OK, this actually calls for a correction on the facts. Asimov didn't combine his robot stories with his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but in space" stories until the 1980s. And even by the '50s, his robot stories were very unsubtly about how thoughtless use of technology leads to social and moral decay. In The Caves of Steel, sparrows are exotic animals you have to go to the zoo to see. The Earth's petroleum supply is completely depleted, and the subway has to be greased with a bioengineered strain of yeast. There are ration books for going to the movies. Not only are robots taking human jobs, but a conspiracy is deliberately stoking fears about robots taking human jobs in order to foment unrest. In The Naked Sun, the colony world of Solaria is a eugenicist society where one of the murder suspects happily admits that they've used robots to reinvent the slave-owning culture of Sparta.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Also the Galactic Empire as an anti-scientific hellhole with secret police surveillance.

Witness good old Hari Seldon unveiling his plans on Trantor:

It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tones and voices.

[Seldon] put his fingers on a certain spot on his desk and a small section of the wall behind him slid aside. Only his own fingers could have done so, since only his particular print-pattern could have activated the scanner beneath.

[…]

“You will find several microfilms inside,” said Seldon. “Take the one marked with the letter T.”

Gaal did so and waited while Seldon fixed it within the projector and handed the young man a pair of eyepieces. Gaal adjusted them, and watched the film unroll before his eyes.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They traded coal interstellarly, which always made me lol. Think a lot of the people who are this hype about the older sf simply have not read them again in ages. As blakestacey says, the golden age is 12.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The people who made the Foundation TV show faced the challenge, not just of adapting a story that repeatedly jumps forward from one generation to the next, but of adapting a series where an actual character doesn't show up until the second book.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I enjoyed what I have seen from the series so far tbh. Doesnt follow the books religiously l, but still a good bit of sf imho. They seem to understand scale at least.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 36 minutes ago

I like the series (I thought the second season was stronger than the first, but the first was fine). Jared Harris is a good Hari Seldon. He plays a man that you feel could be kind, but circumstances have forced him into being manipulative and just a bit vengeful, and our friend Hari is rather good at that.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What with all the rapid innovation surrounding small modular reactors, I still firmly believe that I will be able to bolt a nuclear reactor to a DeLorean in my garage

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 23 hours ago

Sadly we talked about those here, and how unlikely they are to going to work, either in the future or ever. Also, think it was a fusion reactor.

load more comments (3 replies)