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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.
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.