Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is a masterpiece of science fiction writing. After many years it was followed up by Foundation’s Edge, which was so-so. Then, the year I was born, it was added to with Foundation and Earth, following Golan Trevize’s quest to find the planet from which all live originally came from.

It was heavy on the philosophy. Discussions of morality, ethics, whether robots are human and whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. This makes it slow going at the start by picks up as the book moves on.

There is a certain excitement generated on being in on the answer as it were. Obviously, being actually from Earth, and having a basic knowledge of our galaxy, you can feel the rush when you realise that Trevize is getting closer and closer.

The end is quite a nice twist too. It doesn’t throw everything on its head but provides something satisfying different. If you enjoyed the series so far, this is well worth a read.

Dune. Arrakis. Desert planet.

Dune is a 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. It is gripping. I usually make it through a novel. It’s rare when I actively seek out extra time to get in reading. However, this was one of those novels. Intricate and interesting, yet not overpoweringly complicated.

It has also aged very well. Despite being 50 years old, it did not sound out-dated. Herbert died in 1986, coincidentally the same year as follow science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard.

It does mean however, that I now have five sequels to add to my reading list.

I saw Lawrence Krauss speaking at QED last year and decided he was definitely worth reading. When I looked up his books, I found he has one entitled “The Physics of Star Trek”. Win.

It is pretty much what you expect. He looks at various aspects of the technology featured in Star Trek and talks about how possible they would be in the real world. It turns out that Gene Roddenberry put quite a lot of thought into this, especially as Trekkers kept asking difficult questions.

It was written in 1995 and is now starting to show its age. It was, for example, written well before we successfully build a cloaking device. Krauss writes in an engaging style that is on my wavelength.

Maybe there will one day be a sequel. As the author himself suggests, he could do The Physics of Star Trek 2: Wrath of Krauss.

Yesterday, it was announced that science fiction author Ray Bradbury, best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, had died. While it is far from a tragedy, at the respectable age of 91, he will be deeply missed.

If remembrance, here is Rachel Bloom singing about her love for Ray.

Having recently re-read the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, I went on to read the fourth book in the series, Foundation’s Edge.

Despite high praise elsewhere, I was somewhat disappointed by the book. While it was certainly an enjoyable read and one I don’t regret, I don’t feel that it played out with quite the brilliant design that the original trilogy did. It was a great read, but not as good as the first three.

I’m currently re-reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

They are a fantastic series of novels and it’s brilliant to see the way Asimov carefully laid out all the story lines and concepts and weaved them in and out so that you never really know where it will end up, yet it all seems so obvious at the end.

I also find a lot of amusing parallels between the concept of The Tech-Men and work. Carefully tinkering around to try and fix systems we don’t really understand but somehow manage to keep ticking over 😀 .