Foundation
Jun. 10th, 2022 03:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lhexanFrom a comment on Madison Scott-Clary's Patreon account.
I read Asimov's Foundation in graduate school and found it awful. There was a scene that sticks with me in which one professor tells another to calculate the future of humanity based on such and such assumptions, and the other one pulls out a pocket calculator and does so in the space of a paragraph.
Foundation was an unholy combination of Marxism and Great Man theory. It was Marxist in that it claimed humanity passes through a deterministic series of historical phases, each defined by conflict between certain classes. Then it also claimed that each such phase ended with a (calculable) fulcrum requiring a Great Man to resolve correctly.
The only good thing I'm inclined to say about Foundation is that it was (I think) the first novel to portray scientists as heroes.
I read Asimov's Foundation in graduate school and found it awful. There was a scene that sticks with me in which one professor tells another to calculate the future of humanity based on such and such assumptions, and the other one pulls out a pocket calculator and does so in the space of a paragraph.
Foundation was an unholy combination of Marxism and Great Man theory. It was Marxist in that it claimed humanity passes through a deterministic series of historical phases, each defined by conflict between certain classes. Then it also claimed that each such phase ended with a (calculable) fulcrum requiring a Great Man to resolve correctly.
The only good thing I'm inclined to say about Foundation is that it was (I think) the first novel to portray scientists as heroes.
