[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Asimov novel but a Benford novel using Asimov's basic ideas and backdrop.
Necessarily my approach has harkened back to the older storytelling styles
which prevailed in the SF of Isaac's days. I have never responded favorably to
the recent razoring of literature by crirics the tribes of struc-
turalists, post-modernists, deconsrructionists. To many SF writers, 'post-
finally hostile to such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical
ground.
Deconstructionism's stress on contradictory or self-contained internal dif-
ferences in texts, rather than their link to reality, often merely leads to
Page 199
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
lit-
erature seen as empty word games.
SF novels give us worlds which are not to be taken
I
as metaphors but as real. We are asked to participate in wrenchingly strange
events, not merely watch them for clues to what they're really talk-
ing about. (Ummm, if this stands for that, then the other stuff must stand
/or... Not a way to gather narrative momentum. ) The Mars and stars and
digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to
say: Life isn't like this, it is this. Journeys can go to fresh places, not
merely return us to ourselves.
Even so, I've indulged myself a bit in the satirical scenes depicting an
academia going off the rails, but I feel Isaac would have approved of my
targets. Readers thinking I've gone overboard in depicting the view that
science does not deal with objective truths, but instead is a battleground of
power politics where "naive realism" meets relativist worldviews, should look
into The Golem by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. This book attempts to
portray scientists as no more the holders of objective knowledge than are
lawyers or travel agents.
and stories such as Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll. "
But in the past few decades we have focused more on the wonders of
information, of transformations at least partly internal, not external. The
Internet, virtual reality, computer simulations all these loom large in our
visions of our futures. This novel attempts to combine these two themes, with
several conspicuous scenes about travel, and a larger background motif on com-
puters.
As James Gunn noted, the Foundation series is a saga. Its method lies in a
repeated pattern: Out of the solution of each problem grows the next problem
to be solved. This became, of course, a considerable constraint on later
novels. Asimov seemed to be saying that life was a series of problems to be
solved, but life itself could never be solved. As Gunn remarked, con-
sidering that the combined and integrated Foundation and Robot saga now covers
sixteen books, perhaps a directory of it all is called for, named, per-
haps, Encyclopedia Galactica?
Galactic empires became a mainstay frame for science fiction. Poul An-
derson's Flandry novels and Gordon R. Dickson (in his Dorsai series) par-
ticularly studied the sociopolitical structure of such vast complexes, for a
powerful, autocratic imperial system demands great organizational skill
the primary asset of the Romans themselves.
calendar, Pebble in the Sky, which has references to hundreds of thou-
sands of years of expansion into space, occurs about 900 G. E. In Foundation
atomic energy is 50, 000 years old. The robot Daneel is 20, 000 years old in
Prelude to Foundation and in Forward the Foundation. How far away in our
future do the Sun and Spaceship emblem rule? Perhaps 40, 000
years? No one date reconciles every detail.
Not that it truly matters. I know the dangers of writing a long series over
decades. I took twenty-five years to wrestle with the six volumes of my
Galactic Center series. Undoubtedly there are contradictions I missed in
dating and other details, even though I laid it all out in a timeline,
published in the last volume. The aliens of that series are not those
implicated in this novel, but there are clearly conceptual links.
Science fiction speaks of the future, but to the present. The grand is- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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Asimov novel but a Benford novel using Asimov's basic ideas and backdrop.
Necessarily my approach has harkened back to the older storytelling styles
which prevailed in the SF of Isaac's days. I have never responded favorably to
the recent razoring of literature by crirics the tribes of struc-
turalists, post-modernists, deconsrructionists. To many SF writers, 'post-
finally hostile to such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical
ground.
Deconstructionism's stress on contradictory or self-contained internal dif-
ferences in texts, rather than their link to reality, often merely leads to
Page 199
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
lit-
erature seen as empty word games.
SF novels give us worlds which are not to be taken
I
as metaphors but as real. We are asked to participate in wrenchingly strange
events, not merely watch them for clues to what they're really talk-
ing about. (Ummm, if this stands for that, then the other stuff must stand
/or... Not a way to gather narrative momentum. ) The Mars and stars and
digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to
say: Life isn't like this, it is this. Journeys can go to fresh places, not
merely return us to ourselves.
Even so, I've indulged myself a bit in the satirical scenes depicting an
academia going off the rails, but I feel Isaac would have approved of my
targets. Readers thinking I've gone overboard in depicting the view that
science does not deal with objective truths, but instead is a battleground of
power politics where "naive realism" meets relativist worldviews, should look
into The Golem by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. This book attempts to
portray scientists as no more the holders of objective knowledge than are
lawyers or travel agents.
and stories such as Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll. "
But in the past few decades we have focused more on the wonders of
information, of transformations at least partly internal, not external. The
Internet, virtual reality, computer simulations all these loom large in our
visions of our futures. This novel attempts to combine these two themes, with
several conspicuous scenes about travel, and a larger background motif on com-
puters.
As James Gunn noted, the Foundation series is a saga. Its method lies in a
repeated pattern: Out of the solution of each problem grows the next problem
to be solved. This became, of course, a considerable constraint on later
novels. Asimov seemed to be saying that life was a series of problems to be
solved, but life itself could never be solved. As Gunn remarked, con-
sidering that the combined and integrated Foundation and Robot saga now covers
sixteen books, perhaps a directory of it all is called for, named, per-
haps, Encyclopedia Galactica?
Galactic empires became a mainstay frame for science fiction. Poul An-
derson's Flandry novels and Gordon R. Dickson (in his Dorsai series) par-
ticularly studied the sociopolitical structure of such vast complexes, for a
powerful, autocratic imperial system demands great organizational skill
the primary asset of the Romans themselves.
calendar, Pebble in the Sky, which has references to hundreds of thou-
sands of years of expansion into space, occurs about 900 G. E. In Foundation
atomic energy is 50, 000 years old. The robot Daneel is 20, 000 years old in
Prelude to Foundation and in Forward the Foundation. How far away in our
future do the Sun and Spaceship emblem rule? Perhaps 40, 000
years? No one date reconciles every detail.
Not that it truly matters. I know the dangers of writing a long series over
decades. I took twenty-five years to wrestle with the six volumes of my
Galactic Center series. Undoubtedly there are contradictions I missed in
dating and other details, even though I laid it all out in a timeline,
published in the last volume. The aliens of that series are not those
implicated in this novel, but there are clearly conceptual links.
Science fiction speaks of the future, but to the present. The grand is- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]