On the planet Terminus, a group of academics struggles to survive as the Galactic Empire crumbles. With no weapons, all they can rely on are the predictions of a dead genius named Hari Seldon. That's right — it's time to discuss Isaac Asimov's Foundation!
Welcome to Foundation Week, a Blogging the Hugos special event. In 1983, Isaac Asimov won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for Foundation's Edge, in which he revisited his groundbreaking Foundation mythos for the first time in over thirty years. Because the Foundation series is such classic, quintessential, and beloved science fiction — the original stories won their own unique Hugo for Best All-Time Series in 1966, and influenced artists from Douglas Adams to George Lucas — Josh Wimmer and Alasdair Wilkins will be discussing each of the seven books between today and Sunday. We begin with Foundation, published in 1951.
The dystopian science fiction Stephenson¡¯s Project Hieroglyph aims to counter isn¡¯t the cause of our cultural malaise. It¡¯s a symptom. The obstacle to more technological ambitions isn¡¯t our idea of the future. It¡¯s how we think about the present and the past.cheers!
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The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn¡¯t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public. (Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for "You Will Go to the Moon.") People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories -- not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories -- that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips.
Then the stories changed. For good reasons and bad, more and more Americans stopped believing in what they had once viewed as progress. Plastics became a punch line, convenience foods ridiculous, nature the standard of all things right and good. Freeways destroyed neighborhoods. Urban renewal replaced them with forbidding Brutalist plazas. New subdivisions represented a threat to the landscape rather than the promise of the good life. Too-fast airplanes produced window-rattling sonic booms. Insecticides harmed eagles¡¯ eggs. Exploration meant conquest and brutal exploitation. Little by little, the number of modern offenses grew until we found ourselves in a 21st century where some of the most educated, affluent and culturally influential people in the country are terrified of vaccinating their children. Nothing good, they¡¯ve come to think, comes from disturbing nature.
Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are making a big mistake when they propose a vision of the good future that dismisses the everyday pleasures of ordinary people -- that, in short, leaves out consumers. This perspective is particularly odd coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose professional work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won¡¯t directly reap their benefits. They¡¯re even more wary if they believe that the changes of the past have brought only hardship and destruction. If Stephenson wants to make people more optimistic about the future and more likely to undertake difficult technological challenges, he shouldn¡¯t waste his time writing short stories about two-kilometer-high towers. He should find a way to tell tales about past transformations that don¡¯t require 2,000-plus pages. (I say this as someone who has enjoyed his massive Baroque Cycle of 17th-century historical fiction.)
Storytelling does have the potential to rekindle an ideal of progress. The trick is not to confuse pessimism with sophistication or, conversely, to demand that optimism be naive. The past, like the present and the future, was made by complicated and imperfect people. Recapturing a sense of optimism requires stories that accept the ambiguities of history -- and of life -- while recognizing genuine improvements.
Fortunately, we now have an example of such stories: the Cinemax-HBO medical drama "The Knick," which is set in a turn-of-the-20th-century New York hospital. Creators Jack Amiel and Michael Begler got the idea from early 20th century medical textbooks they purchased on #borrring old eBay. ¡°We were astonished,¡± Begler told an interviewer. ¡°We couldn¡¯t put these books down.¡±
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the series depicts decidedly flawed characters living in an exciting but brutal period and improving surgery through clever, risky and -- by today¡¯s standards -- often-high-handed medical procedures. It demonstrates how difficult advances can be, and how much ambition and arrogance even the most promising experiments can require. As you might expect, the show features the advent of electric lights and X-rays -- the technological progress we remember -- but it also highlights such forgotten incremental improvements as better suction machines, suture techniques and hand-made gizmos for stanching the flow of blood. Without preaching, it makes the idea of progress real.
¡°Back then something like syphilis, easily treatable today, could have devastating effects and a procedure as common as a C-section ended up fatally most of the time,¡± a review reminds not science-fiction fans but the readers of Vogue. When progress was popular it wasn¡¯t just for geeks.
See, I would LOVE a Foundation movie/series where all of the now-quaint tech that Asimov projected back in 1951 was kept and presented as the coolest, hippest, cutting-edgiest stuff around. Atomic ashtrays, microfilm, the whole thing, with not a single bit of our own modern vision of "future tech" to be seen and not a whit of irony or retro-hipsterism about it.I had this same thought, and realized that it would wind up looking pretty much exactly like Forbidden Planet.
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