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

[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.