Foundation

[lhexan]

From 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.

Comments

[ergos]

Perhaps, if you like reading sci-fi, may I allow you to fall into the Greg Egan rabbit hole.

Here it is : https://www.gregegan.net/

Personally, my favorite book is Dichronaut

[lhexan]

I've only read Permutation City, and I found its nihilism upsetting. Is that novel representative of his other work?

[ergos]

I haven't read Permutation city or any of his old work precisely because I have been told his older work is not as good as his new, so I believe it's probably not representative. I have found his (newer) books to be very meaningful. The downside is that a lot of them require a certain mathematical maturity to fully appreciate, so I can't recommend a lot of his books to my "non-STEM" friends.

But considering you're a physicist, and you like SF... I thought it would be a good match! ;)

Sorry for the late reply. I'm getting used to dreamwidth, it's a lovely platform.

[lhexan]

Speaking of late replies, Google decided to start segregating automatic emails, and I didn't notice until now. Annoying.

I'll give Dichronaut a look and let you know what I think. Mathematical maturity should be no problem, I'm gaining that by the week!

Yeah, Dreamwidth is indeed lovely. The population is low, though gradually increasing. Its aesthetic belongs to a previous era of the Internet, but in a good way: it doesn't hide or omit helpful functionality for the sake of elegance. You can actually find old content in a reasonable span of time, not that I've got much in the way of that on this new journal.

[lhexan]

I paused my read of Dichronauts twenty pages from the end because I was so frustrated with a character's decision to potentially maim himself, in order to convince someone who I thought was already in the right. Today I went ahead and finished it off, and while the underlying concept is neat, the characters were just frustrating. I also remember thinking the decision to navigate the river was dumb, and had my opinion confirmed ten pages later when they all crashed.

I did have some fun playing with the consequences of hyperbolic geometry. I'm not convinced that the shell theorem holds, but figuring out how to do surface integrals in hyperbolic geometry was more effort than I was willing to make. It was also amusing to realize that chemistry as we know it would be impossible, because it relies on molecules having ground states, and in hyperbolic geometry there would be no minimum-energy states.