Mark Dayton? They are both pro-education, they both acknowledge that our schools aren't good enough, but they are otherwise on opposite ends of the political spectrum. (The answer, if you are curious, is that it doesn't matter because neither one of them would be a good governor anyway).
/tangeant
I guess what I'm getting at is that your loyalty should be very expensive. If you get bad service somewhere, don't go there again. That's what makes capitalism the most democratic system on Earth: you vote with your money. If you keep going back to the same place over and over, bad companies will not be slapped by the Invisible Hand. My favorite quote from the Futurama episode was this exchange between the eye-phone salesman and Fry: "it's $500, you have no choice of carrier, the battery can't hold a charge, and the reception isn't very-" It's at that point that Fry interrupted the Eye-phone salesman and told him to "Shut up and take my money!" I think that's an accurate representation of the idiotic loyalty Mac fans have to their computers. "It costs twice as much as a comparable PC, and it doesn't work as well," "Shut up and take my money!" Mom put it best at the end of the episode: "Idiots!"
Friday, July 23, 2010
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury is the second incarnation of HG Wells. Most of Wells’ books were a social commentary of some kind (I don’t like British imperialism, so how would they like it if Martians imperialized them? What would happen to our current class structure over 800,000 years? Etc.). Fahrenheit 451 is a commentary on censorship and the amount of reading people do these days.
The book is the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman. It is his job to start fires. He starts books on fire, because books are banned. The reason for banning books is that the smart people made the dumb people feel dumb, so they banned the books, burned as many as they could, and now they have firemen whose job it is to burn down the houses of people who are hiding books. The result is a world where people essentially watch TV all day every day. Montag’s wife Mildred spends most of her time in their parlor, where TV’s fill up three of the four walls. On these TV’s are her “families,” it sounds like they are just soap operas that she watches all day that she can interact with in really small ways (they had a chip installed that makes the characters say “Mrs. Montag” instead of “Paying customer” whenever they are talking to her. It makes her even more involved with it). These parlors with TV’s covering the walls are very common in this world. One woman, when discusses having children says that “having children is like doing laundry! You just throw them in the parlor and give them some clean clothes every now and then!” This may not sound realistic, but I believe it does happen on occasion in our society. I lived with a guy who weighed over 300 pounds, and the reason was that he sat on the couch for thirteen hours every day watching TV. He also had the personality of a little kid, which is another characteristic of the people living in Fahrenheit 451: they don’t really get what is real and what is not. They don’t thing the characters in books could be real because they can’t see them, but the people on their walls are real because they see and “interact” with them.
So why do we care about Montag so much? Early on in the book, he meets a girl named Clarisse, who basically introduces him to the world. She asks all the silly questions, and just observes people. Eventually she dies, or something. I don’t really know. I wish Bradbury had explained what happened to her or had her come back at the end. In Montag’s hero’s journey, she serves as the mentor, which is the character that sends our hero on (in this case) his quest. Montag’s quest is to stop “killing” authors by burning their works. After he burns down a house, he realizes that every time he burns a book, he is killing the author in a small way. He makes that connection when he burns down a house that has a woman still inside it. It horrifies him so much that he begins to wonder what is in the books that is worth dying for. Long story short, he finds that books are wonderful, except when they are banned and get his house burned down.
Montag’s discovery of books leads him to betray his fireman friends, and he is eventually exiled from society because of his bookish ways. Lucky for him, right after he leaves the city, there is a huge (and short) war that annihilates the city he just lived in. The hobo’s he ends up with are all book nerds, and they have developed a way to recollect any book they have read at least once. They are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They preserved all the books between all the hobo’s in the country. Montag is the book of Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
Bradbury probably chose the book of Ecclesiastes to be ironic, because the book is about how work is meaningless, although having wisdom is the best way to live. For example, chapter 1 verse 2 states:
This ties in with the end of Fahrenheit 451 when the literature nerds were saying that humans will always go through repeated Dark Ages and Renaissance’s, and their job is to preserve the wisdom that the books have. Also in chapter 1, (verse 18):
This is passage is true for Montag and the other nerds because they are sorrowful for the civilization that is lost at the end of the book, whereas all the people living in it were indifferent because they had lost touch with what was real and what was just on their TV. Next week I’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s opinions of TV in a review of Timequake.
Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0345342968
Ray Bradbury is the second incarnation of HG Wells. Most of Wells’ books were a social commentary of some kind (I don’t like British imperialism, so how would they like it if Martians imperialized them? What would happen to our current class structure over 800,000 years? Etc.). Fahrenheit 451 is a commentary on censorship and the amount of reading people do these days.
The book is the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman. It is his job to start fires. He starts books on fire, because books are banned. The reason for banning books is that the smart people made the dumb people feel dumb, so they banned the books, burned as many as they could, and now they have firemen whose job it is to burn down the houses of people who are hiding books. The result is a world where people essentially watch TV all day every day. Montag’s wife Mildred spends most of her time in their parlor, where TV’s fill up three of the four walls. On these TV’s are her “families,” it sounds like they are just soap operas that she watches all day that she can interact with in really small ways (they had a chip installed that makes the characters say “Mrs. Montag” instead of “Paying customer” whenever they are talking to her. It makes her even more involved with it). These parlors with TV’s covering the walls are very common in this world. One woman, when discusses having children says that “having children is like doing laundry! You just throw them in the parlor and give them some clean clothes every now and then!” This may not sound realistic, but I believe it does happen on occasion in our society. I lived with a guy who weighed over 300 pounds, and the reason was that he sat on the couch for thirteen hours every day watching TV. He also had the personality of a little kid, which is another characteristic of the people living in Fahrenheit 451: they don’t really get what is real and what is not. They don’t thing the characters in books could be real because they can’t see them, but the people on their walls are real because they see and “interact” with them.
So why do we care about Montag so much? Early on in the book, he meets a girl named Clarisse, who basically introduces him to the world. She asks all the silly questions, and just observes people. Eventually she dies, or something. I don’t really know. I wish Bradbury had explained what happened to her or had her come back at the end. In Montag’s hero’s journey, she serves as the mentor, which is the character that sends our hero on (in this case) his quest. Montag’s quest is to stop “killing” authors by burning their works. After he burns down a house, he realizes that every time he burns a book, he is killing the author in a small way. He makes that connection when he burns down a house that has a woman still inside it. It horrifies him so much that he begins to wonder what is in the books that is worth dying for. Long story short, he finds that books are wonderful, except when they are banned and get his house burned down.
Montag’s discovery of books leads him to betray his fireman friends, and he is eventually exiled from society because of his bookish ways. Lucky for him, right after he leaves the city, there is a huge (and short) war that annihilates the city he just lived in. The hobo’s he ends up with are all book nerds, and they have developed a way to recollect any book they have read at least once. They are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They preserved all the books between all the hobo’s in the country. Montag is the book of Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
Bradbury probably chose the book of Ecclesiastes to be ironic, because the book is about how work is meaningless, although having wisdom is the best way to live. For example, chapter 1 verse 2 states:
2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
This ties in with the end of Fahrenheit 451 when the literature nerds were saying that humans will always go through repeated Dark Ages and Renaissance’s, and their job is to preserve the wisdom that the books have. Also in chapter 1, (verse 18):
18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
This is passage is true for Montag and the other nerds because they are sorrowful for the civilization that is lost at the end of the book, whereas all the people living in it were indifferent because they had lost touch with what was real and what was just on their TV. Next week I’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s opinions of TV in a review of Timequake.
Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0345342968
Friday, June 25, 2010
New Futurama Reactions
I love Futurama. I was so excited to hear that it was coming back, and last night it did. I got to see two new episodes, and they were both great. The best part of the Futurama comeback is that the show doesn’t seem completely different than it used to be. Family Guy underwent a huge change after its hiatus, with many of the characters personalities changing, more flashbacks etc. The only difference I noticed between old and new Futurama is that the professor’s voice sounds different.
On to our Sci-Fi storylines then. The opening scenes of the season six premiere have the Planet Express crew being shot out of the sky by the Nimbus. Only Fry and the professor survive, but luckily he killed enough humans to have a huge vat of stem cells to reincarnate the rest of the cast, except Leela. The rest of the episode could have been written by Philip K. Dick, since it has some interesting twists near the end (that I won’t reveal here, since I know some Futurama fans that missed it).
The second new episode was pretty funny too. Zapp and Leela get lost on an “alien” planet, and believe they are the last humans alive. The story isn’t as good as the first episode, since most of it is just Zapp trying to trick Leela into having sex with him, but it was a better episode overall because it was so much funnier than the first one.
Overall, I’m really glad that Futurama is back, and I’m not going to miss any new episodes. It is on Comedy Central at 9PM Central.
Also, this blog will mainly focus on books, but not until after Independence Day.
On to our Sci-Fi storylines then. The opening scenes of the season six premiere have the Planet Express crew being shot out of the sky by the Nimbus. Only Fry and the professor survive, but luckily he killed enough humans to have a huge vat of stem cells to reincarnate the rest of the cast, except Leela. The rest of the episode could have been written by Philip K. Dick, since it has some interesting twists near the end (that I won’t reveal here, since I know some Futurama fans that missed it).
The second new episode was pretty funny too. Zapp and Leela get lost on an “alien” planet, and believe they are the last humans alive. The story isn’t as good as the first episode, since most of it is just Zapp trying to trick Leela into having sex with him, but it was a better episode overall because it was so much funnier than the first one.
Overall, I’m really glad that Futurama is back, and I’m not going to miss any new episodes. It is on Comedy Central at 9PM Central.
Also, this blog will mainly focus on books, but not until after Independence Day.
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