Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

His name was Gaal Domick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

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This is a series of short stories starting off a novels series that comprises seven novels by Isaac Asimov and then three additional novels by David Brin. The stories take place in a “long empire” that has lasted some 10,000 plaus years but seems to be dying now. The first story, which was written last, discusses the ways in which the empire itself has sought to silence any analytic mention of the entropy of the empire itself and we watch as an academic who has […]

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

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I really liked this book, in the way that I always enjoy thoughtful science fiction. Every once in a while, I enjoy a book designed solely to make you grapple with a question, and think, “what if?” The focus here isn’t on Asimov’s characters (though it DOES have actual characters in it, unlike the work of some 1950s sf authors). It’s actually impossible for this to be a character-centric book due the premise. Instead, the arc is on the Foundation itself, on tracing the decline […]

Every successful society is alike in that they die the slow death of excess and comfort.

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Isaac Asimov was a ludicrously prolific author from the Golden Age of science fiction. He, along with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, has reached pantheonic levels of influence and esteem, and the Foundation series is perhaps his most cherished and well-read work. He ended up tying all his major works into a shared universe centered around this series, so it can be said that you can’t understand Asimov’s writing without first reading this book. And I thought it was okay. To be sure, there […]



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