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james_davis_nicollFoundation: Stars End
(Do you think I need a possessive in there?)
Spoilers
The Mule has fallen but the Foundation has acquired an unhealthy interest in and paranoia about the Second Foundation; the paranoia is made worse when evidence of the Second Foundation's machinations turns up. At about this point the story is hijacked by plucky teenager Arkady Darell, Bayta's granddaughter. Arkardy's father is one of the people paranoid about the Second Foundation and as part of the effort against the Second Foundation, he sends his elderly researcher friend Homir Munn off to Kalgan (now a vacation world/autocracy). She of course stows away.
Two notes: Arkady is endearing in a rabbit bounding across a mine field sort of way. Munn for some reason I envision as an elderly John Inman and the sort of person one could trust a woman with without needing to fear in any way he would attempt to seduce her. Also the sort of academic who may never have encountered a woman at all before.
To his credit Munn's main reason for being upset with Arkady is not because she's just scotched his plan to pick up affordably priced Kalganian cabana boys but because Kalgan is currently run by a nutter named Lord Stettin and is not what one could call one hundred percent safe for a young woman (or anyone who pissed Stettin off sufficiently). Stettin fancies himself the Mule reincarnated and as luck would have it Stettin can see a way Munn can help him; Munn, being an expert on the Mule, can help Stettin behave as the Mule would.
There's one bit of Mulish behavior Stettin settles on on his own. The Mule conquered Terminus so Stettin plans to do it as well.
Stettin has a plan for (14-year-old? 15-year-old?) Arkady. He fancies for his next empress. His current mistress Lady Callia is not keen on this at all and she helps Arkady to escape from Stettin by sending Arkady to the nearest spaceport with almost enough money to get off planet. This intricate plan hits a road bump when Stettin has his security forces do a sweep of the space port but happily kindly farmer Preem Palver and his wife from Trantor allow her to pose as their niece and accompany them back to their now unimportant little world (because this is a golden age story and because the Palvers have a use in mind for her, she is not sold to sex slavers along the way).
I liked the perky announcement about how anyone making a run for it at the space port would be gunned down on the stop. The law may be brutal on Kalgan but at least it is cheerful. Also corrupt; the farmers buy their way past an Lieutenant with a small bribe.
Lady Callia is famously stupid and reminds everyone of this whenever she can. She doesn't actually do anything that is particularly bubble-headed. It's true her plan to get Arkady away from Stettin seems to be on the order of pointing Arkady at the front door and calling her a cab but I will note that it did work.
[Oh, yes, Lord Stettin's lofty status may not extend to having a dedicated doorman. When Munn and Arkady show up, it's Callia who shows them in]
From time to time we get to listen in on Second Foundationers fret about the situation. Their grand plan is for the First Foundation to conquer the galaxy and then for the psychics of the Second Foundation to take the whole thing over. The direct approach will not work because sadly in this era people are too unevolved to react well to the idea of a shadowy cabal of mind-controlling telepaths ruling over the inferior masses.
It's a bit unfortunate one of the actors playing a Second Foundationer delivers his lines in a manner suitable for Lord Palpatine plotting to use the Death Star on an unwanted orphanage. I think we're supposed to sympathize with their plan to rule the ha ha ha galaxy but whenever the Second Foundation discusses something it sounds like a meeting of the Guild of Malign Intent.
Once on Trantor, Arkady begins to get the sense that she's being manipulated but she's [pick one: not quite bright enough/having her mind messed with by the telepaths she is surrounded by] and she does not quite work out who is doing it. She does have a sudden and completely not suspicious at all insight that the galaxy is circular and does not really have an other end; if you go to the other end of a circle, you end up where you began. She realizes that this might mean the Second Foundation is back on Terminus.
On an unrelated note, there was evidence from the Mule dicking around with people's minds removed some vital spark. Just thought I'd mention it.
You'd think it would be hard for a teenager to make her way from Trantor to Terminus given that we know she is broke but she has surprisingly little trouble convincing Palver to load his space ship up with produce and head to the warzone to engage in a little war profiteering. She goes along for the ride.
Stettin is under the impression that he is winning right up to the moment his evil vizier informs him the war is lost, that Stettin might want to flee as Lady Callia has (in a ship of unusual design that inexplicably did not had in blinking lights on the side) and that the evil vizier, having vizzed for a number of idiots like Stettin, is going to try his own hand at ruling.
Once reunited with her father and his confederates, Arkady explains what she realizes. He reveals he has invented a painomatic telepathic broadcaster that affects only telepaths. This is used to uncover a mole in Mr. Darell's organization and to torture the details of the Second Foundation out of the man. It is short work to run out all the Second Foundations and put them to death and for all we know the process involved the legal system at some point.
In final scene with theGuild of Malign Intent Second Foundation, we learn this was all the set up, the fifty telepaths who died on Terminus were a necessary sacrifice and the whole thing has been to convince the Foundation the Second Foundation was not a threat. The Second Foundation was never on Terminus but rather at the opposite end of the galaxy in social terms as they stood in Seldon's day, on Trantor.
Apparently only the elites of the Foundation will think they killed the Second Foundation. The masses will think the Second Foundation never existed at all. I wonder what the masses thought those fifty people were killed for, if anything? But perhaps the trials, if there were trials, were not public.
I bet it really sucked to be a non-Second Foundation telepath on Terminus during the purge.
Arkady seems to have inherited her grandmother's Boy Magnet disadvantage. Good thing the Second Foundationers seem to be immune to it. I don't find the insanely dangerous things she decides to do all that hard to believe and I don't think we need assume the Second Foundation had anything to do with her failure to think things through (except the scene where she almost but not quite works out Lady Callia and the Palvers are Second Foundation; I think I could feel Palver's mental fingers twitching on the trigger of his mind crusher part way through that conversation). She did seem rather calm about the prospect of being forced to marry Stettin but her grandmother may have given her tips on how to manage Lotharios and would-be rapists, given how often Bayta encountered them.
I know I've said it before but holy crap is space flight cheap in the Foundation universe. A prosperous farmer not only can own his own space craft but hauling vegetables out to the periphery is profitable.
(Do you think I need a possessive in there?)
Spoilers
The Mule has fallen but the Foundation has acquired an unhealthy interest in and paranoia about the Second Foundation; the paranoia is made worse when evidence of the Second Foundation's machinations turns up. At about this point the story is hijacked by plucky teenager Arkady Darell, Bayta's granddaughter. Arkardy's father is one of the people paranoid about the Second Foundation and as part of the effort against the Second Foundation, he sends his elderly researcher friend Homir Munn off to Kalgan (now a vacation world/autocracy). She of course stows away.
Two notes: Arkady is endearing in a rabbit bounding across a mine field sort of way. Munn for some reason I envision as an elderly John Inman and the sort of person one could trust a woman with without needing to fear in any way he would attempt to seduce her. Also the sort of academic who may never have encountered a woman at all before.
To his credit Munn's main reason for being upset with Arkady is not because she's just scotched his plan to pick up affordably priced Kalganian cabana boys but because Kalgan is currently run by a nutter named Lord Stettin and is not what one could call one hundred percent safe for a young woman (or anyone who pissed Stettin off sufficiently). Stettin fancies himself the Mule reincarnated and as luck would have it Stettin can see a way Munn can help him; Munn, being an expert on the Mule, can help Stettin behave as the Mule would.
There's one bit of Mulish behavior Stettin settles on on his own. The Mule conquered Terminus so Stettin plans to do it as well.
Stettin has a plan for (14-year-old? 15-year-old?) Arkady. He fancies for his next empress. His current mistress Lady Callia is not keen on this at all and she helps Arkady to escape from Stettin by sending Arkady to the nearest spaceport with almost enough money to get off planet. This intricate plan hits a road bump when Stettin has his security forces do a sweep of the space port but happily kindly farmer Preem Palver and his wife from Trantor allow her to pose as their niece and accompany them back to their now unimportant little world (because this is a golden age story and because the Palvers have a use in mind for her, she is not sold to sex slavers along the way).
I liked the perky announcement about how anyone making a run for it at the space port would be gunned down on the stop. The law may be brutal on Kalgan but at least it is cheerful. Also corrupt; the farmers buy their way past an Lieutenant with a small bribe.
Lady Callia is famously stupid and reminds everyone of this whenever she can. She doesn't actually do anything that is particularly bubble-headed. It's true her plan to get Arkady away from Stettin seems to be on the order of pointing Arkady at the front door and calling her a cab but I will note that it did work.
[Oh, yes, Lord Stettin's lofty status may not extend to having a dedicated doorman. When Munn and Arkady show up, it's Callia who shows them in]
From time to time we get to listen in on Second Foundationers fret about the situation. Their grand plan is for the First Foundation to conquer the galaxy and then for the psychics of the Second Foundation to take the whole thing over. The direct approach will not work because sadly in this era people are too unevolved to react well to the idea of a shadowy cabal of mind-controlling telepaths ruling over the inferior masses.
It's a bit unfortunate one of the actors playing a Second Foundationer delivers his lines in a manner suitable for Lord Palpatine plotting to use the Death Star on an unwanted orphanage. I think we're supposed to sympathize with their plan to rule the ha ha ha galaxy but whenever the Second Foundation discusses something it sounds like a meeting of the Guild of Malign Intent.
Once on Trantor, Arkady begins to get the sense that she's being manipulated but she's [pick one: not quite bright enough/having her mind messed with by the telepaths she is surrounded by] and she does not quite work out who is doing it. She does have a sudden and completely not suspicious at all insight that the galaxy is circular and does not really have an other end; if you go to the other end of a circle, you end up where you began. She realizes that this might mean the Second Foundation is back on Terminus.
On an unrelated note, there was evidence from the Mule dicking around with people's minds removed some vital spark. Just thought I'd mention it.
You'd think it would be hard for a teenager to make her way from Trantor to Terminus given that we know she is broke but she has surprisingly little trouble convincing Palver to load his space ship up with produce and head to the warzone to engage in a little war profiteering. She goes along for the ride.
Stettin is under the impression that he is winning right up to the moment his evil vizier informs him the war is lost, that Stettin might want to flee as Lady Callia has (in a ship of unusual design that inexplicably did not had in blinking lights on the side) and that the evil vizier, having vizzed for a number of idiots like Stettin, is going to try his own hand at ruling.
Once reunited with her father and his confederates, Arkady explains what she realizes. He reveals he has invented a painomatic telepathic broadcaster that affects only telepaths. This is used to uncover a mole in Mr. Darell's organization and to torture the details of the Second Foundation out of the man. It is short work to run out all the Second Foundations and put them to death and for all we know the process involved the legal system at some point.
In final scene with the
Apparently only the elites of the Foundation will think they killed the Second Foundation. The masses will think the Second Foundation never existed at all. I wonder what the masses thought those fifty people were killed for, if anything? But perhaps the trials, if there were trials, were not public.
I bet it really sucked to be a non-Second Foundation telepath on Terminus during the purge.
Arkady seems to have inherited her grandmother's Boy Magnet disadvantage. Good thing the Second Foundationers seem to be immune to it. I don't find the insanely dangerous things she decides to do all that hard to believe and I don't think we need assume the Second Foundation had anything to do with her failure to think things through (except the scene where she almost but not quite works out Lady Callia and the Palvers are Second Foundation; I think I could feel Palver's mental fingers twitching on the trigger of his mind crusher part way through that conversation). She did seem rather calm about the prospect of being forced to marry Stettin but her grandmother may have given her tips on how to manage Lotharios and would-be rapists, given how often Bayta encountered them.
I know I've said it before but holy crap is space flight cheap in the Foundation universe. A prosperous farmer not only can own his own space craft but hauling vegetables out to the periphery is profitable.
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no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 05:30 am (UTC)I never thought there were any. The Mule seemed a freak mutant and the Second Foundationers seemed developed alongside psychohistory. Which doesn't make much *sense* but hey, that's what the Robot linkup for was...
(Or maybe the macro of super macroeconomics somehow pays off for creating telepaths... no, still not very sensible. I guess "being the Foundation of psychology and mental science" is the real link.)
I forget if the painmachine was clearly what it was and definitely not a signal that told the telepaths to start acting out their tortured parts. Which would be convoluted but safer than giving a painful telepath detector to your ornery herd.
I know I've said it before but holy crap is space flight cheap in the Foundation universe. A prosperous farmer not only can own his own space craft but hauling vegetables out to the periphery is profitable.
Except the farmer was a key Second Foundation agent, right?
Next step is "but it had to be plausible" and the reply is "plausible to a 14 year old Arkady Darrell".
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 05:34 am (UTC)And anyone she spoke to.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 05:55 am (UTC)The phrase I wanted here was "latchkey empire".
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 06:07 am (UTC)(Cosmic Computer & Space Viking is basically Foundation, right?)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 01:04 pm (UTC)murderingdestroying the personhood of those who might potentially oppose his plans. No, Trask shows up with a fleet and announces that you can either give him what he wants, or he'll kill 15-20 million people and then take what he wants from the survivors. He's all about direct violence, but he at least generally offers the option of surrender.Trask also...
Date: 2012-10-15 01:57 pm (UTC)He might, some of the time, be trying to advance a good _cause_ -- civilization -- but he's entirely aware he's not himself civilized and that the things he does are horrible.
In a lot of ways Space Viking is proto-Drake; obviously flawed human in a (sequence of) horrible situation(s) who keeps doing horrible things out of a mixture of social norms and not seeing what else to do, all presented with completely flat moral affect from the narrative.
-- Graydon
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 02:08 pm (UTC)The spacers used the robots to dominate earth, the robots essentially end spacer civilisation but end their own widespread existence by being responsible for the robot hating empire,
The empire is then dominated by the seldon plan and the foundation despite seldon and the foundation be despised and screwed over by the empire, then the foundation and seldon plan (after many centuries of imposing their will upon neighbouring systems and kingdoms through tricks and underhanded means) is in turn demolished by The Mule, who in turn gets defeated by the second foundation, who in turn gets defeated by galaxia, which is ultimately nothing more than the means to the end of the Daneel Plan to fulfil the zeroth law of robotics and end history communist stylee.
There's no cyclical history, the hubris of any one man thinking that they were capable of being able to shape destiny for the entire human race is ultimately shown to be folly for all but Daneel (who is very far from human even before he becomes a solarian), and anyone banking on manifest destiny is liable to meet someone who's far far better at manifesting their destiny than them (though the superior manifestor is also screwed in the long run as well when another guy with an even larger stick comes along).
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 02:22 pm (UTC)Which is not to say that the Robots cycle didn't have its own gangster puppetmasters, even before Asimov pasted it onto the Foundation. But it's got much more vivid characters, human and robotic, and a better-developed sense of humor, maybe because it doesn't spend all of its time looking at the 50,000-foot view.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 04:13 pm (UTC)(Asimov's general maturing, as a writer and a person, probably contributed at least as much to his leaving Foundation behind --- The End Of Eternity could be seen as his debunking the very idea of a Second Foundation type project, taking Eternity to be a perfected Second Foundation --- and when he returned to the idea, well, the Second Foundation was certainly not any more an ideal.)
I'm also sorry Asimov never felt up to the challenge of writing a story from a Gaian's viewpoint; I think that would've been something.
Perfectly cromulent
Date: 2012-10-15 01:34 pm (UTC)At this point in the story I assume that the Second Foundation has taken control of Arkady's itinerary.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 03:00 pm (UTC)I'm pretty sure no actor would be able to pull off the task of making the Second Foundation come across as sympathetic...
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Date: 2012-10-15 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 03:49 pm (UTC)kidnappedrecruited by the Second Foundation rather than being allowed to run around having wacky adventures with crest cats.no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 02:14 am (UTC)Like I said, peddler-man from Oklahoma! But it's not really that much of a stretch. The energy of escape is just the local acceleration times the distance from the center of the gravitating mass. Plug that in for Earth and divide by 3600,000 to get units in terms of kilowatt-hours per kilogram. That's about 17 kilowatt hours per kilogram, and apparently the hyperspace jump, whatever else it is, is not terribly energetic. So we're talking maybe 18 kilowatt-hours per kilogram hauled, and if you believe in Electricity Too Cheap To Meter (a staple of that era), you're talking maybe two cents per kilogram, or twenty cents per kilogram, at any rate something in that ballpark.
Is hauling vegetables an economic proposition under those constraints? Not only yes, but heck yes!. So all you need are nuclear power plants for ships but not for planet-side, along with some sort of reactionless drive. Asimov never mentioned rockets during the entire Foundation saga, insofar as I recall . . .
So this can be made to work, for various values of "work". Given the back-story, I can see nuclear power being used only for spaceflight. The reactionless drive that turns electricity into kinetic energy? Well, say it's handy for spaceships (I trust you'll grant me that.) But what else can you use a reactionless drive for on a planet? Not much, I'm guessing is the plausible answer. So this is definitely doable. Not plausible, but doable.
So here's an honest question: given a reactionless drive, and assuming some sort of unavoidable overhead for complexity and efficiency, what good is a reactionless on Earth? I'm guessing this one is sorta like ftl in that outside of space travel, it's useful applications are generally small to nonexistant.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 02:31 am (UTC)Supposedly the barbs with space flight lacked atomic power.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 03:22 am (UTC)Also and as usual, atomic power for spaceflight != atomic power for Everyday Use. It's quite possible - even plausible - to separate the two. Nuclear power for a town of 5,000 doesn't seem likely for example, but a town of 5,000 whose electrical needs are met by a nuclear sub in the harbor seems doable.
Note also that barbs with spaceflight is an ancient and honorable trope, whatever the practical realities. I've got no problems with the willing suspension of disbelief for van Vogt's Empire of the Atom stories, for example. Show me an Asimov story with two such implausibilities set in the Foundationverse and I'll grant you the stretch. But off-hand I just don't see it.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 05:06 am (UTC)It does. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter)
I lean towards "in Foundation, gravity control somehow makes getting into space almost trivial and it does so without violating conservation of energy as violating conservation of energy is known to have given Asimov the heebie jeebies."
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 09:30 am (UTC)If energy isn't Too Cheap To Meter in those settings the entire production shuts down in milliseconds.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 09:36 am (UTC)And while reactionless drives are a just dandy for space flight, they don't seem to be much of an advantage on the ground. Probably because ground is cheap to push against.
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Date: 2012-10-16 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 01:24 pm (UTC)Which, if it works the same in any reference frame, violates conservation of energy. Why build nuclear powerplants when you can build perpetual motion machines of the first kind?
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 04:02 pm (UTC)Oh, and number three, this is just a retcon to a series of stories written by someone barely out of his teens to justify not calling it fantasy. Not something to be taken seriously. real space travel is pretty amazingly hard, and not at all what you would have been lead to expect from the classic sf of yesteryear.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 04:11 pm (UTC)(happily the handwavium ftl seems to have them arrive headed generally towards the destination world)
Military ships used expensive high efficiency rockets that work well everywhere.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 04:22 pm (UTC)I would just like to point out at this moment that I have been berated on ssp from going on about how you cannot ignore the sun's mass in discussions of interplanetary travel.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-16 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-17 02:54 am (UTC)Now I'm reminded that Tom Swift Junior had a spaceship that operated by what seemed to be tractor beams grabbing onto distant planets and pulling...
no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 05:44 am (UTC)There are data centers in New Jersey that can charge insanely high rates because of proximity to the NYSE servers, because that means slightly lower latencies between getting data and executing trades. If FTL travel implies FTL communication, that could get just a bit disrupted, in ways that could have significant follow-on ramifications.
Especially if FTL communication implies negative-latency communication.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-20 11:24 pm (UTC)Also, as others have noted, an actual reactionless drive (rather than one that's working because positive kinetic energy is balanced by negative kinetic energy) is, yes, a perpetual motion machine of the first kind: it makes energy out of nothing. Nothing at all. Its cycle goes around, comes back to the exact same point, but you have more energy than you started with. This is probably _why_ power and electricity are Too Cheap To Meter, and also, given a couple other assumptions from this series, it's likely that that's been forgotten in the depths of time and they just know how to make the Energy Boxes, and not how to open them up and rejigger the insides to get an unbalanced momentum out of it.
--Dave, cats are probably involved somehow
no subject
Date: 2012-10-20 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-20 10:49 pm (UTC)Well, and a small mental poke too.
-->I don't find the insanely dangerous things she decides to do all that hard to believe
I believe your calibration on these things may be a wee bit off?
--Dave