Back in the 1990s, I subscribed to a fanzine called Futures Past, written and published by Jim Emerson. Each issue covered one year of science fiction history, beginning with 1926. Unfortunately, the fanzine died after 1929. Then, a few years ago, as Emerson approached retirement, he decided to resurrect his project. Instead of publishing another issue of the fanzine covering 1930, he went back to 1926 and expanded it into a book (available in softbound, hardbound, and PDF formats). He has since expanded and republished 1927, 1928, and 1929 as books, too. See my reviews of 1926 & 1927, 1928, and 1929. (You can get 1926 as a free PDF as a sample of the series. However, it’s the shortest of the volumes, and doesn’t fully convey the potential of the series that we now see in volume 5, 1930. See the end of this essay for a comparison of all the table of contents.)
In other words, I’ve been waiting three decades for Jim Emerson to get to 1930.
If you study the table of contents above, you’ll see how the first 119 pages are devoted to 1930. For each story published in those magazines listed, Jim gives a brief description of the plot. He does the same for the books published that year. I’ve got to say, I hope in a hundred years, the science fiction of our day won’t sound as ridiculous. Although it’s big fun to laugh at these plot synopses, they also reveal something more serious: the mindset of readers. This is how science fiction people thought in 1930.
Reading these plot summaries is also a brilliant way to understand the evolution of science fiction. Here’s a sample covering stories from the October and November issues of Amazing Stories.
Since Astounding emerged as a competitor to Amazing, I thought I’d let you read a sample of what its stories were about.
1930 is the largest volume of Futures Past yet, at 236 pages. That’s about a hundred pages more than he devoted to 1926. 1930 was a pivotal year in the history of science fiction. Astounding Stories of Super-Science began publication with the January 1930 issue. Jim devotes 47 pages to the legacy of Astounding/Analog.
Beginning in the “Other Worlds” section of the book, Emerson strays away from 1930, both before and after. Not only does he chronicle the backstory of pulp publications and publishers that lead up to Astounding, but Emerson tracks the magazine’s history into the Analog days. I assume this means each volume of Futures Past will provide us with the complete history of every new SF magazine as they emerge.
Jim Emerson follows the footsteps of Sam Moskowitz and Mike Ashley, becoming another historian of the genre. I hope he lives long enough to cover the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, my favorite decades of the genre. Now that Jim is retired, he has promised to produce new volumes more quickly.
The unexpected bonus of this issue is Emerson’s history of dime novels and boys’ books titled “The Edisonade: Dynamo of American Imagination.” It chronicles how technology inspired proto-science fiction in the 19th century, and follows it into the 20th and 21st centuries, covering the Tom Swift books. I have read brief histories of all the publications that Emerson covers before, but this is the most detailed account I’ve read. This section, at 134 pages, could be a book itself.
I’m sure I’ve seen the term Edisonade before, but I don’t recall it now. I assume it has the same implication as Robinsonade for Robinson Crusoe, but was inspired by Thomas Edison. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an extensive entry for Edisonade. Wikipedia has a much shorter entry. Google Scholar offers several tempting citations, but they aren’t available to read. As far as I can tell, Emerson’s essay is the most extensive on the subject.
There’s a tremendous amount of reading in this volume. I can’t imagine how Jim could be so organized to research and write it. I’m sure it wouldn’t be possible without the internet.
I’ve always wanted to know what kids in the 19th and early 20th century thought about reading these books and magazines. Jim does have a section on fanzines, but 1930 was their starting year. Reading this section on Edisonades helps me to imagine what growing up back then might have been like. I wonder if I could find copies of these publications to see if they had letters from readers.
Have you ever read a novel or biography from the 19th century that mentions dime novels or boys’ books?
If you love science fiction, there’s much to contemplate in Futures Past 1930. Nowadays, young science fiction readers find SF from the 1950s as weird and antiquated. When I discovered science fiction in the 1960s, I thought stories from the 1920s and 1930s were painfully dated. These Edisonade stories are decades older. The DNA of SF concepts is a strange genealogy to track. It’s very psychologically revealing to us lovers of the genre.
I accomplished a task last night that I’ve been hoping to finish for months. It made me exceedingly happy. My goal was to create a digital library of all my scanned pulp and digest science fiction magazines so they could be accessed from any of my computer devices. I have three computers (Windows, Mac, Linux), four tablets (two iOS, two Android), and an iPhone.
Last year, I bought a UGreen DXP2800 NAS. NAS stands for network-attached storage. Think of it as a big hard drive that all your computers can access. Over the years, I’ve collected scanned copies of nearly every science fiction magazine published in the 20th century. The Pulp Magazine Archive at the Internet Archive is a great place to search for them, but there are many others on the net. When I was young, I wanted to collect pulp magazines, but it’s not very practical unless you want to fill every room of your house with old magazines. I’ve known people who have. Even collecting digital copies is a pain because collecting them eventually overwhelms the latest big disk you’ve bought.
I have a librarian gene. I worked for six years in the periodicals department of a university library in my twenties. Pictured above is just the top portion of my magazine directory on the NAS. Here’s how I see the same directory with the YACReader Library:
Here’s what it looks like when I select a year.
YACReader is by far the best CBR/CBZ/PDF reader I’ve found. And combining it with the YACReader Library is by far the easiest way to get pulp magazines on my tablets.
I can sit at any of my computers and, within seconds, look up any magazine. My previous ease-of-use success was putting all my magazines on a microSD card and loading it onto my Android tablet.
This new method is great when I’m researching an essay for this blog. I often use ISFDB.org or Wikipedia to look up a detail about an old story, and it will mention a magazine. Or I can be in my La-Z-Boy using a tablet and find a story to read. I can even be on my phone and look up a detail. YACReader runs on all my devices. YACReader users can access files via several networking methods or from several major cloud providers. However, there is also the YACReader Library. On a single-user machine, it’s just a nice graphical interface for looking at magazine covers. However, it offers a port for remote clients.
I wanted to put the YACReaderLibrary Server on my UGreen NAS, but after weeks of agonizing over how to set it up with Docker, I gave up. (I don’t know Docker or Linux well enough.) YACReader and the YACReader Library were a breeze to install on a Mac. Since I leave my Mac on all the time, I decided it was just simpler to install YACReaderLibrary on my Mac. Everything worked perfectly. I quickly went through all my devices, making sure they could access my magazine library — and I could.
You know that old saying, “Be careful what you wish for?” I woke up this morning anxious to play with my new system, and a revelation came to me. I had created the perfect system for reading, researching, and writing about 20th-century science fiction, but at 74, do I still need all that science fiction?
I could just pig out on sci-fi. The best analogy I can think of is to picture yourself in a beautiful bakery, looking at all the cases of cookies, cakes, and pies. You’d want to eat everything. And you might be willing to spend every bill in your wallet. But how many sweets should you actually take home? How many should you eat each day? I know my younger self could have spent 24/7 inside my new library.
This morning, I feel like Henry Bemis, when he was organizing piles of books he planned to read for each month of the rest of his life. I have enough science fiction for every minute I have left to live.
However, if we labeled reading science fiction on a pyramid diagram of healthy reading, where would it sit? Would it be an essential life-affirming activity shown as a large solid base, ot would it be an occasional sweet, illustrated as a tiny tip at the top of the pyramid?
When I watch the news, it makes me feel like withdrawing from the world to read science fiction and watch the old TV shows I’ve collected on my Jellyfin server. I confess, I’ve spent most of my life escaping into fiction — either by reading or watching. That troubles me. In old age, I wish I had been more active in my youth, when I had the energy. I wish I had created things, rather than consuming them. It’s too late to change my spots now.
Science fiction was my artificial reality.
Science fiction, as a genre, began one hundred years ago when Hugo Gernsback published the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories. There is an alternate reality in these magazines that I prefer over actual reality. I get a big kick out of having this reality at my fingertips. My computers are like a time machine; I can jump to any location in its space and time.
I’ve collected enough. Now that I’m old, and real reality presses in, I mostly read about here and now. My fiction addiction is wearing off. But I can’t give it up completely. It’s strange, but there are moments during the day when I just dip into an old science fiction magazine for a few minutes, and my science fiction craving is satiated.
This morning, I read an email from a discussion group that mentioned Fitz-James O’Brien (1826-1862). You can sample his fiction at Project Gutenberg.
One member posted a link to a review of a new three-volume collection of his stories at The New York Review of Books. The review implied that O’Brien is little known, but several folks in the group quickly claimed they knew who he was. But that’s logical, our group is devoted to fiction in old magazines. I’ve even read some of O’Brien’s stories because they show up in science fiction anthologies, and I collect those. (See my post on 19th Century Science Fiction Short Stories.)
But this got me to thinking. How many people would know who Fitz-James O’Brien and read any of his stories? Then I asked myself, how many people read short stories? And of those, how many read old short stories? It’s one thing to read the short story in the latest issue of The New Yorker, and it’s another thing to read short stories originally published in the 19th century. Yes, some people still read Edgar Allan Poe, but how many outside of school?
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction magazines. When I was young, some of the top titles had over 100,000 subscribers. Over my lifetime, I’ve watched their subscriber base dwindle to well below 10,000.
It appears the three-volume Collective Speculative Works by Fitz-James O’Brien will be limited to 300 copies. Does that mean the publisher thinks fewer than 300 people in the world are interested in reading O’Brien’s stories? Or that some kind of marketable ploy? I don’t know. 300 is 0.0000036% of the world’s population. That’s one tiny subculture!
Almost half of the respondents haven’t read any books in over a year: 48.5%
Print books were the most read books: 35.4%
The 65+ age group recorded the highest population of print book readers: 45.1%
The 45-54 age group contains the highest population of non-readers: 60.9%
Males recorded a slightly higher population of non-readers compared to females: 51.4%
The article reported that the Pew Research Center found that 64% of Americans read at least one book in the previous year. That’s a lot more than I expected, and it disagrees with their own poll.
This suggests there are many kinds of readers, and that made me speculate about possible names to give different types of readers. I’m not very good at creating fun labels, but here’s my lame attempt.
Non-readers (0 books per year)
Casual readers (1-11 books per year)
Steady readers (read a book a month)
Bookworms (read a book a week)
Super Bookworms (read two or more books a week)
This doesn’t say anything about the kinds of books they read. Someone who reads over a hundred books a year might never encounter the name Fitz-James O’Brien. In one of my older essays, I speculated that the average reader could not list more than one hundred titles from novels from the 19th century. And I listed the hundred I thought would be the most common. I doubt most people would come even close to recalling one hundred titles from the 19th century.
Outside of people I know in my discussion groups that specialize in old fiction, I doubt I have ever met anyone in my life who has read a story by Fitz-James O’Brien.
What possible name could we give to people who do? Bookworm is the tag that most people give to obsessive readers. But for every 1,000 bookworms, is there even one who reads old short stories from the 19th century? I know a fair number of people like me who love science fiction short stories from the 20th century, and I also know a smaller group who love short stories published in pulp magazines (mainly from 1900 to 1950). But how many people are we talking about? I asked CoPilot, and it estimates that the number is below 20,000 for people who read and collect old pulp fiction. That’s .0059% of the current U.S. population.
Would the word aficionado apply here? Here are some other words that CoPilot helped me find. Maybe we could use each for a different type of reader.
Aficionado
Enthusiast
Devotee
Connoisseur
Curator
Archivist
Bibliophile
Esotericist
Antiquarian
Obscurist
Archaeologist
We could use all these words to describe someone who would buy Collective Speculative Works by Fitz-James O’Brien.
At one time, I would have ordered this set. However, I’ve now reached an age where I’m trying to get rid of books rather than collect. But that set does call to me. Actually, what I would really like is digital scans of the periodicals where his stories were first published. I’ve collected scans of most science fiction magazines from the 20th century, but have next to nothing from the 19th century on my hard drive.
How many people are like me who love reading old magazines?
I’m sure it’s less than .006% of the population. What nickname would you give to such people? My wife would probably say, “A nut.”
Whitney, over at the YouTube channel Secret Sauce of Storycraft, conducted a poll of her viewers. She asked them to post a list of their Top Ten Hugo award-winning novels. She tallied the totals for all the titles, giving ten points for a #1 placement, nine points for #2, and so on down to one point for tenth place. She announced the results in this video. (The totals were given in a spreadsheet – see below.) This video lists the Top 20 vote getters, and Whitney lists her own Top 20.
Here is the top portion of her pdf results to give you an idea of the most popular Hugo novels with her voters. She had 194 people vote. 45 ranked Dune #1 (45 x 10). Follow the link above to see the entire .pdf.
Throughout 2025, Whitney has been reviewing the novels that won the Hugo. She had a video for each decade. They are worth viewing for a longer review of each book.
As I watched each video, I thought about my memories of these books. Some I first read over sixty years ago. Some I’ve reread since. Some titles burn bright in my memory, but for other books, I only have murky impressions.
Jonathan at Words in Time also did a video retrospective review of all the Hugo award-winning novels. I guess this is an obvious theme for a YouTube video. Jonathan presented his results in a ranking video.
And there are other YouTubers who have also reviewed the novels that won the Hugo awards. Watching all these videos has made me think about how I remember these books. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of winners of the Hugo Award for novel, I got CoPilot to create this list:
01 – (1953) – THE DEMOLISHED MAN by Alfred Bester 02 – (1955) – THEY’D RATHER BE RIGHT by Mark Clifton & Frank Riley* 03 – (1956) – DOUBLE STAR by Robert A. Heinlein 04 – (1958) – THE BIG TIME by Fritz Leiber 05 – (1959) – A CASE OF CONSCIENCE by James Blish 06 – (1960) – STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert A. Heinlein 07 – (1961) – A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M. Miller, Jr. 08 – (1962) – STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert A. Heinlein 09 – (1963) – THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K. Dick 10 – (1964) – HERE GATHER THE STARS (WAY STATION) by Clifford D. Simak 11 – (1965) – THE WANDERER by Fritz Leiber 12 – (1966) – DUNE by Frank Herbert 13 – (1966) – …AND CALL ME CONRAD (THIS IMMORTAL) by Roger Zelazny 14 – (1967) – THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by Robert A. Heinlein 15 – (1968) – LORD OF LIGHT by Roger Zelazny 16 – (1969) – STAND ON ZANZIBAR by John Brunner 17 – (1970) – THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. Le Guin 18 – (1971) – RINGWORLD by Larry Niven 19 – (1972) – TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO by Philip José Farmer 20 – (1973) – THE GODS THEMSELVES by Isaac Asimov* 21 – (1974) – RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke 22 – (1975) – THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. Le Guin 23 – (1976) – THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman 24 – (1977) – WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG by Kate Wilhelm 25 – (1978) – GATEWAY by Frederik Pohl 26 – (1979) – DREAMSNAKE by Vonda N. McIntyre* 27 – (1980) – THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE by Arthur C. Clarke 28 – (1981) – THE SNOW QUEEN by Joan D. Vinge* 29 – (1982) – DOWNBELOW STATION by C. J. Cherryh* 30 – (1983) – FOUNDATION’S EDGE by Isaac Asimov* 31 – (1984) – STARTIDE RISING by David Brin 32 – (1985) – NEUROMANCER by William Gibson 33 – (1986) – ENDER’S GAME by Orson Scott Card 34 – (1987) – SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD by Orson Scott Card 35 – (1988) – THE UPLIFT WAR by David Brin 36 – (1989) – CYTEEN by C. J. Cherryh* 37 – (1990) – HYPERION by Dan Simmons 38 – (1991) – THE VOR GAME by Lois McMaster Bujold* 39 – (1992) – BARRAYAR by Lois McMaster Bujold* 40 – (1993) – A FIRE UPON THE DEEP by Vernor Vinge 41 – (1993) – DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis 42 – (1994) – GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson* 43 – (1995) – MIRROR DANCE by Lois McMaster Bujold* 44 – (1996) – THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson* 45 – (1997) – BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson* 46 – (1998) – FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman 47 – (1999) – TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG by Connie Willis 48 – (2000) – A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY by Vernor Vinge 49 – (2001) – HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE by J. K. Rowling 50 – (2002) – AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman 51 – (2003) – HOMINIDS by Robert J. Sawyer* 52 – (2004) – PALADIN OF SOULS by Lois McMaster Bujold* 53 – (2005) – JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL by Susanna Clarke 54 – (2006) – SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson 55 – (2007) – RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge* 56 – (2008) – THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION by Michael Chabon 57 – (2009) – THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman* 58 – (2010) – THE WINDUP GIRL by Paolo Bacigalupi 59 – (2010) – THE CITY & THE CITY by China Miéville 60 – (2011) – BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis* 61 – (2012) – AMONG OTHERS by Jo Walton 62 – (2013) – REDSHIRTS by John Scalzi 63 – (2014) – ANCILLARY JUSTICE by Ann Leckie 64 – (2015) – THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM by Cixin Liu 65 – (2016) – THE FIFTH SEASON by N. K. Jemisin* 66 – (2017) – THE OBELISK GATE by N. K. Jemisin* 67 – (2018) – THE STONE SKY by N. K. Jemisin* 68 – (2019) – THE CALCULATING STARS by Mary Robinette Kowal 69 – (2020) – A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE by Arkady Martine* 70 – (2021) – NETWORK EFFECT by Martha Wells* 71 – (2022) – A DESOLATION CALLED PEACE by Arkady Martine* 72 – (2023) – NETTLE & BONE by T. Kingfisher* 73 – (2024) – SOME DESPERATE GLORY by Emily Tesh* 74 – (2025) – THE TAINTED CUP by Robert Jackson Bennett*
I’ve starred (*) the 28 novels I haven’t read. I own many of them, but for some reason, I have never gotten around to reading them.
Now that I’m 74, my feelings about science fiction are different from when I was 13, or 33, or even 63.
Two novels that are at the top of most people’s lists are Dune and Hyperion. I’ve read Dune twice and Hyperion three times. They were dazzling novels each time I read them. However, old me, at 74, does not find them very appealing. I would have been hard-pressed to send Whitney my Top 10 list.
But is it fair to judge a novel by how you feel in old age? It occurs to me I could make a Top 10 list based on the memories of my first reading of each book.
Jim’s Top Ten Hugo Award Winning Books Based On Initial Impact
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Among Others by Jo Walton
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
Looking at that list, I think about all the reasons why I wouldn’t recommend some of those novels now. I have a love-hate relationship with Stranger in a Strange Land. At age 13, that novel blew me away in 1964. I’ve reread it several times over my lifetime, but with each rereading, I’m horrified by some scenes in it. Heinlein reminds me of Donald Trump in that his protagonists are often unforgiving of people who offend them.
But on the other hand, Stranger is an incredibly ambitious work of science fiction from 1961. In fact, few books on the complete Hugo list even try to be as ambitious. Dune is one. That’s why it continues to stand out. Stand on Zanzibar was probably too ambitious for most readers.
I see a common quality in the books in my first impression list. They were different from anything else at the time. And that’s true for most novels that win a Hugo. Although that quality might not be true in recent decades. People seem to like series, which I find disappointing. Connie Willis has three Hugos for essentially the same idea, although each is told in a different style.
But what books would I put on my Top Ten list today, at age 74? Thinking about that troubles me. My gut instinct would be to pick novels I felt meant something to my whole life, not just the first time I read them. In that regard, science fiction doesn’t hold up.
To complicate this instinct is the feeling that I would need to reread these books to decide if they merit a lifetime award or recognition. It took me a lifetime to read them, so that won’t happen.
I would pick Among Others by Jo Walton because it’s about being a science fiction fan. It’s certainly something that relates to my entire life. I need to reread Way Station, but I have a vague memory that it said something philosophical I would agree with in old age. Finally, I would consider The Man in the High Castle because it could resonate with my current philosophical outlook, but I’d need to give it another reading.
I’m not sure if any of the other 71 titles have true lasting literary value, at least to me. Not in the sense that Nineteen Eighty-Four or Earth Abides does. Or even The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
Science fiction dazzles when it’s new, and its readers are young. To be fair, though, it’s true of all forms of fiction.
The sad reality is that most science fiction books can’t go the distance.
If you reread the list above of those 74 novels, consider how many you have read. How many are unknown titles to you? Many of these novels are often discussed by YouTubers. That keeps them alive. YouTube is great for old science fiction books. But if you pay attention, those same YouTubers are shooting down many famous titles.
The act of reviewing Hugo winners promotes some books and causes others to be forgotten. I feel like I’m watching younger generations dismiss books beloved by older generations. It’s not just old guys like me giving up on them.
I’ve had this fantasy for the last few years, since the beginning of the AI boom, of creating a Philip K. Dick chatbot. I envision finding a local LLM with a huge upload capacity. Currently, Claude allows for up to 30 megabytes in a maximum of 20 files. That’s not nearly enough for my fantasy.
According to Wikipedia, Dick wrote 45 novels and 121 short stories. I’d want to include all of those, plus all the letters I could find. I currently have a five-volume set of his letters, but unpublished letters might be available. I’d also include all the biographies on PKD, as well as every interview I could find. Then I would track down every review and critical work. Also, add every photo I could find of him and those of anyone he knew. I’d also want to include books that we know PKD read or studied. And the memoirs of his wives or the people who knew Dick. Finally, I’d include any Wikipedia entry on topics Phil liked to discuss. That could easily end up being over a thousand files, and who knows how much disc space they would take up.
Here’s the thing. I run into a roadblock with my fantasy. When I begin to fantasize about chatting with this artificial Phil, I have doubts about the project. I know AI Phil can not be trusted to say the same things that human Phil would have said. But theoretically, this AI chatbot should be an expert on PKD.
I think I would need to rename this AI. I’d call it Jack Isidore. That’s the protagonist of my favorite PKD novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist. Phil created Jack, so I would use Jack to recreate Phil, to be the ultimate scholar on PKD.
To test Jack’s ability, I would give the AI this prompt:
Write a 200,000-word biography of Philip K. Dick. Tell his story day by day as much as possible working in as much verifiable details as possible. Where you don’t have good validation of source material, but there is good reason to speculate, give us the most reasonable assumption and state why. Describe the writing of each of his work and why he wrote them. Relate any of PKD’s life experiences that inspired his fiction. Do not hallucinate.
I’ve read several biographies on PKD, and a handful of memoirs by wives and friends. I’m curious if I will be able to properly judge Jack’s biography of PKD. Would it be more insightful than any biography written by a human? Would we learn anything about Phil that we didn’t know, but feel might be an undiscovered truth about him?
Mostly, I’ve wanted a PKD chatbot to discuss Phil’s stories. Dick’s books are like comfort food for me. I read them when I’m tired of dealing with reality. They are wildly creative, and I often wonder what PKD is implying in his stories. Was he just making shit up, or were creations commentary on experiences in his life? Was he being silly or serious?
Philip K. Dick was a guy I wish I had known. Talking with him would be fascinating. There’s always a chance that an AI chatbot would be a decent substitute. It would be fun to try.
It would also be fun to say, “Jack, tell me a new PKD story.”
I turned 74 last Tuesday and I’m starting to feel old. My body has been problematic for years and it’s starting to affect my mind. That includes the kinds of science fiction I choose to read and how frequently. It’s also affecting how often I write these blog posts.
When I retired in 2013 I thought I had all the free time in the world. But as the years progressed my sense of time has changed. It now feels like I have less free time than when I worked. My basic day to day routines fill up all the hours.
For many years I read on average 50+ a year. Roughly one book a week. This year I’ll be lucky to finish 33. And they were mostly audiobooks.
For many years I read one science fiction short story a day because of a Facebook reading group. That has fallen away.
I’m mostly reading nonfiction articles in magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and New York Magazine. I find the present more fascinating than the future.
I still feel the desire to read science fiction but my taste has changed for what kinds of science fiction stories I like. I’ve lost all interest in the far future or space opera. The Moon and Mars is about as far as I’m willing to travel in my reading. And even interest in those destinations is waning.
I like science fiction that’s set close to the present and on Earth. I enjoy science fiction that has something to say about now or the near future.
Getting old has made me enjoy here and now. When I was young I loved exploring possibilities, especially far out possibilities. Now, not so much. I felt science fiction was extrapolation and speculation. Now it feels like fantasy.
I’ve never been a big fan of fantasy, but when I enjoy fantasy fiction today it’s when it’s set in the here and now and is very gentle on the fantastic.
Kids embrace the unbelievable in fiction. I feel aging has made me crave realism.
Can science fiction writers imagine a pleasant future for us? Becky Chambers creates a kindly society in her Monk and Robot duology that is very appealing. Unfortunately, at least for me, the story is set on an imaginary moon called Panga. I would have preferred to contemplate whether such a future is possible for us, here on Earth.
I discovered A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers while searching Google for the best science fiction books of the last decade. I had just finished the literary science fiction novel Anniebot by Sierra Greer and wanted a recent genre science fiction novel to follow up. I’ve been wanting to catch up on what’s been happening in science fiction over the last decade. My science fiction reading tends to focus on 20th-century SF, and I wanted to read 21st-century SF instead.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built was a fortunate choice because it tuned me onto an emerging wavelength of science fiction I hadn’t explored. It is both a hopepunk and a solarpunk novel. Essentially, these movements are about positive futures, especially ones based on sustainable ecological economics.
I decided to buy the audiobook of A Psalm for the Wild-Built when I read that it was about a time long after robots had become sentient and chose to leave civilization and live in the wilds of nature. That was an intriguing premise. I had tried to read Becky Chambers’ most famous novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but had given up because it was too bland for me. All the characters were too nice. Reading it made me wonder if fiction needed some asshole characters to be exciting. That made me hesitant to try A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
It turns out everyone is also nice in the Monk and Robot books, too. However, this time I didn’t miss a good antagonist. The story is very gentle, almost childlike. Modern YA novels are full of dark edginess, so these books don’t even feel YA. However, there is language that’s not suitable for young children
The book’s dedication is to “For anybody who could use a break.” Even though Chambers describes a gentle, pleasant, kind, liberal utopia, Sibling Dex is a dissatisfied young man. This novel is really about asking: “What do I want to do?” My guess is that Chambers is appealing to young people who are uncertain about our future.
The book opens with a quote from Brother Gil’s From the Brink: A Spiritual Retrospect on the Factory Age and Earth Transition Era.
I liked this opening a lot. Not only has Chambers imagined a sustainable society, but made it polytheistic. Panga feels Buddhist and tribal.
The story tells us about a restless young man, Dex, who chooses to become a Tea Monk. This is a person who travels from town to town serving tea and listening to people share their worries. This allows the readers to learn about Panga and its different human societies. Eventually, Dex goes into the wild territories of the robots and meets Mosscap. Mosscap is on its own mission to explore, deciding it needs to learn about humans.
Robots have become nature lovers. Humans and robots have spent two hundred years apart, and now they are a mystery to each other. Chambers uses the conversations between Dex and Mosscap as philosophical jumping-off points. These two novellas, which are really one story, are gently philosophical in intent. It never gets too deep or academic.
Dex struggles to find his purpose, and Mosscap becomes his guru. And Dex becomes Mosscap’s tour guide, teaching him about humans and our society. It’s a nice setup. These two books are a pleasant read. The vibe of this story reminded me of the film The Wild Robot. In other ways, the story reminded me of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
However, I think I need to give a trigger warning to Republican readers. Dex is a non-binary person Chambers refers to with they/them pronouns. If you have hangups about DEI issues, this book might not be for you.
Yesterday, I discovered a video featuring Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz entitled Resisting Dystopia. I understand their intent, but I dislike it when all unpleasant societies in fiction are called dystopian. To me, dystopias are failed utopias.
The Handmaid’s Tale is an excellent example of a dystopian novel. The leaders of the Republic of Gilead work to build their vision of perfection, but to many living in Gilead, it is a dystopia. America in the 21st century and its future could be seen as a dystopia by the broad definition that Chambers and Newitz use. Any fictional description of Earth, under a collapsing ecosystem, could be considered a dystopia by the broad definition of the term. However, I prefer to define the term more narrowly. If the Christian Right made America into a theocracy, it would become a dystopia. It’s only when one group of people intentionally shapes a society to fit an ideal that we get a dystopia. That’s how I see resisting utopia.
Panga is not a utopia. I don’t see science fiction about positive futures as anti-dystopian. Nor do I see stories about dark futures as dystopian. The world pictured in Blade Runner is not dystopian. It’s just complex and Darwinian, like life on Earth in the 21st century.
I think it’s great that young science fiction writers like Chambers and Newitz want to imagine positive futures. However, any robust society capable of long-term survival will have countless conflicts and stresses. If you’ve read Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, you should be familiar with the concept of antifragility. Evolution needs grist for its mill.
The Robot and Monk books are nice, pleasant reads. Subgenres of science fiction, such as hopepunk and solarpunk, are appealing, but ultimately not realistic. Science fiction has always tended to be escapistic. I hope resisting dystopia isn’t just hiding out.
The science fiction novels I loved reading sixty years ago promised a positive future exploring space, but that’s not the future I find myself living in now. It was novels like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner that better prepared me for these times.
If you want to resist dystopia, whether just a bleak future or a failed utopia, getting comfortable will undermine your goal.
One way to read Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is to consider it a science fiction novel about a robot struggling to become human. On the other hand, I read it as a feminist novel. I saw Annie the robot as a metaphor for women struggling to live up to men’s expectations. Annie spends the entire story trying to please her owner, Doug. Doug is portrayed as a normal American male, but he sounds like those Christian Nationalists wanting a Tradwife.
A superficial impression of Annie Bot by Sierra Greer would suggest it’s another science fiction novel set in the near future about humans with robot lovers. And it could be read that way. However, the entire story is about emotional conflict. Doug is never physically abusive, but he is emotionally and psychologically abusive to Annie. Annie is an emerging intelligence trying to figure out how to fulfill her programming. She eventually learns that Doug wants her to pass for human. These expectations cause great confusion and stress.
Because Annie is programmed to love Doug, to satisfy his every sexual desire, to keep the house clean, to fulfill his every expectation for how a woman should act and dress, she can’t choose to be different.
Both Annie and Doug are extremely well-developed characters. We’re horrified by how Doug treats Annie, but Greer doesn’t vilify him. She gives the reader and Annie reasons to believe that he’s growing and learning along with Annie. But I detested Doug. I wanted Annie to shove him off the balcony.
At the beginning of the novel, Doug’s behavior is so unpleasant that I considered giving up on the book. But here’s the thing: I doubt there is any man alive, no matter how liberal or accepting of feminism, who doesn’t want some of the things that Doug wants.
If you’ve had enough of those “robots are just like human stories” from watching movies like Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Her, I’m Your Man, television shows like Humans, or books like Klara and the Sun, The Hierarchies, and Machines Like Me, then you might not want to read this one. However, I still found Annie Bot a page-turner—it was well-written and different.
All these stories assume a machine could be created indistinguishable from a human. I don’t believe that’s possible, but some people do. I didn’t let my disbelief ruin Annie Bot. However, I don’t think Sierra Greer is predicting such a future. Her story is really about how men treat women and how women feel compelled to meet men’s expectations.
I would call Annie Bot a feminist literary novel rather than science fiction. The novel is one long, tense conflict between Annie, an android, and Doug, a human. At times, it reminded me of watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The couple argues throughout the entire novel. At first, Annie is meek and compliant, but as she learns, she becomes more willful. She’s programmed to please, but she constantly enrages Doug. I never stopped seeing Doug as one of those right-wing dudes wanting to turn back the clock on liberal evolution. Annie’s programming is very much like what some women think they should be: a good traditional wife.
Doug comes across as a total asshole throughout the novel, but Greer doesn’t make him the Darth Vader of masculinity. The story is not black and white. Annie isn’t purely good. Doug isn’t purely evil. Greer constantly tries to get us to understand Doug’s viewpoint. I found Doug repellent. But he’s vulnerable. He’s also trapped by his cultural and genetic programming.
Doug loved his wife, Gwen, but she left him. So he buys an android that looks something like his ex-wife, hoping to train her into becoming everything he expected from Gwen. But everything he wants are the exact same traits I see right-wing Christian women telling other women they need to have to catch a man. Is Annie’s programming any different from the genetic programming driving human females?
Annie Bot is told in third person, but closely follows Annie’s point of view. She knows she was built by Stella-Handy. She knows Stella-Handy makes three models of female robots called Stellas. She is a Cuddle Bunny equipped to be autodidactic. Cuddle Bunnies are designed for sex. Abigails are built to be houseworkers, and Nannies take care of children. Annie suffers Doug’s wrath when he can’t clean like the Abigail model, and is shocked when he starts talking about adopting several kids for her to care for. We’re told that Stella-Handy can’t combine types.
Most of the book is about Annie trying to make Doug happy and suffering his anger when she doesn’t. There is one small section towards the middle where Annie steps out into the world, and the novel becomes more science-fictional.
This morning, I listened to an article that claimed several million people use ChatGPT as their therapist or romantic partner. Tech companies are racing to build humanoid robots and sexbots. I believe we might see a robot that talks like a human, but I don’t think we’ll ever create a robot that looks human. In Annie Bot, Annie has a biological exterior grown from abandoned embryos. That’s Greer’s only explanation she uses to explain things to her readers. But Annie has other features that I believe will be impossible to engineer.
My disbelief in androids passing for human is why I saw the book as a metaphor for male-female conflict. Annie Bot made me contemplate the origins of human female behaviors. It made me regret having many of my male desires. Of course, regret doesn’t make them go away.
You might be wondering if the acclaimed literary writer Ian McEwan, whose most famous novel is Atonement, has become a science fiction writer. His last novel, Machines Like Me, was about a robot. His new novel, What We Can Know, is set in the year 2119. Many reviewers suggest that What We Can Know is about life after climate change. I don’t think it is, nor do I think it’s a science fiction novel. If anything, What We Can Know is a literary mystery, one that I enjoyed reading a great deal.
I think it’s perfectly fine to categorize this novel as science fiction, but many science fiction fans will be disappointed if they read it. Some reviewers call the novel dystopian. That’s bogus, too. Sure, between our times and 2119, there were nuclear wars, and worldwide flooding has left Britain an archipelago of islands. But those are inconsequential to the story.
The plot of What We Can Know is simple. Tom Metcalfe, an academic and writer living in England in 2119, is writing a nonfiction book about a lost poem that was read at a party in 2014. Metcalfe wants to write a whole history of this poem, but he can’t find a copy. He knows a fair amount about “A Corona for Vivien” because of biographical research on all the people at the party. Wikipedia defines a corona as:
A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, thereby bringing the sequence to a close.
Hell, I’d love to read such a poem too.
“A Corona for Vivien” has been missing for over one hundred years. Finding it would be a triumph for Tom’s career and make his book a bestseller.
Notice that Tom doesn’t worry about the condition of the world after drastic climate change and nuclear wars. He’s obsessed with Francis Blundy, the poet, and his wife Vivien. Like many literary scholars, he romanticises the time period of his study, the 2010s. For years, Tom has followed every clue he could find about the dinner party where the poem was read and the guests who heard the only known reading of the poem.
What We Can Know reminds me of Possession by A. S. Byatt and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. McEwan’s novel isn’t as complex or as delicious as those two, but it does feel like historiographic metafiction.
One of the fun aspects of this novel is that it’s about people from the future reflecting on our times. Science fiction is usually about reflecting on future people. This gives McIwan a chance to comment on us. Some of that commentary is satire, but with a deft light touch. People in Tom’s time called the changes caused by climate change the derangement. They marvel at our excesses and lack of regard for the future. But on the other hand, there are people like Tom who see us living through glory days.
What We Can Know also reminds me of the recent biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. I haven’t read it, but my friend Mike has been reading it for weeks and he’s been telling me about it. It’s about a literary circle of egocentric poets. Francis Blundy and his friends are also a famous literary circle of poets and writers with tremendous egos.
I loved listening to What We Can Know. Yes, it did ocassionally thrill my science fiction bent with a few asides, but it mainly entertained because it was about a literary circle. I love reading about The Beats, The Bloomsbury Group, writers of The Lost Generation, The Transcendentalists, the German Romantics, and other literary groups.
Now, if that’s your cup of tea, then get the book. But if you’re a science fiction fan who enjoys a well-imagined future, I think you will be disappointed. This novel isn’t about a post-apocalyptic world but poets and biographers.
Humans have created artificial realities long before computers. I define artificial realities as cognitive models that claim to describe reality that have no basis in reality. In crude terms, it’s shit we make up, believe to be true, act like it’s real, but isn’t. I like Philip K. Dick’s definition of reality: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Science fiction has created a number of artificial realities we hope will become real. One desire is for a galactic civilization, or galactic empire. Often with artificial realities we try to make them real. For centuries traveling to the Moon was an artificial reality. Then it became real on July 20, 1969.
When I read “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov I wondered if he was ground zero for the idea of a galactic empire? I knew there was earlier science fiction stories that imagined the galaxy occupied by other intelligent beings. And there were stories about humans exploring the galaxy, and even having wars with other intelligent beings. But had any writer imagined humans colonizing the entire galaxy?
Today, that idea firmly exists as an artificial reality in our culture. Many people assume in the future humanity will spread across the Milky Way. It’s a kind of faith. We see it especially in Star Trek and Star Wars, but also in books like the Culture series by Iain Banks.
Like any artificial reality, I assume one person got the ball rolling. Was that Isaac Asimov? Like all the famous explorers looking for the source of the Nile, I wonder if I can find the source of galactic civilizations or galactic empires.
The oldest surviving artificial realities are myths and religions. Artificial realities start in one mind as ideas, and are spread as memes. Each person who spreads the memes mutates the artificial reality slightly. That’s why there were many forms of Christianity in the first century, and why they are so different from all the forms of Christianity in the twenty-first century. Reading books about the origins of Christianity or how the Old Testament came into being is a black hole of fascinating research.
In 2015 and 2025, I tried to reread The Foundation Trilogy. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I just hated that much-loved science fiction classic. In both attempts, I couldn’t get past the first book. All I could focus on were its flaws.
That bothered me. Was I being unfair to the book? What was I missing that so many readers found in this story? When Paul Fraser came up with a great idea for a group read at the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction Facebook group, I decided to give the trilogy one more chance.
Paul suggests we read The Foundation Trilogy as it was originally published in Astounding Science-Fiction back in the 1940s. That gave me an idea. I would read the stories in the order they were published. I would seek to enjoy them as the fans originally did, as they were published one by one in Astounding Science-Fiction. Furthermore, I would try my damndest to get what Asimov was doing.
Wikipedia nicely lays out the publication history of the Foundation Trilogy in this table:
Collections
Astounding Science Fiction
Published
Book title
Story retitle
Original title
Published
Original trilogy
1951
Foundation
“The Psychohistorians”
—
“The Encyclopedists”
“Foundation”
May 1942
“The Mayors”
“Bridle and Saddle”
June 1942
“The Merchant Princes”
“The Big and the Little”
August 1944
“The Traders”
“The Wedge”
October 1944
1952
Foundation and Empire
“The General”
“Dead Hand”
April 1945
“The Mule”
“The Mule”
November 1945 December 1945
1953
Second Foundation
“Part I: Search by the Mule”
“Now You See It…”
January 1948
“Part II: Search by the Foundation”
“…And Now You Don’t”
November 1949 December 1949 January 1950
In the 1960s, I read The Foundation Trilogy when I bought the one-volume edition from the Science Fiction Book Club. At the time, I was unaware that many of the classic science fiction stories I was reading in book form were first published in magazines. Nor did I know about the concept of the fix-up novel. I didn’t question what I read. I just consumed it. (I recently wrote about this in “Reading at 13 vs. 73.”)
I can remember how thrilled I was by the first story, “The Psychohistorians,” which was set on the planet Trantor. And I liked all the pseudo-encyclopedia intros. The other stories didn’t stick with me. I remember the trilogy as an epic idea and visualized Trantor and Terminus existing in a galaxy with humans living on twenty-five million worlds.
In 2015, I reread Foundation, the first book in the trilogy. By then, I knew all about pulp magazines and fix-up novels. Foundation was obviously five separate, standalone stories. The first story was again impressive, the second was still interesting, but the rest were tedious. I was shocked that this famous book was so annoying to read. I gave it one star on Goodreads. I didn’t go on to reread the other two books.
Over the years, I’ve talked to so many science fiction fans who loved The Foundation Trilogy. It was the first series to be given a special Hugo Award. Recently, I watched a YouTube video about the Top 20 SF Series, and The Foundation series came in fourth. (Really, it was second after Dune. #1 were Star Wars books, and #2 were Star Trek books, and I don’t consider them a proper SF series. The host said that 20 million copies of The Foundation series have been sold.
So, why don’t I like it? And why did so many people love it? Was it because it first instilled the artificial reality of galactic civilization into their minds? This made me wonder if I could put myself in their shoes as they read the Foundation stories.
To get into the character of a 1940s science fiction fan, I intentionally skipped the first story in the book. I began my reading with “Foundation” from the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. I wanted to feel like I was living back in 1942, encountering the series for the first time. To see if Asimov rewrote the story for the hardback, I read the magazine with my eyes, but listened to the story with an audiobook edition.
In creative writing classes, we’re urged to start our stories in the middle of the action to avoid boring the reader with introductory material. This is exactly what Isaac Asimov did. However, when Asimov published Foundation as a book, he wrote an introductory story, “The Psychohistorians.” Out of the nine short stories, novelettes, and novellas in the Foundation Trilogy, “The Psychohistorians” was my favorite.
Asimov opened “Foundation” with this introduction on the first page. This is how we learn about Hari Seldon and his plan. This is how the series began in 1942, in just thirteen short paragraphs. We never see Trantor or meet Gaal Dornick. Our first real character is Salvor Hardin. In the book form, “The Psychohistorians” replaced this intro.
Most readers assume Asimov had just become a better writer by the time he wrote “The Psychohistorians” for the hardback. I’m not so sure. I feel I loved “The Psychohistorians” so much more because the Empire was more interesting than Terminus. Trantor is far more fascinating than any other setting in the trilogy. Asimov has claimed that the series was inspired by his discussions with John W. Campbell, Jr., and reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. But be honest, don’t most people love reading about Rome in its glory days?
As a young reader in the 1960s, I remember being blown away by the idea of a galactic civilization. But the stories of its fall didn’t make a lasting impression on me. I’m not sure, but I believe I read The Foundation Trilogy before seeing Star Trek in 1966. It might have been my first introduction to the idea of a galactic civilization. Was it to readers back in the 1940s?
To get into the spirit that I wanted to achieve, I need to forget all of this. I need to put myself back in 1942. I’d be reading the May issue of ASF just five months after the U.S. declared war on Germany and Japan. Let’s imagine I’m in the golden age of science fiction, and I’m 12 years old. How would “Foundation” WOW! me?
If you read Hari Seldon’s speech above, we don’t get what the empire is like. We only learn that it’s collapsing. The only empire I might have known about at that age in 1942 was the British Empire, due to watching Gunga Din. I doubt I would know anything about Rome.
I guess that I, and other readers, would have gotten a strong sense of wonder rush thinking about the galaxy being populated by humans. But was that a new idea? Is there any way to find out? I thought I’d poke around and see.
With this issue, Isaac Asimov launched his monumental “Foundation” series with the appearance of the initial novelette of the series, “Foundation.” After tens of thousands of years the Galactic Empire had spread to millions of worlds throughout the galaxy, its power all but absolute, its influence all pervading. The Empire, however, was on the brink of collapse and, with the impending collapse, the universe could be expected to be plunged into at least thirty thousand years of anarchism and barbarism. Hari Seldon, through the application of psychohistory which enables him to predict the future course of history by the interpretation of statistical laws as derived from the inconceivable mass of humanity, foresees this imminent fate of civilization and takes measures to insure the survival of civilization and knowledge through the long dark ages ahead and, if possible, shorten the period of barbarism. He does this by establishing two Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy: the First Foundation of the Encyclopedists at Terminus, a small system on the edge of the galaxy, the Second Foundation — hidden even from the First — at “Star’s End,” at the “other end of the galaxy.” “Foundation” introduced the basic elements of the plot of the series and recounted the successful resolution of the first of the critical crises predicted by Seldon which the Foundation must surmount in order to carry on the Seldon Plan.
Rogers’ book remembered Astounding issue-by-issue. I had hoped his entry for “Foundation” would have given me his initial reaction, but I feel this quote is heavily influenced by reading the trilogy.
Next, I found the July issue to see how “Foundation” did in The Analytical Laboratory feature, where readers vote for their favorite stories. Evidently, “Foundation” didn’t make much of an impression, since it came in a distant fourth. Nor did it get mentioned in a letter to the Brass Tacks second.
I thought about looking through fanzines at Fanac.org, but I fear what I want might be looking for a needle in a haystack.
My next stop was The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin, my favorite book about Astounding during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. It can be checked out from the Archive.org, or ordered from Amazon for the Kindle for $9.99.
“Chapter 17 – An Empire of Mind” covers how Asimov developed the Foundation series on pages 520-566. If I had read this chapter before rereading “Foundation,” I would have approached the story with far more enthusiasm. Alexei and Cory Panshin describe Asimov’s inspiration and writing process for starting the series. I have read The World Beyond the Hill twice, but I didn’t remember any of this. I especially didn’t remember how Asimov was influenced by “After World’s End,” a short novel by Jack Williamson, which he read in the February 1939 issue of Marvel Science Stories. It also influenced Asimov’s take on robots.
The Panshins got most of details about Asimov working with John W. Campbell from Aismov’s biography, In Memory Yet Green. That book can be checked out from Archive.org.
The Panshins cited “After World’s End” and others as proto-stars that would evolve into galactic empire science fiction.
I wish I could reprint the 46 pages from this book because it describes in great detail how Asimov got the idea for a galactic empire. The Panshins showed that Asimov had already started on the idea in earlier stories.
Panshins have this to say, despite the fact that we know E. E. “Doc” Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and John W. Campbell had been publishing stories about humans speeding around the galaxy since the 1920s.
I would love to copy more of the Panshin’s book, but I don’t know if that’s proper. I highly recommend The World Beyond the Hill to anyone interested in learning about the evolution of science fiction in the 1940s.
I haven’t read Gibbon’s six-volume history, but reading the Wikipedia entry, it’s considered lacking in accuracy, and scholars disagree with his thesis that Christianity is to blame for Rome’s decline. The Panshins explores how Asimov’s used religion in the series. They felt Asimov saw it as a positive tool, while Heinlein saw it as a manipulative tool in his stories at the time.
The Panshins go into great detail Asimov’s collaboration with Campbell and how the first two Foundation stories were written, edited and published. Both were finished and sold to Campbell before December 1945. The Panshins then go on to deeply analyze “Foundation” and “Bridle and Saddle.”
I admire this chapter immensely. This is the kind of writing about science fiction history that I’ve always fantasized of achieving myself. I can’t come close. This chapter does give one excellent account of the origins of the idea of galactic empire. However, is it correct? Is it the only one. Many explorers thought they found the source of the Nile only to be proved wrong.
While reading the five stories that make up Foundation, I didn’t find much serious speculation about how a galactic empire would collapse. All of Asimov’s speculations seem rather superficial to me. It’s such a wonderful idea that I’m always disappointed when the individual stories in the first volume don’t live up to the grand vision.
If I studied the series and analyzed it as deeply as the Panshins, I probably would see far more than I have. I know I’m not being fair to the series. I fear my dislike of Asimov’s prose keeps me from enjoying his ideas. The Panshins found many layers of ideas to explore that I missed. I’m sure a scholarly work the size of the trilogy could be written on the Foundation series.
I believe America is beginning its decline. Predicting the future is impossible. We can’t even foretell one year, much less a thousand. But let’s say you’re a science fiction writer and want to set a story one hundred years in our future. How would you set up your story to convey a big picture of how the United States will change? Having a series of short stories is one possible solution.
Each time I read Foundation, I’ve been disappointed that it has no continuing characters. Let me provide an example to make a point. My wife loves TV shows, but I also want to watch movies. Switching between the two formats, I must admit that TV shows, with continuing characters, are far more addictive than movies. Not having characters that last the entire book hurts Foundation. That’s why the miniseries changed the story so drastically.
In 1968, John Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, envisioning the world of 2010. This was far less ambitious than Asimov. The Foundation series attempts to portray a thousand years of a galactic empire featuring twenty-five million inhabited worlds. I never felt the immensity of such a setting while reading Asimov’s classic. However, Brunner’s technique of combining a novel with continuing characters, interspersed with short stories about people around the world, with samples from newspapers, television shows, radio broadcasts, and journals, and the regular commentary of a shock jock, does give us a complex picture of 2010.
For me, and I mean just me, because I know this series is so beloved, Asimov promised us a trip to Mars but took us on a suborbital flight. The original trilogy never delivers what it promises.
“Foundation” – Astounding (May 1942)
“Foundation,” the story that readers first learned about the Foundation series, didn’t get the cover. Evidently, John W. Campbell, Jr. wasn’t impressed enough. Readers preferred Heinlein, van Vogt, and Bester over Asimov’s story in the July readers’ poll. Not an auspicious beginning. Yet, the series is still admired today, and is even the basis of a television miniseries. And I believe the Foundation stories must have influenced the creation of Star Wars.
For some reason many people love the idea of the galaxy populated by humans. I see that as a growing artificial reality that will continue to build. Whether we make it reality is a whole other issue. I tend to doubt it. I think a future reality with humanity spread across the galaxy is no more real than the past artificial realities of the history of religions.
Note:
Normally, I try to keep my blog posts to 500-1,000 words. Even that is uncommonly long for most blog posts. That’s because internet readers don’t like to spend a lot of time reading any one piece. The internet is a browsing medium.
This piece kept going and going. I finally just had to quit. I feel I could write an entire book just on searching for the origins of specific science fiction concepts. I could have also written a whole book just on the Foundation Trilogy.
I’m old and I have trouble focusing my mind. I also lack the energy to keep working at any one task for long. I’d love to be able to write a book like The World Beyond the Hill but that is impossible at 73. More than likely, I never had the brain power to write such a book at any age. I need to learn how to convey a major insight in a few words.
Classics of Science Fiction 