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I hope woke grok is okay (thelemmy.club)
submitted 22 hours ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[–] 8 points 20 hours ago (5 children)

The books are awesome. The concept of being able to (more or less) predict the future and trying to shepherd humanity through various crises that will alter the timeline and trying to rescue us from our own nature is a fun one.

The nature of the story doesn't lend itself well to adaptation in a visual medium but the show is decent (it does deviate some from the books and mess around with the timeline some to make it work better for TV). Can't speak to the movie.

The Foundation Trilogy also was published 1951-1953 and you see a lot of ideas that became mainstay scifi tropes in their early form. For example, it's easy to see the influence Foundation had on Dune.

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  • [–] 5 points 20 hours ago* (4 children)

    I only read the first one and didn't really like it. From what I remember (not much) it's just full of "plot twists" where some smoking guy randomly appears and tell the protagonists "haha, I predicted you'd do this" and then "hah, I predicted you'd know that I'd predict your next move and you'd do something different!".

    I don't know, I like the setup and the beginning but after a while it seemed silly to me.

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  • [–] 8 points 19 hours ago (1 child)

    It's kinda competency porn. The heroes solve problems by being clever and predicting their opponents moves. The generational aspect, where it follows multiple characters over long periods of time, is also interesting. I really like the series, and now that I think of it it's probably no coincidence that I also like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

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  • [–] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    I think it's a touch more nuanced than that but yes the plot does follow Hari Seldon's creation of a school of thought and study called psychohistory.

    The main plot is that humanity would be plunged into 30,000 years of dark ages full of bad shit but Seldon believes following his plan it can be shortened to only 1,000 years of real bad times for the schmucks born then.

    Like you said, one of the themes the books talk about is the paradox of knowing the future and if you can or can't change it. If you know the future and do something to change it to be different from what you predicted - does that mean you did or did not actually know the future?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago

    Personally I didn't care for the series specifically because I thought the concept was really goddamn stupid, but finished it anyways simply because I thought it was well done despite the premise grating on me from beginning to end.

    Masochistic tendencies aside, I think that's in effect a pretty solid endorsement?

    Read the first if nothing else just to see if you buy the premise.

    As long as you remember that Asimov straight up hated women when he wrote the first novel, got engaged and realized women are slightly more than baby making machines and slowly improved from there.

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