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I'll move on if I sit tight
Tonight in a move of true insult to injury, our dishwasher which we never use tried to flood the kitchen. Many towels were sacrificed. Many floorboards were mopped. We shut off the water under the sink, pulled the plug for good measure, and bailed out the inside of the dishwasher, but suspect we will need to call for a plumber no matter what. For consolation, we watched the first four episodes of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–). I wish Patricia McKillip were alive so I could tell her how formatively she imprinted me for millennially long games.
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Thank you, and horrified solidarity.
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I'm also happy to hear you're watching Foundation, and I hope you enjoy it!
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Ah, I've got to watch more of Foundation; I've only seen 1.1.
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That feels much less like cheating!
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It doesn't seem to have flooded further today! Small reprieves!
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Thank you! I hope yours holds out. Ours was theoretically new as the entire kitchen was done over right before we moved in, but our bathroom cabinet was also hung right before we moved in and then several months later it began to fall off, so.
I'm also happy to hear you're watching Foundation, and I hope you enjoy it!
Very much so far! For obvious reasons we are in a bit of a Jared Harris lacuna at the moment, but I am greatly enjoying Salvor and the fracturing trinity of the Cleons and in fact the worldbuilding generally, which is explaining a lot less of itself than I was braced for it to. The production design has committed to a lived-in future and the plot isn't structured as a puzzle-box for the viewer which means it can float a whole bunch of unanswered questions without feeling like it's baiting me for the next shocking twist. I like the way the show is playing with the concept of personal and communal (and temporal) scale with both psychohistory and the clone-dynasty, as well as the narration which is coming from several centuries in the future at least. I am also actively fond of Gaal, which is nice since she looks about to reenter the story. The relation to Asimov is actually broad-strokes closer than I expected and it's fun trying to figure out which fragment on the slant of a Seldon crisis will surface next.
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Right? It's not cricket!
Ah, I've got to watch more of Foundation; I've only seen 1.1.
Four episodes into Season 1, would highly recommend! See sketchy notes above to
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Yeah, I never actually read the books (except maybe one of the later ones, long ago) but I did read a lot of other SF of the era, and I think despite having from all accounts very little directly to do with the plot of the books, the show has done a genuinely excellent job of capturing the Vibes of Golden Age and New Wave SF, to an extent that I've been repeatedly surprised to discover - from interviews and such - that various things I assumed were directly from the books actually aren't, like the entire Cleon clone dynasty, which absolutely feels like something that an SF writer in the 60s would've come up with! But, as you say, it's not *just* running on Vibes; I also got a fairly lived-in feel from the world and enjoyed the different glimpses of places as far apart as Gaal's algae-farming world vs academia under a totalitarian empire.
I'm thoroughly glad you're enjoying it, and look forward to talking about it further!
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Agreed! I did read Asimov's original Foundation trilogy in middle or high school—
and enjoyed the different glimpses of places as far apart as Gaal's algae-farming world vs academia under a totalitarian empire.
I assume their budget is astronomical, but they appear to be spending it on the kinds of things I value in my space opera. I loved the introduction of the Vault in the very first episode: if there is a weird immemorial artifact with physically repellent powers on the edge of your settlement, of course each generation of local kids is going to treat it like a permanent dare.
I'm thoroughly glad you're enjoying it, and look forward to talking about it further!
Will report back when we have seen more!
[edit] Hooray, a glitching ghost of Jared Harris presumably transferred from his actual body via some storage process of the knife that was used to kill him and the small device we saw Raych remove from behind his ear at the scene of the death was the cliffhanger of the fifth episode, which was otherwise enjoyably Gaal- and Salvor-centric.
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I didn't realize Patricia McKillip had a story that stretched millennia!
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Yes! Kitchen appendicitis. Although apparently the appendix has been rehabilitated in recent decades.
I didn't realize Patricia McKillip had a story that stretched millennia!
The Riddle-Master trilogy: The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1977), and Harpist in the Wind (1979). I believe I was in middle rather than elementary school when I read the books for the first time. I have lost track of how many times I have read them since. Their imprint on me is probably visible from the next galaxy over, but they also fitted into shapes of things that I had in my head already. I did have the chance to tell her; we met at ICFA in 2008 when I was part of a poetry reading with her husband, David Lunde. But I am still furious that she's dead.
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We were surprised.
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Okay, that's unusual.
Also I was away and couldn't be blamed and I had been longing for a new dishwasher, so it might have been much worse.
I am glad it took itself out so helpfully.
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I assume their budget is astronomical, but they appear to be spending it on the kinds of things I value in my space opera. I loved the introduction of the Vault in the very first episode: if there is a weird immemorial artifact with physically repellent powers on the edge of your settlement, of course each generation of local kids is going to treat it like a permanent dare.
I concur entirely, both in the general human nature of the way the local kids who have grown up with it react to the thing, and the perfect space opera feeling of the Vault that hovers inscrutably at the top of a local hill and zaps anyone who gets near it. Classic SF with a modern demographic twist. I'm here for it.
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And so far I was right about what actually happened between him and Raych, though the part where Salvor appears to be flashbacking from both Gaal and Raych has slightly blown the till then credible theory of Salvor being linked to an imprint of Hari in the Vault! We just watched one episode tonight, so there are many more cliffhangers and
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One of my regrets about not having seen the first half of season one is that I missed the start of his arc. I could tell as soon as he walked into the part of the show I was watching that I was going to like him. (Along those lines, I look forward to you meeting one of my season two favorites as well ...)
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I shall endeavor to keep reporting back and I look forward to finding out who they are!
[edit] A+ DEEP SPACE GHOST SHIP.
I feel I must have encountered the device of an out-of-control jump drive constantly losing itself among the stars until its crew die out and the ship itself becomes a legend—frankly I'm surprised it never came up on Babylon 5—but it was excellently realized in the episode we just watched, although I personally would not have popped my helmet off so soon in a seven-hundred-year-old atmosphere of deep-freeze-arrested decay. Top-notch space horror. Am a little skeptical about the part of Phara's plan that involves regaining enough control of the ship to redirect it even to suicidally chosen coordinates, since its original crew demonstrably never managed to get it to stay anywhere safe long enough to abandon ship. And this doesn't even touch on how lucky Hari is to be a technoghost if he's going to tell Gaal about eight things in a row that make her (justifiably) want to knock his block off. I called the precognition as far back as the Starbridge and am now overinvested in figuring out whether it is connected to the dominant religion of Synnax being known as the Seer's Church: was it founded by someone like Gaal, who could feel the future? Her close-up moment-to-moment visions, Hari trying to model the long arc of time with math. I do like this show.
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I can't believe this show didn't get a look-in at the Hugos its first year. It might not have won, but as a short-form dramatic presentation of science fiction, it's spectacular. The math might as well be magic, but come on, that's Clarke's Law. And like the best space opera, it just seems to go for whatever it wants on a conceptual level and trust the rest of the story to hang together behind it on the strength of its cool (although, in this case, also its people: not one of Asimov's strengths and visibly paying off here. Of course Hari couldn't let himself be martyred at his trial: he had to stay alive to play the long game, not just set it in motion; he had to see for himself that his math was right. Watching the Cleons flounder in their individuality while deforming themselves to the template of a man four hundred years dead is heartbreaking, but that doesn't absolve them of breaking the galaxy). So we have deep space ghost ships and desert pilgrimage maze-walks and ghosts in multiple kinds of machine and far-future imperial decadence and people saying "fuck." It isn't hard sf and it doesn't care about being so. I admire as well as enjoy that.
(Forgot to mention: still absurdly attached to Lewis. In the science fiction I grew up on, this really did get people killed all the time. I feel like it was sometime in college when my favorite characters stopped being all so doomed.)
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I am legitimately surprised I've heard so little about this show, in awards or in fandom. It's flown completely under the radar. I think I might vaguely have heard of it, but unlike - say - Expanse, which I definitely knew about even if it took me a while to try it, I might never have watched it or thought about it, if not for Orion starting it.
But it's such fun! It doesn't even quite feel like a throwback to the sci-fi shows of the early 2000s so much as it feels like its own thing, a Golden Age sci-fi tropefest with a modern updated sensibility. Actually I'd say the thing it feels most like to me is SF anime, in that general mix of wildly OTT SF tropes combined with epic scope and a modern feel, as well as willingness to commit to even the wildest premise and go as far as it needs to go. It also feels a bit like the one-off space movies that we don't really get much anymore because everything is tied to a franchise now. But mostly it's just its own thing, an affectionate but strongly worded love letter to the SF I grew up on.
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There's a lot less of it on AO3 than I would have expected, and while I understand there are a lot of Cleons to go around, I would not have expected them to dominate the writing scene over the rest of the main cast, especially Gaal or Hari! There's a lot of time in the first season already. No one's writing the interstitial stuff?
But mostly it's just its own thing, an affectionate but strongly worded love letter to the SF I grew up on.
It's the passion project of its showrunner:
"The Foundation books were given to me by my father on my thirteenth birthday. My mother
was also a fan. As I gained a foothold as a screenwriter, my father started pestering me to one day adapt Foundation. And although both my parents passed away before the show was realized, it's a special thing to know that I get to work on a series that was held in such high regard by my family."
It doesn't feel like anime to me; it feels like science fiction I have read. It's just that the last science fiction I saw that felt closest was Jupiter Ascending (2015), and that got commercially slammed.
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I know, it's truly astonishing to me that there's so little fic and the vast majority of it is focused on the Cleons. (And not just that, it's mostly Cleon/OFC from what I saw when I was poking around.) People gonna like what they like! But it is really surprising to me that this show seems to have very little toehold in fanfic-writing fandom at all. As you say, there's so much scope for interstitial fic that it's really a shame no one seems to be writing it.
That being said, there are definitely a few things I want to write! Whether I'll get around to them, who knows, but I've had a few thoughts.
It's the passion project of its showrunner:
I am delighted to know this. ♥
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I can't believe no one has even poked at the sheer fucking space horror that so obviously took out the Invictus. It's bad enough when it just looks like the drive fritzed on its own and jaunted its crew around known space until they died effectively marooned on their own ship. Then we get the barricaded bridge and the interpretation of a mutiny and the captain who killed herself after writing in her own blood an ominous last message of EXO—"Outside the galaxy? You think they encountered something out there?"—and we are in full bore Event Horizon, last voyage of the Demeter territory. The who-knows-why-he-was-shot navigator still strapped into his cradle, the AI still jacked into his dead brain rifling it for coordinates as it jumps from nowhere to nowhere on its own. The reminder that the conscious and unaugmented human mind cannot bear very much exposure to folded space, so who knows what kind of number it did on the crew to survive inside the ship as long as they did. Every single part of this scenario is freaky af! Entire sci-fi horror movie's worth of a very bad place to be! And unless the show ever revisits the ship's past (at the moment we're cliffhanging on its present, although I am banking on the show not actually warping Salvor into the heart of a sun; dammit, Lewis, you did not actually have to resemble favorite minor characters from sf I grew up on, especially not when you were just starting to be less of a twerp), here it's just casually part of the long chain of history of which there's so much already that the calendar's into the 12,000's and that's just in Imperial years. It's a big universe. Lots of weirdness. Keep moving.
I don't think I understand why readerfic exists when second person has been a viable narrative voice for millennia.
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Edit:
dammit, Lewis, you did not actually have to resemble favorite minor characters from sf I grew up on, especially not when you were just starting to be less of a twerp
I know. :(((( He went out a hero, at least, but I didn't want him to go out at all!
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"You wished us home."
brb augh forever
Otherwise
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I was already expecting some kind of timeskip due to the nature of the show, but having everything jump forward 100 years was certainly a surprise!
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We were speculating that it might work as a kind of linked anthology following the structure of the original stories—a different crisis each season—but I had no expectation of most of the developments in the intervening decades, including the quite impressive latest nonsense from the Cleons. The continuity of Poly made both of us happy. Meanwhile I don't know whose id is driving the minor casting, but we are now two for two on dillweed Foundation Directors I would die for; this season is slightly cheating since I did have a prior liking for Oliver Chris ever since One Man, Two Guvnors, but I didn't know he was in the cast and therefore spent the entire first board meeting staring really hard at Sef Sermak. The pace of the second season is a lot more breakneck so far, but it has correctly recognized that there's almost no point in casting Jared Harris if you aren't going to emotionally rough him up.
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Jared Harris as a scruffy disaster this season pleased me enormously. Watching him diverge from both his previous self and Vault Hari is fascinating. I also thoroughly enjoyed the Hari-Gaal-Salvor Road Trip From Hell.
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I fully support this plan.
(I haven't seen as much of her other dad yet, but I love Constant and her riding bishop's claw and her relationship with Poly and I will be extremely unhappy if anything happens to any of them.)
Disaster Hari is a treasure. [edit]
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I can only agree with this. <3