Foundation and Empire

As was to be expected, the plot has thickened in the second book in Asimov's Foundation series. The Foundation is very successful, but an unexpected adversary, The Mule, turns up, and threatens to overthrow the Foundation. Exciting things unfold.

As Krin pointed out in her comment on my post about Foundation, the way technology is handled in the books is interesting (or off-putting, depending on how you take it), from a retro-futuristic perspective. It's all about the "atomics" - all the cool advanced tech developed by the Foundation is atomic powered. Miniaturization is key - it's what makes the Foundation's tech way better than that of its opponents. And computers basically don't exist. It's an interesting window into a time when information was scarce, and even authors like Asimov didn't imagine a future in which technology would bring about an information-abundant world like ours is today. The plot of Foundation and Empire occurs when the Galactic Empire is in the last stages of its collapse, and people just don't know what is happening on the other side of the galaxy. I found it hard to comprehend; that people aren't able to just go and look that stuff up. A novel written today, even if it didn't allow for hyperspace communication, would have the traders (who can cross the galaxy in weeks with a series of hyperspace jumps) carrying CDs full of data about what's going on around the wider galaxy, which would then get bought and cheerfully uploaded to local planetary editions of wikipedia.

But, it was written in 1952, and Foundation is a look at the future as envisioned then. In other aspects, it still holds up, and it's interesting to see echoes of other science fiction in here - certainly, I can see some of its influence in Iain Banks - the space-opera-ness, and the wide whole-of-galaxy unfolding-history feel of the story. There are a surprising number of people and place names I recognise from the Star Wars series (plus the whole "Galactic Empire" thing (oh, and Trantor, the city-planet, basically identical to Coruscant)).