Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 35

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for October 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some September books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, holiday mysteries, humorous mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, action thrillers, historical thrillers, revenge thrillers, noir, romantic suspense, police officers, amateur sleuths, FBI agents, CIA agents, reporters, assassins, human traffickers, vigilantes, serial killers, severed heads, Puritan witch hunters, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting journalists, crime-busting skeletons, murder and mayhem in London, Galveston, Silicon Valley, Massachusetts, Hong Kong, Colombia, at a science fiction convention and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Witchfinder’s Apprentice by Cora Buhlert:

Massachusetts in the Year of the Lord 1695: Matthew Goodson, eighteen years of age, is apprenticed to a team of experienced witchfinders, who travel from village to village and town to town to uncover witchcraft, examine the evidence, interrogate suspects and stamp out evil.

When a wave of mysterious illnesses and deaths hits the town of Redemption, the witchfinders are called in and quickly arrest a suspect, a teenaged girl named Grace Pankhurst.

Matthew has long been having his doubts about the witchfinders and the righteousness of their mission. The interrogation of Grace brings those doubts to a flashpoint. But is Grace truly innocent or has Matthew fallen under the spell of a comely witch?

This is a historical suspense story of 5500 words or approximately 20 print pages by two-time Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert.

Murder on a Girl’s Night Out by Beth Byers:

Vi is one of those women lucky enough to have good friends. In fact, Kate, Rita, and Lila are closer to Vi than her own sister. With children arriving and what feels like an endless cycle of trouble, their friendship has been pushed to it’s limit. It’s long past time to get together–just the girls.

Is it even surprising when things go sideways? Or when they find themselves looking over their shoulders? Or when they find, one again, that they’re stronger together?

 

1414° by Paul Bradley Carr:

The billionaire predators of Silicon Valley always get what they want.
Now someone is giving them what they deserve.

Journalist Lou McCarthy has spent her career exposing powerful predators in Silicon Valley. Her crusade has cost her everything: Her apartment, friends, relationships, and any hope of promotion. And for what? Readers don’t care, her boss and workmates pity her, and the billionaire bro-ciopaths she writes about continue to fail upwards.

But when two of her highest profile subjects are killed on the same night, their deaths staged as gruesome public suicides, Lou’s work is suddenly and violently thrust into the spotlight. Blamed for the deaths, fired from her job, and pursued by vengeful trolls who have already attacked her mother, Lou has only one chance of survival: To find the killer obsessed with her work, and stop them before anyone else dies.

Or perhaps not. Because the more Lou discovers about the ingenious killer’s past, and their methods, the more she becomes determined to help them succeed.

Tight-Lipped by Eric Carter:

THE MURDERS BEGIN SUDDENLY…
BUT THE SECRET HAS BEEN KEPT FOR YEARS.

Vigilante assassin Silence Jones is accustomed to hunting people who escaped justice. But nothing can prepare him for the depths of deceit he’s about to face.

People are being murdered across the United States, and law enforcement is powerless to stop it. The victims’ only connection: they’re all survivors of a military training disaster years earlier.

As Silence feverishly chases the killer around the country, he uncovers a sinister coverup and the dark forces willing to do anything to maintain the secret. If Silence is going to stop the slaughter, he’ll have to tear down a web of lies that powerful people have held in place for years.

The next standalone action thriller in the pulse-pounding new series. Enter the world of Silence Jones. Hold on tight…

Wake the Dead by Stacy Claflin and Nolon King:

There’s no cross like a double-cross. Except maybe a double-double-cross.

Assassin Brad Morris has finally been arrested for murder, but not for a murder he actually committed. Now he’s cooling his heels in jail — his lawyer seems to have forgotten him, and his boss might have betrayed him.

Just as he’s starting to lose hope, he gets a visit from the CIA. Agent June Bancroft has an offer for Brad: full immunity, if he’s willing to spy on his boss and fellow assassins for her. Worse, Bancroft wants his daughter Hadley’s help, too.

Brad agrees, but soon finds out how hard it is to answer to two bosses while pursuing an agenda of his own.

Can Brad keep his family safe while operating as both a CIA asset and an assassin? Or will his double life destroy everyone he loves?

No Bones About It by Rachel Ford:

He’s a skeleton who used to be a cop. I’m a Freak who used to be a detective. Together, we’re going to find the woman I love.

Technically, the PD hasn’t fired me yet. But when my girlfriend, the star witness in the biggest embezzlement case in a century, went missing, I stepped on some toes. And maybe busted a senior detective’s nose.

He had it coming. He’s hiding something. I’m going to find out what, and I’m going to find my fiancée. But I can’t do it alone.

In a world of magic and undead beings, Normies avoid Freaks like me like the plague. Our magic terrifies them.

But there’s one place I know I can turn to find the help I need: the undead. So here I am, trusting the fate of my career and the love of my life to the bony hands of a 150 year old undead investigator.

And that’s a recipe for disaster. No bones about it.

The Ghoul, the Bad and the Ugly by Lily Harper Hart:

Zombies in Casper Creek? Say it ain’t so. Unfortunately, it looks to be true … and Hannah Hickok and her motley crew of helpers have a mess on their hands.

As Cooper Wyatt struggles with the perfect way to propose, his girlfriend is buried in zombie lore … and seemingly having a good time digging up solutions.

The bodies are rising from two different cemeteries, one so old it hasn’t seen a new resident in thirty years. Why, though?

Needing help, Lindy suggests her brother David join the team. He’s a paranormal investigator, and he has an interesting set of skills. He also seems to be sparking with animal wrangler Tyler James, which has all the women in a tizzy in an effort to help him make the ultimate connection.
Love is in the air. Zombies are on the streets. Trouble is afoot.

It’s a normal day in Casper Creek, but the stakes are ratcheting up. Hannah’s magic is off the charts, but this time the monsters she’s facing are like nothing she’s ever seen.

Death may be stalking Hannah but she’s not afraid to stand her ground. Survival isn’t a given, but if she makes it through to the end, Cooper has a surprise for both of them.

Poisonous Paws by CeeCee James:

Murder can reach out and touch you when you least expect it.

The mysterious death of a town founder rocks the Thornberry Estate. Miss Janice is the main suspect and everyone is up at arms. How was she to know the truce she formed with her neighbor put the target squarely on her? Coupled with a strange box that shows up out of nowhere and filled with bizarre things beyond imagination, and strange footsteps at night has everyone anxious.

…then there’s the bit of the skeleton in the closet. Literally.

The book club group is determined to discover who the real culprit is, and who is sending them disturbing messages. Especially since no one is supposed to know the club exists.

Little do they know, that’s only the beginning of their problems.

If you like cozy mysteries with all the feels, good friendships, giggles and snorts, you’ll love this heartwarming series.

Murder at the Galvez by Kathleen Kaska:

Eighteen years after discovering the murdered body of her grandfather in the foyer of the historic Galvez Hotel, reporter Sydney Lockhart returns to Galveston, Texas to cover a story. Instead, she finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery.

Something fishy is going on in Galveston, Texas, and Sydney is smack dab in the middle of it when she checks into the historic Galvez Hotel, a place that stirs her most uncomfortable memories. She’s there to cover the controversial Pelican Island Development Project conference, but soon after her arrival, the conference is canceled, the keynote speaker is missing, and a body turns up in the truck of Sydney’s car. Next, Sydney’s hauled to the police station for questioning.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, just a few blocks from the hotel at her parents’ home, people are gathering, sparks are flying, another controversial event is in the planning, one that just might rival the Great Storm of 1900.

Sydney is helped and obstructed by her cousins, Ruth and Marcela, and Dixon, her beloved partner-in-solving-crime. But ultimately it’s up to Sydney, armed with wit and bravado (and Dixon’s .45), who must discover who killed the man in the trunk and why her father’s new friend is floating face-down in a fish tank with a bullet in his head. Her father’s odd behavior and the anonymous threatening notes delivered to her hotel room lead Sydney to suspect that her grandfather’s unsolved murder and the present murders might be connected.

Follow the Crumbs by Amanda M. Lee:

There’s a prominent threat on the block … and he might just be sharing Stormy Morgan’s roof.

She’s a new witch but she has a big problem … and it talks. Her new roommate Krankle may look cute but he’s a huge pain in her posterior. He’s also hiding something. Before she can focus on that, however, the unthinkable happens.

On the highway leading out of town, three vehicles are involved in an accident. One belongs to Harold Lautner, the former head of the senior center who went missing months before. He was presumed dead in a hunting accident, but now the truck he was driving at the time he fell off the face of the earth is front and center … and emergency crews say there’s nobody to save inside.

Hunter Ryan, Stormy’s boyfriend and a police officer in Shadow Hills, is chasing lead after lead but they’re going nowhere … and then things get worse.

A magical shadow, the type Stormy isn’t ready to fight, is taking over the town. The Winchester witches, who are eager to help, can’t offer much in the way of aid because their magic is being affected by the shadow. That leaves Stormy to solve things, and she has no idea how to do it.

Stormy is eager to learn but the curve is steep. Alone, she knows she will fail. That means her new friends have to pitch in and help … including Krankle.

Someone is lying. Someone is playing games. The answer to the question might be closer than it seems.

Stormy has a fight on her hands. Will she survive long enough to answer all the questions, or is she doomed to disappointment … and death?

The Last Days of Hong Kong by G.D. Penman:

Book 3 in the Witch of Empire series

In the aftermath of the war, Iona “Sully” Sullivan has lost everything; her job, her friends, her fiancé and even her magic. But when an old friend shows up on her doorstep, offering her the chance to undo one of her long litany of mistakes, there is still enough of the old Sully left to get her on the first boat to Hong Kong. A stranger in a strange land, Sully must navigate alien customs, werebear chefs, the blossoming criminal underworld, religious extremists, Mongol agents, vampire separatists, and every other freak, maniac or cosmic leftover with an iota of power as they all compete for a chance at the most valuable prize in all the world; a little sailor doll named Eugene, and the last wish on earth.

The Heist and Crimes of Shackleton Manor by Daniel J. Reeves:

Sitting fully clothed in his tepid shower and busily dwelling on his romantic misfortune, Seamus is not ready for much of anything. Above all, he is certainly not ready to find the severed, bloody head of an old industry magnate stuffed inside of his university backpack. Seamus has his vices, but a severed head enthusiast he is not.

Chuck, a new acquaintance of his, reacts with perplexing enthusiasm to this turn of events, and together they plunge into a twenty-five year old mystery of love and betrayal at the decadent Shackleton Manor. Will Seamus solve the crime, accidentally implicate himself in it, or simply drink himself to sleep whilst hiding in the basement?

Oy Vey, Maria! by Mark Reutlinger:

Rose Kaplan and her sidekick Ida are at it again. It’s the holiday of Purim, and almost everyone at the Julius and Rebecca Cohen Home for Jewish Seniors is in costume for the Purim play. All except one, who will instead have to be fitted for a shroud. Once again, “Mrs. K” and Ida are called upon to solve the puzzle of a mysterious death at the Home. Described by Chanticleer Book Reviews as “at times more Lucy and Ethel than Holmes and Watson, with a soupcon of Miss Jane Marple,” these geriatric amateur sleuths will keep you laughing, guessing, and maybe even learning a bissel Yiddish!

So We Lie by Willow Rose:

What do we do when the truth hurts too much?

Fresh out of the national academy – mother of two – FBI profiler Eva Rae Thomas is in over her head on her first assignment in multi-million-copy bestselling author Willow Rose’s breath-taking mystery.

When the mother of two, Arlene Wood, crashes her car against a tree at four in the morning, the case seems pretty straightforward.

But evidence found in the remains of the car soon raises the question of whether this was really an accident.

Shortly after, her husband is taken in and later convicted of having murdered his wife.

But many questions remain unanswered.

Why was Arlene driving in the middle of the night?
Why did she leave the house, her husband, and her sleeping children, get into her car, and drive away?
Was she meeting someone?

A friend?

A lover?

A killer?

Six years later, Special Agent Eva Rae Thomas is new on the job when she stumbles upon something that suddenly blows this case wide open.

But can she persuade anyone to reopen the case even when the husband has admitted that he is guilty?

And will she be able to do it in time before this killer strikes again?

My Emerald Jungle by Adler Stevens:

Having my daughter, Haley, and her old high school sweetheart, Steve, kidnapped is the right thing to do. If anybody deserves a second chance at romance, it’s those two. And there’s nothing like a frightening adventure to bring two people together.

But something terrible has happened. Haley and Steve never arrived on the secluded island near Puerto Rico. Instead, they’re somewhere in Colombia, in the jungle, being held by human traffickers.

I’m afraid for the safety of my lovely little girl, but I know Haley is in Steve’s very strong and capable hands.

Or is it the other way around?

Frame in Blood by Ed Teja:

It’s a messy, bloody, crime. It’s a proper crime.

A pimp and drug dealer is found tortured and shot. That makes for a messy scene, but not a striking crime. Discovering that someone is trying to make it seem that the prostitute who tortured him also killed him — that grabs Sherry Proper’s attention, makes it a proper crime.

Anytime a crime is textured, layered, and fascinating, it provides glimpses into the dark underbelly where people from all social strata, as well as their money, ambition, and greed can intersect. Sherry calls these Proper Crimes.

It’s a passion. A passion with only dark sides, and one that can take her up to her neck in danger and trouble in a heartbeat.

A Conventional Murder by Nathaniel Webb:

It’s a Daylight Savings Crime!

Kit Morrison just wants to enjoy her hometown sci-fi convention, but things keep getting in the way: con drama, annoying fans, murder… Sci-fi/fantasy author Nathaniel Webb takes on the cozy in his mystery debut, featuring a hilarious amateur sleuth and a tricky, twisty mystery worthy of the classics.

Art teacher, single mom, and geek girl Kit Morrison hasn’t been to her hometown sci-fi con in a decade. All she wants is to sell some art and catch up with old friends. But when a legendary fantasy author is murdered, Kit’s detective brother makes her his nerd sherpa. Kit’s happy to guide him through the weird world of con life—until he makes her favorite student his prime suspect. And then there are the threatening notes that keep appearing in her hotel room…

Kit will confront crazy fans, navigate major drama, wait for the elevator, learn about industrial laundry machines, and try her best to get a croissant—and with luck, prove her student’s innocence before the convention ends!

You’ll laugh—you’ll cheer—you’ll stay up late and fall asleep in a work meeting the next day. Come meet Kit, a sleuth like no other.

Fancast Spotlight: Light On Light Through

Even though I recently announced the new Semiprozine Spotlight series, I’m still featuring fanzines and fancasts, too.

And therefore, here is the next entry in the Fancast Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

Today, I’m pleased to feature Light On Light Through, a podcast run by Paul Levinson, who’s a science fiction author, singer/songwriter, media critic and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University.

Paul Levinson is clearly a very busy man, so I’m thrilled to welcome him to my blog today to talk about Light On Light Through.

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

I posted the first episode of Light On Light Through on 21 October 2006, a little over 15 years ago to the day. The topics of the podcast are everything I find interesting or important, ranging from the cars I drive to the science fiction series I watch on television. The format is usually me talking.  Sometimes I do interviews with editors, authors and actors, sometimes I post readings that I do of my science fiction stories and concerts of my music.  I started the podcast doing as many as two or three episodes a week.  As the years went by, I became so involved in other projects – finishing a novel, making a new recording – that the number of episodes of Light On Light Through were just three or four per year.  But during the lockdown due to the pandemic, I was spending much more time at home, and by the Summer of 2020 I was back to doing as many as 4 or 5 episodes a month.  The past few months, the early Fall of 2021, have brought such a cascade of great science fiction on the screen that I’m posting podcast reviews several times a week.  In just the past few days, I’ve watched and reviewed a new episode of the Foundation series, the first half of the new Dune movie, and the debut of a new series, Invasion.

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?

Just me.  I do all the taking and recording and posting links to the episodes all over the known and unknown universe.  That’s actually one of the things I really love about podcasting – I can do whatever I want with the podcast, whenever I want.  Podcasting is a great way to satisfy your creative impulses.

Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?

I love to talk.  That’s one of the reasons I became a professor.  But the advantage of podcasting is you can talk about whatever you want to talk about.  My first episode in 2006 was about the joys of driving my new hybrid Prius.  The second was a review of Battlestar Galactica. Then I had episodes that discussed why I like Trader Joe’s supermarkets and dislike Daylight Savings Time.  By the way, I also love to write – that’s why I became an author.  I review lots of science fiction on my blog.  These often are written springboards for my podcast episodes.

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

I upload MP3s of my episodes to Libsyn.  I’ve been with them from the very beginning of my podcast in 2006.  Yes, they do charge a monthly fee, but they have great statistics on number and places of downloads, and they have great distribution to social media and podcast apps all over the world.

The fan categories at the Hugos were there at the very beginning, but they are also the categories which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines, fancasts and other fan projects are important?

Fanzines and other fan projects are vitally important because they are the voice of the people – literally so in the case of podcasts.  Why, for example, should reviews of science fiction television series be only found in professional publications on the Internet, like Variety or The New York Times?  The beauty and utility of podcasting is that anyone can express their opinion for the world to hear.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online and fancasts have sprung up. What do you think the future of fan media looks like?

I think the future of fanzines and fancasts is very bright.  Podcasts have been bursting out all over the past few years. Listeners love their convenience and specific focus on subjects of interest.  I expect fan media to continue growing at an even faster pace.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Right now, I’m really focused on the Foundation series on Apple TV+ and the original Isaac Asimov stories and novels.  My favorite fancast about the importance of the Foundation narrative, and its relevance to our world today, is Joel McKinnon’s Seldon Crisis podcast.  My favorite fan writer review site is Cora Buhlert’s own blog, where she provides in-depth, spirited reviews of each episode, with a copy of Asimov’s novels close at hand.

Where can people find you?

Light On Light Through podcast: https://paullev.libsyn.com/
Paul Levinson’s Infinite Regress blog: https://paullevinson.blogspot.com/
YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/PaulLevinson
Amazon books: https://www.amazon.com/author/paullevinson
IMDb: https://www.imdb.me/paullevinson
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5wWMm7Q8SSRTvvIJ1GLiRY?si=EguRjFf-QoK-L3La03ohOA
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaulLev

Thank you, Paul, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Light On Light Through, cause it’s a great podcast.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast or a semiprozine and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Foundation encounters “Death and the Maiden”

Looks like I’m doing episode by episode reviews of Foundation – at least for now – so here is my take on episode 6. Reviews of previous episodes of Foundation as well as two actual Foundation stories may be found here.

For more Foundation discussion, check out the Star’s End and Seldon Crisis podcasts.

But before we get to this week’s episode of Foundation, I also want to point you to the other TV show of which I’m currently doing episode by episode reviews. Because my latest Raumpatrouille Orion (Space Patrol Orion) reviews are up at Galactic Journey. Here’s episode 2, “Planet Off Course” and episode 3 “Guardians of the Law”, which also happens to be an unofficial adaptation of an Isaac Asimov robot story.

Which brings us back to Foundation, one of the comparatively few official Asimov adaptations.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

After an episode of absence, the Emperors Three are back and get two of the three plot strands of the episode devoted to them. The IMO least interesting of those three plots involves Brother Day’s and Demerzel’s trip to the planet of the generic triple goddess religion. Okay, so we do get to see Lee Pace wearing nothing but a towel (always a plus) and Demerzel finally changes her clothes and hairstyle, but otherwise this whole subplot not only has nothing to do with the books, it also fails to move the story forward in any way. Plus, it undermines Demerzel/Daneel’s character.

Now I have stated before that I have a very low tolerance for religious content, whether real world or fictional religions, in science fiction. And the Brother Day segment is basically all about the internal religious squabbles and schisms of the generic triple goddess religion a.k.a. Luminism. Now I can accept that Luminism is apparently one of the Empire’s major religions with three trillion worshippers. And the Maiden, Mother, Crone trichotomy of Luminism nicely mirrors of Dawn, Day, Dusk trichotomy of the Emperors Three. Nonetheless, I still don’t give a damn about these people and the details of their beliefs.

As was mentioned in episode 4, the leader/high priestess of Luminism has died. Because it’s such a popular religion, this is a big deal, similar to the death of a pope. Usually, there is a designated successor to this high priestess, but this time there are two potential candidate, a white woman who is friendly inclined towards the Empire, and a black women, who is an upstart and not friendly inclined towards the Empire at all. In fact, the black priestess believes that the Emperors Three are not really human, because their souls cannot be reincarnated, as the Luminist religion demands. And no, I can’t help but notice that here we have yet another antagonist who’s played by an actress of colour. This pattern is becoming really notable.

If theological debates involving real world religions make my eyes glaze over, theological debates of fictional religions are even worse. Because to be honest, I don’t give a damn if the Luminists believe that the Emperors Three share one soul or have none or fourteen souls. Personally, I’d say that clones or not, the Cleons are human and if you believe that humans have souls, then the Cleons must have one. But it honestly doesn’t matter to anybody except the Luminists. And since Luminism is a fictional religion, though inspired by several real world religions, that means that no one cares, because there are no Luminists.

Brother Day pretty much feels about the Luminists as I do. He doesn’t care what they believe and assumes that throwing money at the problem – by promising the Luminists to build a desalination plant to solve the lack of salt-free drinking water on the habitable moon that is the centre of their religion and location of their temple. This would seem to be a perfectly logical thing to do, since it solves a real world problem that these people have, namely a lack of clean water, rather than some spiritual mumbo jumbo about souls and reincarnation. However, religion is not logical and so the heretical rival priestess (T’Nia Miller) gives a rousing speech, denouncing the Emperors Three by claiming that they are not developing and evolving, because their souls are not reincarnated. And since she’s an excellent speaker, the Luminists are completely convinced and drop to their knees.

Personally, I was reminded of Fritz Leiber’s 1959 Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, where Fafhrd finds religion and briefly brings the obscure cult of Issek with the Jug (not to be confused with Issek in the Jug or any other number of Isseks) to prominence due to being a trained skald and excellent storyteller. “Lean Times in Lankhmar” (which I encourage everybody to read, because it’s hilarious) was supposedly inspired by Fritz Leiber’s brief time as an Episcopal priest, where his acting experience made him an extremely popular preacher, even though the vocation was lacking. The heretical priestess is Fafhrd or Leiber in this episode. She’s simply a better speaker than her rival. Too bad she also has it in for the Emperors Three for reasons unknown – unless she really believes every word she’s saying, which is of course possible. After all, Fafhrd did take Issek seriously as well.

The problem with the whole “Brother Day and the religious schism” segment is not only that it is boring (though visually gorgeous), but also that – unlike “Lean Times in Lankhmar” – the show takes Luminism absolutely seriously, as if it were a real religion with real worshippers, even though it is no more real than Leiber’s cult of Issek with the Jug (not to be confused with Issek in the Jug or any other number of Isseks).

And then there is Demerzel, who is revealed not only to be an adherent of Luminism, but who also drops to her knees when the rival priestess holds her speech. Now Demerzel/Daneel does show an interest in religion in the books, since Daneel and Elijah Baley have several philosophical discussions about biblical matters in The Caves of Steel. However, there is never any indication that Daneel views the biblical stories he discusses with Elijah as anything other than interesting philosophical questions. After all, Elijah uses the biblical story of Jesus and the adulteress to illustrate that following the letter of the law does not equal justice. But then, the biblical discussions in The Caves of Steel draw on examples taken from an actual religion, with which many/most readers will be familiar. Besides, the whole episode is funny in a way that Foundation is not, because Daneel has no idea what adultery is or what stoning is for that matter and keeps asking Elijah to explain, who is very embarassed by the whole thing. Come to think of it, I would love to see Laura Birn as Daneel in the Elijah Bailey/R. Daneel Olivaw buddy cop show.

Besides, Demerzel believing in Luminism of all religions also makes little sense in this context, because if even the cloned Emperors Three don’t have a sould according to the black priestess, then Demerzel who is a robot most definitely doesn’t have a soul. Not that this is a problem for me, but it clearly is one for the Luminists. So why would anybody, least of all the most advanced robot in the galaxy, follow a religion that treats them as not only less than human but potentially evil? Never mind that Daneel/Demerzel is old enough that he/she was already around when the moon broke into three parts, which initiated the religion, and knows there is nothing divine about that. Honestly, this makes no sense. Though I did love the way that Demerzel lied to Brother Day’s face that her purpose is to serve the Emperors and the Empire, because we know that her purpose is much bigger than that.

Camestros Felapton enjoyed the “Brother Day and the theological debate” plotline rather more than I did, but then he has a higher tolerance for theological debates than I do. Besides, Camestros agrees that the whole Luminism subplot doesn’t move the overall plot forward by a single inch.

While Brother Day is away, dealing with annoying religions, Brother Dusk and Brother Dawn hold the fort in Trantor. Brother Dawn is still fascinated by the female gardener who chanced to witness his failed suicide attempt in episode 4 and seeks her out to thank her for her herbal pain relief tips.

Meanwhile, Brother Dusk has taken it upon himself to make Brother Dawn into a man – quite literally. So he first takes Brother Dawn hunting for what looks like little pterodactyls in the Emperors’ private hunting preserve. Personally, I was reminded of the accidental pterodactyl cameo in Citizen Kane. I love the blue hunting coats BTW, though they don’t look exactly practical.

The pterodactyl creatures are sneaky and blend into the foliage, so they are not easy to shoot. However, Brother Dawn turns out to be remarkably adept at shooting them, much more adept than Brother Dusk. And so Brother Dawn shoots seven pterodacytls on his first day out, whereas Brother Dusk never managed more than three in one day. However, Brother Dawn is terrified of Brother Dusk – just as the current Brother Day was terrified of him, when he was Brother Dawn – and so he instructs his attendant to throw four of the pterodactyl things away, so he will not break Brother Dusk’s record. However, one of Brother Dusk’s attendants finds the discarded pterodactyl corpses, so Brother Dawn’s secret is out.

After the hunt, the quest to make a man of Brother Dawn continues in the Imperial harem (yes, there is such a thing. I’m sure John W. Campbell and Kay Tarrant would be shocked and Asimov pleased). The Imperial harem contains young women (apparently, all Cleons are assumed to be straight) from all over the Empire, who will have their memories wiped after their time with the Emperors Three to avoid any tell-all memoirs. Meanwhile, Conan, who has a harem himself in his time as King of Aquilonia, wonders where the fun is, if the ladies forget what happened during their time spent with him.

Brother Dusk encourages Brother Dawn to pick a woman. Brother Dawn picks one who reminds him of the young gardener and takes her to his chambers, but won’t do anything with her. “I’ll tell them you did fine”, he tells her and remarks that since she’ll have her memories wiped, she won’t remember anything different either. However, the woman doesn’t have her memories wiped at once and tells Brother Dusk exactly what happened, namely nothing.

The next day, Brother Dawn has the young gardener called to his chambers (once he realises that he can do that) to show her what the garden looks like from above. The garden scenes were shot somewhere in Bavaria, which is why the logo of the German film support fund is in the credits.  Brother Dawn entices the young gardener to step onto the ledge, from which he tried to jump back in episode 4. She’s reluctant at first, but Brother Dawn takes off his personal force field and offers it to her. The gardener refuses, so they both stand on the ledge in a very precarious position and without any protection. They admire the gardens and Brother Dawn asks the gardener to describe the colours to him, whereupon she realises that Brother Dawn is colour-blind. This is also why he is such a good hunter.

Now colour blindness is a genetic condition in the vast majority of cases and men are more affected than women. And therein lies the problem, because no other Cleon has ever been colour-blind, which suggests that the cloning process is imperfect and genetic mutations are creeping in.

Brother Dawn is terrified that someone will find out his secret, because he fears that as a defective clone, he will simply be killed and replaced by another clone. And considering that the first Brother Dusk we saw was disintegrated, this fear is not entirely unjustified. There is a tense moment with the gardener who knows his secret and could expose him to Brothers Dusk and Day, then Brother Dawn and the gardener kiss.

Paul Levinson notes in his review of this episode that in Forward the Foundation, Cleon I is murdered by a gardener in front of the eyes of Hari Seldon, though that gardener is an old man. The purpose of that scene (which I had completely forgotten) is to show that even Hari Seldon can’t predict the actions of individuals like a deranged gardener murdering the Emperor.

Meanwhile, in the TV show, the purpose of the various Emperors Three scene is to show the slow but inevitable decline of the Empire. The Brother Dawn sequences show that decline on a genetic level, since the cloning process seems to be breaking down from too many copies made, while the Brother Day sequences show the decline on a macro level.

I wasn’t too impressed by the teenaged version of Brother Dawn in episode 4, but I like his storyline in this episode. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, the whole Brother Day sequence is just dull. I understand that the showrunners want to show the decline and fall of the Empire on the screen rather than have it happen off-page as in the books. But honestly, couldn’t they have come up with something more interesting for Brother Day to do than deal with the internal squabbles of an annoying religion? I suspect that the religion angle is a reference to the rise of Christianity, which coincided with (and some feel was to blame for) the decline of the Roman Empire. But while visually very pretty, the whole Luminist sequence was just dull and made me yell at the screen, “Oh, just have the rabble-rousing priestess assassinated and pass it off as the will of the goddess.”

Which brings us to the main storyline – even if the show keeps forgetting it – on Terminus, where the Anacreons have broken through the fence around Terminus City and are happily murdering Foundationers in the streets, while Salvor Hardin has been taken prisoner by Supreme Huntress Nutcase Phara and her little gang of Xena cosplayers. The Anacreons also managed to shootdown an Imperial warship under the command of Lord Dorwin. Though amazingly, Dorwin survives the fiery crash – being married to the Thirteenth Doctor has its advantages – only to be promptly taken prisoner by the Anacreons.

Phara is uncommonly interested in certain Foundationers who had vital roles in piloting the starship that brought the Foundation to Terminus. She’s also keeping Dorwin alive, because she needs him. It becomes clear that Phara needs people who can operate a jumpship. And not just any old jumpship either, but the Invictus, a legendary lost Imperial superweapon. Uh-oh.

Quite a few people such as io9 reviewer Rob Bricken were annoyed at the whole Invictus angle, because Isaac Asimov’s original stories barely have space battles, let alone Death Star type superweapons. However, the whole Invictus bit is actually closer to the original stories than the whole Luminism stuff. Because an abandoned Imperial battlecruiser retrofitted by the Foundation on behalf of Anacreon does play a role in “Bridle and Saddle”, the second of the original Foundation stories, which was published in the June 1942 issue of Astounding and later became chapter three of the first book under the title “The Mayors”. Coincidentally, there’s also a character named “Fara” in that story, though that character is a) male and b) a Foundationer, not someone from Anacreon. Can you tell that I have my copy of Foundation next to the computer to look this stuff up?

The battlecruiser in “Bridle and Saddle” is called Wienis, after the treacherous Prince Regent of Anacreon, and not Invictus. But whatever the name, both are Imperial battleships retrofitted and refurbished by the Foundation with their superior technology on behalf of Anacreon. In “Briddle and Saddle”, the villainous Prince Regent Wienis wants to use the eponymous battlecruiser to launch an attack against Terminus. However, the Foundation has built in a fail-safe in the form of a kill switch, which is then remotely triggered after a priest of the Foundation’s fake religion scientism curses the ship. A subsequent attempt to shoot Salvor Hardin also fails due to the nifty personal forceshields that the Foundationers have. This convinces the Anacreons that the Foundation are mighty priest-magicians and causes them to bow down before them.

While Phara is threatening Foundationers to find a crew for the Invictus, Salvor is rescued by two of the plucky kids we’ve been seeing running around in the Terminus scenes and reunited with Hugo and her Dad. There’s also a neat scene where Salvor learns that her Dad never really believed in Hari Seldon and the whole plan, but only joined the Foundation because he was in love with Salvor’s and she believed in the plan.

Because the kids managed to overhear the word “Invictus” and Salvor just happens to know that that is the name of a legendary lost Imperial battleship. Sorry, but Asimov, who was also a mystery writer, after all, would have come up with a less clumsy way to drop that clue even at the tender age of 22. So Salvor, her Dad and Hugo decide to launch a three-person attack on the Anacreon corvettes, because without ships, the Anacreons can’t leave Terminus and can’t reach the Invictus.

We get an impressive raid sequence, where Salvor gets to show off her sharp-shooting skills. However, Salvor suffers another weird flashback at the worst moment possible and sees how Hari Seldon and Raych planned Hari’s murder. But it was Raych, not Gaal, who was supposed to escape in the escape pod and get to the mystery ship we saw last episode. As for why the murder is necessary at all, Hari gives a speech to Raych that sometimes the fate of the whole galaxy hinges on the actions of a single person and that Raych and Gaal getting together will upset the plan. As for why Salvor Hardin is suddenly getting infodump flashbacks, who knows? Especially since the infodumps are only of interest to the audience, not to Salvor.

Of course, psychohistory is about predicting the future based on large-scale trends and large numbers of people. It cannot predict the actions of individuals and can also be stymied by unpredictable individuals like the gardener who murdered Cleon I and the Mule. And the show actually has Hari Seldon explain just that in episode 1. So why does the show keep contradicting this central tenet of psychohistory by constantly showing us that the actions of certain individuals – Salvor, Gaal, Raych – are vitally important and may change the entire course of history and upset the Seldon plan? Especially since the books make it very clear that if Salvor Hardin or Hober Mallow hadn’t done what they did, someone else would have done it and the outcome would have been the same. I’m not the only person who is irked by this. AV-Club reviewer Nick Wanserski, who as far as I recall hasn’t read the books, notes the contradiction as well.

Salvor’s infodump flashback derails the original plan and so her Dad is the one who sets off the charges and blows up the Anacreon corvettes, sadly perishing in the process. With the Anacreon corvettes destroyed, there is only one ship left on Terminus capable in getting the Anacreons off planet and that is Hugo’s ship. So Salvor and Hugo try to reach it, before the Anacreons realise what’s up. However, they’re too late and are taken hostage by Phara – again. Phara wants to take Hugo alone, but he transfers the controls of the ship to Salvor, so Phara has to take them both -plus, Lewis Pirenne and two other Foundationers. The episode ends with them taking off in search of the Invictus.

This was the first episode where I actually felt sorry for Lewis Pirenne, a character who’s very much a pompous jerk in the books and not much better in the TV series. Meanwhile, I really, really hate Phara and the Anacreons. I certainly won’t cry if the Empire nukes them from orbit again.

It seems to me as if the show is combining the first two Foundation stories, “Foundation”/”The Encyclopedists” and “Bridle and Saddle”/”The Mayors” into one, which makes a whole lot of sense, because a) both stories star Salvor Hardin, even though they are set thirty years apart, and b) “Foundation” is rather dull, whereas “Bridle and Saddle” has a lot more action. Besides, Salvor even says in the episode itself that this is the first Seldon crisis.

That said, I’m getting really worried that we’re not going to see the fake religion of “Scientism” being presented as the solution to the problem of Anacreon and the Four Kingdoms as it was in the books. Which will make me very cross, because I always loved the idea of pacifying aggressive idiots via a fake religion that worships nuclear power of all things. I don’t mind if Salvor Hardin is a black woman and super-special now and I don’t mind all the extraneous stuff that doesn’t happen in the books, but I really want to see “Scientism”, complete with pompous robed priests worshipping sacred technology and uttering curses that trigger kill switches.

The three hosts of the Star’s End podcast said a few weeks ago that they believe we won’t get to see Scientism, because the idea of a deliberately fake religion being used to trick people might offend religious viewers. Personally, I think this is nonsense, because Scientism is not an analogue to any real world religion and therefore unlikely to offend anybody. And the sort of fundamentalists who believe that Harry Potter and D&D promote Satanism aren’t watching Foundation anyway. Though now I wonder whether the many scenes devoted to the religions of the Empire aren’t supposed to form a counterpoint to Scientism – see, we do take religion seriously, after all.

Never mind that the first two Foundation stories were written and published in 1942, at a time when the US was a lot more religious than they are now. Nor was this the only “science as a fake religion” story published during that era. Particularly John W. Campbell’s magazines Astounding and Unknown were full of that sort of thing. If you think Scientism might be offensive to religious people, then what would they make of Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Gather, Darkness, also published in Astounding, where the fake religion is not only a lot more modeled on some of the more regressive strands of Christianity, complete with robotic drones that look like angels, while their opponents, who wield science disguised as magic, employ a mix a wiccan and pagan tropes? Or how about Fritz Leiber’s above mentioned “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, published in 1959 – no, not in Astounding but in Fantastic – which is a sharp satire of religion as well as a hilariously funny story starring everybody’s favourite pair of rogues. Or how about Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, future mutilator of Conan, published in 1939 in Campbell’s Unknown, whose modern protagonist finds himself in Ostrogothic occupied Rome in the year 535 AD, i.e. after the fall of the West Roman Empire and at the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages” and sets about to introduce advanced technology to stave off the Dark Ages – sound familiar? – and also suppress the rise of Christianity and prevent the development of Islam altogether?

In general, religion of any kind does not play a big role in the SFF of the so-called “golden age” of the 1930s to early 1950s. If religion does appear it’s either a scam or for aliens or both or it involves robed cultists sacrificing nubile virgins to some Lovecraftian monstrosity. The whole “science as religion” thing seems to have been one of Campbell’s pet topics, considering how often it shows up in stories he published in Astounding and Unknown. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Foundation and Lest Darkness Fall and maybe even Gather, Darkness! all grew from the same prompt. But the scepticism of organised religion goes beyond the Campbell mags. In the 1910s, Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us the corrupt and fake gods of Mars. Robert E. Howard’s Conan may swear by Crom – because, as Bobby Derie put it, using “Fuck” was not acceptable in the 1930s – but Crom is explicitly an absent god who sits on his mountain top and just wants to be left alone. Conan himself is an agnostic, who explicitly says in “Queen of the Black Coast” that there are probably gods, based on what he’s experienced, but he doesn’t know which religion gets it right and doesn’t particularly care either.

So how was it possible to tell stories like Foundation, Lest Darkness Fall, Gather, Darkness or Lean Times in Lankhmar in the much more religious US of the 1940s and 1950s without mobs armed with torches and pitchforks descending upon the Street & Smith building and fatwas being issued again L. Sprague de Camp and John W. Campbell, but nowadays the concept of a fake religion that uses science to create miracles is apparently too offensive for TV? Or is it a case of the Apple+ service being overly cautious, because someone somewhere might be offended, similar to how Disney handles LGBTQ characters?

At any rate, I hope that we get to see Scientism eventually and of course, Hari Seldon’s hologram dispensing vague wisdom.

Semiprozine Spotlight: Space Cowboy Books Presents Simultaneous Times

It’s time for the first entry in my Semiprozine Spotlight project. For more about the Semiprozine Spotlight project, go here.

I’ll start off the Semiprozine Spotlight project by interviewing a good friend of mine, Jean-Paul Garnier of the Space Cowboy Books Presents Simultaneous Times science fiction podcast. Come on, of course, I contacted people I already know first before cold-e-mailing editors I don’t know. And in the interest of full disclosure, yes, Simultaneous Times have produced three stories of mine to date.

So I’m happy to welcome Jean-Paul Garnier of Space Cowboy Books, a great SFF specialty bookstore in Joshua Tree, California, as well as producer and narrator of the Simultaneous Times science fiction podcast.

Tell us about your magazine.

Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast, released on the 15th of each month. We create audio adaptations of stories by contemporary science fiction authors from all over the world, set to original soundtracks created by our team of composers. When possible we do cast readings of the stories, and we have featured works by authors such as: David Brin, Rudy Rucker, Michael Butterworth, and tons of other wonderful contemporary writers. 

 

Who are the people behind your magazine?

 

We are blessed with an amazing team! Our main composers are RedBlueBlackSilver and Phog Masheeen, but we have also featured music from Dain Luscombe, Julie Carpenter, Oneirothopter, Patrick Urn, Scott Scott Smigiel, and loopool. My partner Zara Kand is also an integral part of the podcast and does proofreading and voice acting. We’ve also had a long list of voice actors participate and bring their unique skill to the production. And last but not least, we’ve had an incredible list of authors and poets who have graced us with their work.

 

Why did you decide to start your magazine?

 

All of our projects were born out of Space Cowboy Books, our science fiction specialty bookstore in Joshua Tree, CA. While we love selling books, the goal has always been to contribute to the amazing world of science fiction. We’ve been fortunate to meet so many great authors when hosting readings, both online and in person, and from there we branched out and do our best to help support the SF community at large.

 

What format do you use for your magazine (print zine, PDF zine, e-mail zine, online zine, podcast, etc…) and why did you choose this format?

 

Our main output is in podcast format, and I decided to go this route because of my experience as an audio engineer and background in radio. But we also produce a series of paperback anthologies featuring stories from the podcast and some appearing for the first time. In addition to this we also produce a monthly print newsletter which features interviews with SF authors and editors. The newsletter is available for free subscription and is also available on our website as a free PDF download. We also just released a PDF ebook featuring authors from Simultaneous Times podcast, as well as illustrations from amazing artists all over the world. The ebook, Simultaneous Times 2.5, is also available for free download at our website.

 Science fiction, fantasy and horror were born in the pulps and short fiction has long been the beating heart of the genre. However, the focus of attention is increasingly moving towards novels and series. So why do you think SFF short fiction is important and worthy of attention?

 

So many of the great novelists got their start writing for magazines, and I think that today this still rings true. The short story is a very different art form than the novel, and not all authors excel at both. But generally those that perfect their craft in the short story markets can go on to have wonderful careers. Selling a novel can be difficult and can take a long time. The short fiction markets tend to move faster, and therefore gives authors opportunities for publication that would not be available in long form fiction. I know for working at the bookstore that many readers still prefer short fiction, or even flash. Not everyone has the luxury of time to read novels, and short stories fill the gaps for those folks who still want to read.

 

One big problem for SFF magazines is monetarization. Readers are happy to consume short fiction, but they’re often unwilling to pay for it. What are your strategies for financing your magazine and paying your writers and staff?

 

As for most small presses this is always a struggle, but fortunately we have the bookstore to help pay the bills. We pay all of our writers, and this money is often generated from articles I write about podcasting, which appear on DreamFoundry.org’s blog. In late 2020 we were also extremely fortunate to receive the SFWA’s Givers Grant, which has helped pay for the postage for our newsletter and for the hosting of the podcast. At some point we will set up a Patreon, but for the better part of the fours years the podcast has been running I have paid for it out of pocket, because I love what I do and always wanted to give back the SF community.

 

The format of fiction magazines has changed a lot in the past twenty years. Print magazines still exist, but are no longer as dominant. Online and PDF zines are now the dominant form of short fiction delivery and fiction podcasts are becoming ever more popular. So where do you think magazines will go next?

 

I suspect that many of the wonderful online and PDF magazines will move into print as their popularity grows, and I see more and more of them starting to podcast as well. As always, predicting the future can be tricky, but I’m sure that the literary arts will continue to morph with and exploit new technological changes. That being said I think that for many of us print is still the goal, there is just no replacement for holding a book in your hand. A few of the things I’d like to see are more non-linear storytelling and I’ve always loved the Shared Universe approach, collaboration between writers and artists – we are fortunate to live in a world where it is fairly easy to connect, so let’s connect!

 

Are there any other great magazines, podcasts, editors, stories, etc… you’d like to recommend?

 

There are so many wonderful magazines and podcasts today that it’s hard to choose, but a few of my favorites are Hexagon Magazine and Mermaids Monthly. Not a podcast, but my favorite SF radio program is Mind Webs, which ran from the mid-70s into the early 80s (the complete recordings can be found on archive.org).

 

Where can people find you?

 

https://spacecowboybooks.com/

https://twitter.com/space_books

https://www.instagram.com/spacecowboybooks/

 

Thank you, Jean-Paul, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Simultaneous Times, cause it’s a great podcast. And should you ever find yourself in Joshua Tree, California, visit Space Cowboy Books in person or check out their online store from anywhere in the world.

***

Do you run a semiprozine and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Introducing Semiprozine Spotlights

Earlier this year, I started the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project to highlight the many worthy fanzines, blogs and fancasts are out there.

Originally, that project was intended to coincide with the nomination period for the 2021 Hugo Awards. However, I’ll be continuing this project on and off, because there are new fanzines, blogs and fancasts springing up all the time plus plenty of existing ones that I missed the first time around. Besides, after the Hugo nominations is before the Hugo nominations.

Furthermore, I have decided to expand the project to cover semiprozines as well. What is a semiprozine? The constitution of the World Science Fiction Society defines a semiprozine as follows:

3.3.13: Best Semiprozine. Any generally available non-professional periodical publication devoted to science fiction or fantasy, or related subjects which by the close of the previous calendar year has published four (4) or more issues (or the equivalent in other media), at least one (1) of which appeared in the previous calendar year, which does not qualify as a fancast, and which in the previous calendar year met at least one (1) of the following criteria:

(1) paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication,

(2) was generally available only for paid purchase

And because semiprozines can not be professional by definition, here’s the WSFS definition of a professional publication:

3.2.11: A Professional Publication is one which meets at least one of the following two criteria:

(1) it provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or,

(2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner.

That’s a lot of legalese, but the short version is that semiprozines are smaller magazines that pay their contributors and/or staff in other than copies, but don’t make enough money to provide at least a quarter of the income for staff or owners.

Even though that definition is very specific, there are actually a lot of magazines which meet it. The semiprozine directory has a lengthy list of Hugo eligible semiprozines and there are several I know of that are not yet listed.

Semiprozines range from the very well known to the obscure, so I thought it was time to shine a light on the many great semiprozines that are out there and decided to interview the editors and staff of various semiprozines. I hope this series will be of interest not just to potential Hugo nominators, but to everybody who is looking for great SFF short fiction.

I want to feature as many different semiprozines as possible and everybody is welcome to participate. However, I reserve the right to refuse to feature something, e.g. if a zine (and/or the people behind it) is known for shitposting, harrassment and generally terrible behaviour.

I will post responses as I get them, including potentially controversial answers, unless there are egregiously problematic, e.g. racist, sexist, homophobic, etc… comments, in which case I will contact the interviewee to discuss edits.

Finally, a feature is not an endorsement. Instead, the Semiprozine Spotlight project is intended as a resource to show potential Hugo nominators and SFF fans in general what’s out there.

The first Semiprozine Spotlight will go live tomorrow and I hope to have many more. Do you run a semiprozine and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Your zine is not actually a semiprozine? Well, I’m still running the Fanzine and Fancast sSpotlights, too, so contact me anyway.

Your zine is actually a prozine? Well, I’ll still interview you, but I’ll mark the post respectively. Though I doubt that will be much of a problem.

So check out all the great semiprozines that will be featured and consider nominating your favourites for the 2022 Hugo Awards next year.

Foundation realises “Upon Awakening” that the story is still moving at a glacial pace

Looks like I’m doing episode by episode reviews of Foundation – at least for now – so here is my take on episode 5. Reviews of previous episodes of Foundation as well as two actual Foundation stories may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand the storytelling choices this show makes. Like I’ve said before, I accept that a literal adaptation of the original stories isn’t possible, because stories of people sitting around and talking would not make for very thrilling TV. However, the shows pads out the lean narrative of the original stories with a lot of stuff that’s at best irrelevant and at worst contradicts the story. The show also deals with the fact that the Foundation series takes place over a long period of time (500 years for the original trilogy with the sequels and prequels spanning an even longer period of time) by inserting yet more unnecessary time jumps.

So episode 5 opens with a flashback to Gaal Dornick’s past on Synnax. Now I doubt that anybody was clamouring for Gaal Dornick’s backstory. I at any rate wasn’t. Gaal Dornick in the original books is a cypher who serves as the POV character for a single short story that’s all about Hari Seldon. Gaal in the TV series is given more characterisation, which is a good thing. However, as Nick Wanserski points out in his review at The AV Club, episode 1 gave us all the Gaal backstory we needed to know. We didn’t really need an extensive flashback to Gaal’s life on Synnax to hammer home the point that Gaal goes against the religion and tradition of her people at great personal risk. Especially since the flashback turns Gaal from a highly intelligent young woman raised in an environment that does not value intelligence to an even more super-special ultra math genius than she already was.

Gaal, we learn was not just a member of a fundamentalist anti-science religion, but she actually was an acolyte, though apparently mainly for the pay that supports her family. The show follows Gaal through the Synnaxian equivalent of a baptism (inserting those weird stones into a baby’s cheeks) and then on a hunt for heretics in the ruins of an abandoned university. Because learning, science and even books are forbidden on Synnax as heresy against their religion.

Gaal finds her heretic taking books from the abandoned university and lo and behold, it’s someone she knows, a former friend of her parents named Arren Sorn. Unlike Gaal’s religious parents, Sorn is a man of science. Gaal implores him to leave the books and flee, but Sorn won’t do it. He has recognised Gaal’s intelligence and tries to encourage her to take a particular book/scroll, the mathematical paradox that she will solve and that will lead her to Trantor and Hari Seldon. But for now, Gaal does not take the book. She waits until her fellow religious fanatics show up to arrest Arren Sorn.

Justice is swift on Synnax and heresy must be stamped out without mercy, so the next scene is Arren Sorn’s execution. Because Gaal is an acolyte, she’s forced to officiate. And so Arren Sorn and the books he took, including the chaos theory scroll he wanted to give to Gaal, are tied to stones and thrown into the ocean.

Where do the people of Synnax get the stones from, considering they live on a water world? And while a lot of the boats, furniture, etc… we see on Synnax seems to be made from reed, some of it is clearly made from wood. Where do they good the wood from – or even the reed, considering there seems to be no dry land anywhere? Also, how can rising sea levels threaten Gaal’s village, when it seems to be floating? And how can Gaal’s Mom tell her about black holes and tell her the names of the worlds in the Empire, when she lives on an fundamentalist anti-science planet. None of this makes any sense and the whole water world only seems to exist to make a clumsy point about climate change. Arren Sorn even tells Gaal that the people of Synnax melted their polar caps and now their whole world is drowning. Again, this makes no real sense, unless all the dry land on Synnax was only barely above sea level, but why let logic get in the way of a good climate change analogy.

The climate change analogy, which is repeated at least two times, annoyed me a lot, first of all, because it’s so very on the nose. Hari Seldon predicts the fall of the Empire, but the Empire won’t listen to science? Come on, everybody living in the early 21st century will see a climate change analogy in that, even though that’s not what Asimov intended in the early stories, though ecological concerns creep in in later stories.  We don’t need the on the nose dialogue about a drowning planet. Also, if Synnax is part of the Empire, why doesn’t the Empire send help? Are they already so far in decline that they can’t help a single backwater planet with a global warming problem?

It was clear to me that modern audiences would interpret Foundation through a climate change lens, because it’s just such an obvious analogy to draw. However, seeing the parallels spelled out in the dialogue irks me, because the point of the whole Foundation series is that the Foundation (almost) always wins, because they are smarter than everybody else and find scientific and technological solutions to every crisis. However, the noisy anti-climate change activists in real life – groups like Extinction Rebellion or to a lesser degree Fridays for Future – are anti-technology and closer to the fanatics of Synnax than to the Foundation. Of course, it’s possible that the show wants to make exactly this point – the people of Synnax rejected science in response to their climate change problem and only made things worse. But if so, it’s hopefully muddled.

Finally, environmental activism isn’t something that sprang up in the 21st century. It was also very much a thing in the 1980s when I grew up (and before), though climate change was a lot further down on the list of concerns compared to issues like acid rain, forest die-back and the ozone hole, most of which are now resolved, though forest die-back is an issue again.  There were a lot of regressive, anti-technology environmental activists in my school and probably in many other West German schools at the time.  Now I had a slightly different view, because my Dad worked in the waste processing industry at the time, which also disillusioned me about the nobility of environmental groups – especially since my Dad has probably done more for the environment than any of those people.

As a result, I argued with the would-be eco activists at my school a lot and pointed out their idiocies (“If you want to protest against Shell selling genetically modified grain – and that’s only a rumour – then staging a protest at the nearest Shell gas station is not the way to do so, because the leaseholder of a Shell station has no influence whatsoever on Shell’s policies and is actually being exploited by them” – and yes, this was a real thing). I was bullied for my troubles – by students and teachers. And one of the arguments I used to try to convince those people was – guess  what? – the Foundation books, which I discovered around the same time (This went about as well as you can imagine). Because the message of Foundation is, “Science and technology will solve all problems and everything is going to be all right in the end, even if it takes some time to get there.” In many ways, Foundation was hopepunk before we had a word for it.

So seeing the Foundation TV series drawing clumsy climate change analogies that seem to support the sort of reactionary environmental activists I was arguing with more than thirty years ago (and how depressing is it that we still have to do this) actively hurts me, because it feels like a betrayal. For the record, that’s also why I hated the Gaia and Galaxia nonsense in Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth so much, because I didn’t want any eco-stuff in my Foundation and the whole Gaia thing felt like a betrayal of the story I’d been promised. And at the time, I didn’t know that this was based on a real hypothesis, though I have resented James Lovelock ever since I found out, because this crap ruined Foundation for me.

All of this is completely personal, since very few other fans of the books will have the same history as me. But it colours my response to the show, because those books were not just something I used to escape from an unpleasant school experience, they were an argument in my favour. And no, I absolutely don’t recommend shoving Foundation into the hands of people and urging them to read it, because it will change their lives, since that doesn’t work.

Next, we see Gaal diving into the water by night. She swims past the bodies of several other drowned heretics – a chilling reminder that Gaal’s people are fanatical mass murderers – to Arren Sorn’s body and retrieves the triangular scroll with the math puzzle. How can Gaal dive to the ocean floor without any breathing apparatus, even though her people apparently live in the middle of the ocean? That’s just one more thing that makes no sense.

Come to think of it, Foundation is an extremely execution-happy show. Arren Sorn’s drowning isn’t even the only execution scene in this episode. Now it’s not as if there are no executions or close calls in the original books – there are a few. But the TV show lays it on really thick. The executions are also all by very old-fashioned methods (hanging, drowning, etc…), something that the executions and execution threats in the books explicitly are not.

A bit later, Gaal is totally absorbed by the math puzzle to the point that she neglects her religious duties. Her mother is concerned and wants her to stop. But Gaal doesn’t stop. She solves the puzzle that has been unsolved for fifty years – even though she hasn’t had any formal math training and most likely can barely read – and sends a message to Hari Seldon. How she knows where to send the message is unclear. Maybe the address was in the book.

Hari sends Gaal a holographic message in response, inviting her to come to Trantor. And indeed, it’s fascinating that we have seen Hari Seldon as a hologram several times in the past two episodes, but not the holographic Hari we are waiting for, namely the one who pops up in times of crisis to make cryptic pronouncements.

The rest is stuff we’ve already seen. Gaal has the stones removed from her cheeks. Why she does this is never made clear. She wouldn’t have been discriminated against, because we have seen members of her religion on Trantor. Never mind that it probably would have been easier to remove the stones on Trantor with better medical facilities. Maybe it’s a way to make a dramatic and visible break with her past.

By the standards of her planet, Gaal has committed heresy. Yet unlike poor Arren Sorn, she is not drowned, but allowed to leave. None of this makes any sense or has any real relevance to the actual plot, because episode 1 told us all we needed to know about Gaal. We didn’t need this deep dive into her past, especially not since it actually diminishes her character.

Camestros Felapton likes the Gaal flashback somewhat more than I did and notes that it’s possible that the reason Gaal was not drowned but allowed to leave was because the people of Synnax feared the reaction of the Empire. Since Gaal won the math competition, her disappearance would be noticed, unlike Arren Sorn going missing. Indeed, this does make a certain degree of sense. Romanian German writer and Nobel Prize winner for Literature Herta Müller once said that the most important literary award she ever won was not the Nobel Prize but the Aspekte-Literaturpreis for best German language debut novel. Because once she had won that award, she knew that the Romanian secret police could not just make her disappear, because her disappearance would be noticed.

So Gaal did not just grow up on a fundamentalist religious planet, she was actually an acolyte and complicit in the murder of supposed heretics. Okay, so there are a few lapsed priests in the actual Foundation stories, most notably Limmar Ponyets, but the Foundation’s fake religion does not murder people. Besides, Gaal is not just uncommonly smart and a math genius, she’s able to solve a supposedly unsolvable puzzle with barely any training. In episodes 1 and 2, Gaal was Katherine Johnson, a highly intelligent young woman from a disadvantaged background. Now she is a super duper math genius, who can solve an unsolvable puzzle in spite of having only the equivalent of a middle school education, if that. This is yet another instance of the show’s irritating tendency to make characters like Gaal Dornick or Salvor Hardin, who were resourceful, intelligent and shrewd people in the books, but still regular people, into super duper special superheroines.

The whole Gaal flashback takes up a lot of time and adds absolutely nothing to the story. Nor is it particularly interesting – on the contrary, it’s quite boring.  Also, I’m not sure what the point of the whole flashback is. If the showrunners wanted to show a conflict between science and a fundamentalist anti-science religion, there actually is a Foundation story which does just that, namely “The Wedge”, which even has executions of supposed heretics. However, given the glacial pace at which the show is moving, they will never reach “The Wedge” in this season. Most likely, they won’t even reach “The Mayors/Bridle and Saddle”.

After the extended and completely unnecessary flashback, we see Gaal again as the escape pod into which Raych (whose surname is Foss – a hat tip to Chris Foss, whose covers adorned the Panther/Granada editions of the Foundation books that I had?) shoved her back in episode 2 and shot her into space, is picked up by a mystery spaceship. So Gaal wakes up aboard an empty spaceship with no idea what happened to her. The computer will not give her all the information, because Gaal has no authorisation (which again doesn’t make any sense), though it does tell her that she has been in suspended animation for thirty-four years. The computer also shows her a replay of Hari’s murder and Raych’s trial, which ends with Raych taking a walk out of the nearest airlock, courtesy of Lewis Pirenne. Meanwhile, Hari Seldon is given a space burial in a casket of his own design. I strongly suspect that casket eventually became the Time Vault. Gaal also learns that she is believed to have been Raych’s accomplice.

Seeing Raych shot out of the nearest airlock so depresses Gaal that she grabs a scalpel and tries to kill herself in the shower. However, a course change manoeuvre of the mystery ship stops her just in time. Gaal wants to figure out where the ship is taking her and has to – to quote The Martian – math the shit out of the situation, because the ship won’t just tell her what she needs to know. None of this happens in the books, but – as Camestros Felapton points out – Gaal mathing the shit out of the situation is a very Campbellian solution to her dilemma. Gaal even takes a spacewalk – even though she’s from a backwater planet and has never been in space before leaving for Trantor – to figure out the truth. She realises that the ship is headed for Helicon, Hari Seldon’s homeworld, which is the last place where she wants to go, since she is considered an accomplice to Hari’s murder and really doesn’t want to experience whatever retro methods of execution the people on Helicon favour (We haven’t beheading yet. Or garrotting.). Presuming, of course, that anybody on Helicon would care about what happened to Hari, especially thirty-four years after the fact.

Gaal’s rude awakening becomes even ruder, when she finds puddles of blood on the floor on the spaceship, blood that is not hers, and then sees a glitchy looking hologram of Hari Seldon, stabbed but not quite dead, in the ship’s cargo bay. I think it’s pretty clear by now that Hari engineered the whole murder, though I’m not sure if Raych was in on the plot or if Hari manipulated and sacrificed him. I also suspect that the purpose of the mystery ship initially was to pick up Raych and not Gaal. Paul Levinson also wonders if Hari might still be alive, since he did not die immediately after being stabbed. Personally, I doubt that Hari is still alive – at least not thirty-four years after his stabbing – though we will see him again as an omniscient hologram.

Which brings us to what is supposed to be the main plot, namely the stand-off with the Anacreons on Terminus. When the episode finally does give us Terminus, nothing has changed there since the last episode. The Anacreons are still outside the forcefield fence, occasionally firing their rifles at it. The Foundation is still facing them, outnumbered and outgunned, but protected by their fence. Anacreon leader Phara is still in Foundation custody and still gloating and unpleasant. The Anacreons do set up a very big cannon, but for now all they do is camouflage it, though the question is from whom, since the Foundationers have already seen it.

The situation shifts when an Imperial warship under the command of Lord Dorwin, played by Christian Contreras, who is the real life husband of Thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker. Lord Dorwin is actually a character from the original story, where he is an ineffectual Imperial official who basically tells the Foundation, “You’re on your own, sorry.”

His TV counterpart is more effective. For starters, TV Dorwin is actually willing to defend the Foundation, not because he cares about the Encyclopedia Galactica, but because he really, really doesn’t like the Anacreons. He talks to Lewis Pirenne and – after demanding to speak to the minister of defence and learning that Terminus is a colony of geeks and has no such thing – to Salvor Hardin. Dorwin is thrilled that Phara has been apprehended and wants to interrogate her himself in the so-called tower, a part of the Foundation’s colony ship that now serves as the hub of Terminus City.

Salvor thinks that taking Phara to the tower is a bad idea, because that was where Phara wanted to go from the beginning and who knows what she might be planning. But as usual, Lewis Pirenne doesn’t listen to Salvor and has Phara brought to the tower, before Salvor can stop him. This turns out to be a grave mistake, because Phara suddenly freaks out, once she’s inside the tower, and rips out her left eyeball, which turns out to be an implanted bomb, much like the ones used by the terrorists that blew up the Skybridge in episode one. So does this mean that the Anacreons were responsible for that attack after all or did Phara simply purchase her eyeball bomb from the same arms dealer?

Phara triggers the eyeball bomb, which takes out the generator for the forcefield fence, allowing the Anacreon troops assembled outside to attack Terminus and its pitifully few defenders. Shivaughn, the resident example of that classic golden age trope, the Irish person in space, is wounded and Hugo, the not so classic example of an Australian in space, is shot as well, while the Anacreons proceed to trash Terminus City and set buildings on fire.

Meanwhile, Phara has taken Salvor’s Mom hostage and heads for the artefact archive, Salvor hot in pursuit. Phara puts a gun to the head of Salvor’s Mom, but Salvor puts on a convincing act of “I don’t particularly care if you shoot my Mom. We never got along anyway” (so convincing that even Salvor’s Mom believes it for a moment), while signaling to her Mom to duck. What follows is a hand to hand fight of Salvor against Phara with improvised weapons. Salvor wins, at least temporarily, when she stabs Phara in the shoulder with the sundial we saw in episode 3 (so keeping it was good for something).

However, Salvor’s victory is shortlived, because Phara and her fellow Xena-cosplayers apprehend Salvor and her Mom again. Now Phara also reveals her true plan. She wants to destroy Terminus City in retaliation for the bombing of Anacreon, because she believes that Hari Seldon blew up the Skybridge and also riled the Emperors Three (who are notably absent in this episode) up so much that they took out their frustration on Anacreon. How Phara, who was about five at the time of the bombing, knows all this or came to this conclusion is unclear. But then Phara is completely nuts anyway.

Meanwhile, up in orbit, Lord Dorwin is not having any of this anymore. As far as he is concerned, the Anacreons are responsible for the terrorist attack on the Skybridge and now they are attacking an Imperial outpost, so he will intervene.

However, there is still that big cannon that we saw in the cliffhanger of the previous episode. The big cannon that is now camouflaged. That big cannon fires once – and since the Anacreons are jamming communications and neither Salvor nor Lewis thought to warn the Imperials of the very big cannon the Anacreons had set up beforehand – the Anacreon gunner manages to take down an Imperial warship with a single shot. The warship crashes on Terminus in a fiery inferno.

Rest in Peace (and in pieces), Lord Dorwin. A pity, cause I liked the TV show’s take on the character much more than his book counterpart. Besides, he was easy on the eyes and is married to the Thirteenth Doctor in an epic franchise crossover.

As for Phara’s revenge scheme, it makes about as much sense as everything else in this episode. The execution of her plan is actually pretty good, but what precisely do the Anacreons hope to gain from attacking an Imperial outpost and blowing an Imperial warship to smithereens except to get nuked from orbit once again? Yes, the Empire is in decline, but they will still be able to muster enough warships to nuke Anacreon again. Of course, Phara is completely nuts, but you would think someone on Anacreon would still be sane.

Now I have absolutely no issue with making the stand-off between Anacreon and Terminus more tense and action-packed than it is in the books, where the “stand-off” is basically a state visit and a meeting in a board room. But I don’t see why the show had to change the motivation of the Anacreons so completely.  Because the Anacreons in the books basically want to annex the Foundation to gain more land for the nobles of their neofeudalist kingdom. They also want technology, because the Imperial legacy tech is failing. As motivations go, this may not be as sexy as the crazed revenge scheme of a woman radicalised by a massive bombing, but it makes more sense. And if you’re looking for real world parallels, look at Crimea, Eastern Ukraine and maybe soon Taiwan for examples of what happens when a more powerful country wants to annex a smaller one and no one wants to pick a fight with the more powerful country, because they have nukes.

Finally, I find it hugely problematic that the two planets we’ve seen which are inhabited almost solely by arseholes, Anacreons and Synnax, are also the only two planets where the population consists solely of POC, black people for Synnax and people of Indian or Pakistani origin for Anacreon. Meanwhile, Thesbis seems to be majority white; Trantor and Terminus are mixed.

Now Asimov makes it very clear in The Currents of Space in 1952 (!) that while certain planets are racially homogenous, the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Galactic Empire are mixed race. Indeed, one of the things that makes the planet Florina in The Currents of Space stand out is that its population is very light-skinned, which is extremely unusual for the Empire. The Florinians are also being oppressed and exploited by their neighbours.

I understand that the showrunners wanted to show the Galactic Empire as the very diverse place it is in the books, but making the only two planets that are inhabited solely by terrible people inhabited solely of people of colour is not the way to do it. Why not make Synnax and Anacreon as diverse as everywhere else?

As I said in the beginning, I just don’t understand the storytelling choices Foundation makes. Instead of actually moving the plot forward, especially since we’ve not spent a whopping 150 minutes on a novelette of barely 10000 words, the show pads out the plot with all sorts of side plots that have nothing whatsoever to do with the books.

The adventures of the Emperors Three are at least compelling, even if they have very little to do with the story. The Gaal flashback, however, was completely superfluous and could have been cut without losing anything. And while the scenes of Gaal awaking aboard the mystery spaceship were more interesting, we should have seen those scenes in episode 3 instead of forgetting Gaal’s existence for two whole episodes. The actual plot on Terminus is exciting enough, but it is deviating so far from the books that I don’t really see how they’re going to pull off the fake religion solution.

And yes, a literal adaptation of Foundation wouldn’t have worked, because the original stories are very talky and low on action. But I don’t know why they couldn’t just take the conflicts from the original stories, especially since those conflicts are compelling, and jazz them up a bit with action, explosions and firefights.

So far, I’ve been cautiously positive about Foundation, in spite of some strange choices. But episode 5 is the first one that actively annoyed me. Let’s hope that episode 6 is better and that it maybe actually gets to the solution of the story known as “Foundation” a.k.a. “The Encyclopedists”.

Cora’s Adventures at the Virtual 2021 Octocon

As I mentioned on this blog some time ago, I spent the first October weekend at Octocon, the Irish National Science Fiction Convention, which was virtual this year for obvious reasons.

But before I get to my adventures at Octocon, I first want to point you to another great discussion I was involved in at the Hugos There! podcast last weekend. Hosted by Seth Healey, a panel consisting of Ivor Watkins, Alan Bailey of the If This Goes On… Don’t Panic! podcast, Lise Andreasen, Sarah Elkins, J.W. Wartick, Lori Anderson, Haley Zapal and Amy Salley of the Hugo Girl! podcast as well as yours truly met to discuss the 2021 nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

You can listen to the podcast here or – if you prefer to see the panelists as well as their pets – there’s also a video version available on YouTube.

So let’s get back to Octocon. The con started on Friday, but my first panel was the international comics panel on Saturday morning. True to form, we were a very international group of panelists. Moderator Sakuya from France, Ann Gry from Russia, Christopher Hwang from Singapore, with whom I was on a similar panel at the Dublin Worldcon in 2019, and me from Germany. “Is anybody here actually from Ireland?” someone asked during the pre-panel chat.

Every virtual con is bound to have technical issues and this panel was the one that was affected, because the stream didn’t go live until ten minutes after the designated start time. We panelists were a tad confused – “Are we live or not?” – since we were discussing quantum mechanics (like you do) rather than the comics we were supposed to discuss. Eventually, we got hold of an Octocon volunteer and the panel went live.

We discussed our own comics experience growing up, different regional comics traditions, the impact of American superhero comics (everybody wants their own shared universe a la Marvel now) and how well comics translate across cultures (remarkably well).  This was a fascinating panel, especially since I know very little about Russian comics and not a lot more about comics from South East Asia.

As for how well comics translate across cultures, manga is read and understood by millions of people worldwide, even though it often requires reading in a format that westerners are not used to. Also, Asterix is one of the most reprinted and translated comics ever. And people all over the world have no problems understanding and enjoying the stories, even if they are not familiar with the historical background. The many allusions to French politics in the originals (sometimes translated into allusions to local politics) are also lost on international audiences. In fact, much of what I know about the Roman occupation of Gaul I know from comics like Asterix or the lesser known Alix. The rest is from reading Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Gaius Julius Caesar (a biased source, if there ever was one) in high school Latin class. The Latin teacher was a huge Asterix fan BTW. And pretty much everything I know about the Eighty Years War a.k.a. the Dutch war of independence against Spain comes from a Belgian comic called De Geuzen.

The thing about virtual cons is that you are both at a con and at home, so I went to make lunch after the panel and took care of some other household stuff. Then I returned to the computer for my next panel about the fantasy genre before Lord of the Rings. Unlike the previous panel, this one was all-Irish except for me. The moderator was Elaine McIonyn and the other panelists were scholar, author and editor Jack Fennell and Dr. Helen Conrad-O’Briain from Trinity College.

I was the resident specialist for American pulp fantasy, mainly Weird Tales and Unknown and their mainstays like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he was a racist, but you also can’t ignore the huge influence he had), C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, etc…, whereas the other panelists contributed knowledge about authors like E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and of course Ireland’s own Lord Dunsany. We had great discussion, covering e.g. that secondary world fantasy was extremely rare pre-Tolkien – most fantasy was either historical fantasy (Conan is historical fantasy, since the Hyborian Age is supposed to be our past that never was) or contemporary fantasy (Weird Tales published a lot of what we would now call urban fantasy) or portal fantasy – with the fantastic being placed either someplace far away (difficult to do once the previously blank spots on the map vanished) or in the distant past (again difficult as historical knowledge increased).

As for Lord of the Rings, the interesting thing is that it was a true slow-burn success. The Hobbit came out in 1937 and was viewed as a children’s book. The Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in hardcover in 1954 and 1955 and received a positive, but not enthusiastic reception. The trilogy was also far from a runaway bestseller, largely because hardcovers were really expensive. The runaway success of Lord of the Rings didn’t begin until 1965, when Donald Wollheim published a not quite legal paperback edition of the trilogy (Tolkien sued and Wollheim paid him 8000 US-dollars in royalties, a huge sum in 1965, which also defused Tolkien’s prejudice against paperbacks), which sold like the proverbial hotcakes and also put the already simmering fantasy revival of the 1960s (see the Galactic Journey article about Cele Goldsmith Lalli, editor of Fantastic) into overdrive.

But the fantasy that was published after and often directly as a result of the huge success of The Lord of the Rings in paperback were not the Tolkien clones that dominated the fantasy shelves in the 1980s and 1990s. No, the first of those – The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, on which I may have been a little hard on the panel – was not published until 1977, twelve years after the paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings and four years after Tolkien’s death. Instead, paperback publishers printed any kind of fantasy they could get their hands on and so we got the Lancer Conan reprints, which ushered in the sword and sorcery boom, the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser collections, anthologies like the Flashing Swords series, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which reprinted a lot of the classic pre-Tolkien fantasy by authors like Lord Dunsany that were discussed on the panel, and 1960s classics like The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle or A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The glut of bad Tolkien clones in the 1980s and 1990s is not Tolkien’s fault – he wrote a unique and amazing work and had no idea nor any intention to create a genre – anymore than Robert E. Howard is to blame for the glut of bad “Clonans” of the 1970s and 1980s, published decades after his death by people who didn’t understand his work. It’s not even Terry Brooks’ fault, cause Sword of Shannara was just one book that eventually became a series. No, the reason that the fantasy genre became overrun by bad would-be Tolkien tomes were the economics of publishing. Tolkien clones sold, more than the more idiosyncratic works. Plus, rising printing costs drove book lengths upwards throughout the 1980s and 1990s. And epic fantasies are often big fat books in lengthy series. whereas e.g. sword and sorcery tends towards shorter length. No wonder publishers loved them.

How would the fantasy genre have looked if Tolkien had never existed or at least never written Lord of the Rings? I suspect we would have seen the rise of fantasy anyway, because that trend was already underway by 1965, though it might have been less meteoric and would probably have looked differently. The sword and sorcery boom would probably still have happened, if only because the sword and sorcery revival was already in progress by 1965 and the Lancer Conan reprints, which fuelled the boom, would probably have happened anyway. The bust of the 1980s would probably have happened as well, though I suspect sword and sorcery would not have vanished as completely as it did, if big fat epic fantasy hadn’t been there to fill the void. As for other trends, it’s possible that contemporary fantasy would have reappeared earlier than it did. And without Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin might have become the dominant voice in the genre via The Chronicles of Earthsea. Maybe we would have seen more fantasy in non-western settings such as Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro series or Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Tomoe Gozen series.

After the fantasy before Tolkien panel, I switched over to watch Angeline B. Adams‘ fascinating presentation about disability and the roots of heroic fantasy. Then I had dinner and in the evening went to an open Zoom chat for Octocon members, which was a lot of fun.

On Sunday, I was on the panel about “Uncovering the Hidden Treasures of the Past” with Michael Carroll, who was also the Octocon Guest of Honour, Cheryl Morgan, Deirdre Thornton. Ian Moore was the moderator. This panel was recorded and may be watched along with other great content at the Octocon Twitch channel.

Now everybody who knows me should know that I love talking about old SFF and the many great stories and novels of past decades that are not nearly as well known as they should be, so that was exactly the right panel for me. We agreed that reading and discussing older SFF is valuable, because it shows us where the genre came from and how it got where it is now. Besides, actually reading older SFF and not just the few books anointed classics either is also the best antidote against the common claim that women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, [insert minority here] were not writing SFF before the current time, because women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, etc… were always part of the genre, we have just chosen to forget and ignore many of them, denying the writers who follow role models.

Finally, we also discussed why some works are remembered, while other equally good or better works are forgotten and came to the conclusion that quite often the editors of reprint anthologies are to blame, e.g. Isaac Asimov’s and Martin H. Greenberg’s Golden Age year by year anthologies drew disproportionately from Astounding while ignoring many of the good stories published in the likes of Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories or Weird Tales (which Asimov famously disliked), cementing the belief that Astounding was the best magazine of the era, even though that isn’t true, if you read the actual magazines. Also, it really helps to be a white cisman to be remembered and reprinted, though it’s no guarantee.

Because one of the recommendations for a work that should be remembered more was The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Now I absolutely agree that we should remember The Sheep Look Up, it’s just a pity that we forgot it in the first place. Also, I remember reading an article lamenting that everything by John Brunner was out of print in SFX magazine sometime in 1995/96, i.e. twenty-five years ago. Now, in 2021, at least some of John Brunner’s work is in print, but we still need to remind people to read him.

Another recommendation were the Witch World books by Andre Norton, another seminal series that really shouldn’t be forgotten. Also, it’s a pity if we are on the verge of forgetting Andre Norton, considering how prolific she was and for how many people her works for younger readers served as a gateway into the genre. Especially since Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles are in no danger of being forgotten. My own recommendations were for Margaret St. Clair and Rosel George Brown BTW.

Octocon also had craft workshops and projects, including one where you could crochet your very own version of Octo, the Octocon mascot. The actual workshop conflicted with one of my panels, but then I can crochet and read a pattern well enough not to need a workshop, though crafting with others is fun. So I also made an cuddly Octo during the weekend – from yarn I had brought back from the 2019 Worldcon in Ireland. You can see him below:

A cuddly crochet Octo.

The pattern, courtesy of Kat Dodd, as well as photos of other cuddly Octos may be found here, by the way.

All in all, I really enjoyed Octocon. The program offered a variety of fascinating items across a wide range of subjects. In fact, I found the Octocon program much better than that of some much bigger cons.

Foundation realises that there are “Barbarians at the Gates”

Looks like I’m doing episode by episode reviews of Foundation, so here is my take on episode 4. And yes, the Octocon report is coming, but I had a very busy week. Reviews of previous episodes of Foundation as well as two actual Foundation stories may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

The very first Foundation story – entitled simply “Foundation”, when it was first published in Astounding Sciencen Fiction in May 1942, and “The Encyclopedists” for the book edition – is a comparatively short novelette, under 10000 words long. The Foundation TV series has now spent two episodes of 49 and 45 minutes respectively and still hasn’t reached the end of this short novelette.

As I said in my previous review, adapting “Foundation”/”The Encyclopedists” as is would not make for a thrilling TV show, because the novelette is a basically a series of meetings and men talking in boardrooms. So it’s obvious that they would have to change the plot of the story a lot for the series. And indeed, very little of the original story remains except for the names of some characters, the basic conflict – Terminus is under threat from its “barbarian” neighbours and the Empire is doing fuck all to help – and oddly enough the coin that Salvor Hardin likes to toss and irritate people with, something he/she does both in the original story and the TV show. And I like that they kept the coin, because it is a nice hat tip to the original story.

Still, how do you take a story that’s 15 pages long in the magazine version and 44 pages in the book version and stretch it to more than 90 minutes. Simple. You add a lot of padding. And that’s exactly what Foundation does.

For example, the many scenes featuring the Emperors Three are entirely padding, since the Emperor (just one) doesn’t even appear in the Foundation trilogy until the second book Foundation and Empire. We occasionally see imperial remnants in earlier stories, most notably in “The Big and the Little” a.k.a. “The Merchant Princes”, but mostly the Foundation stories focus on the Foundation and Terminus and pay little to no attention to the Empire.

The TV show, however, seems to have settled into a pattern of dividing its time equally between the Emperors Three, i.e. a plotline that’s not in the books at all, and Terminus, a plotline which is at least loosely based on the original stories. At least, the Emperors Three plot is generally compelling. And indeed, both AV-Club reviewer Nick Wanserski, who hasn’t read the books, and Paul Levinson, who has read them and is a big fan, find the Emperors Three plot more compelling than the Terminus plot, which is a problem, because the latter is what the books are actually about.

So what are the Emperors Three and Demerzel up to in this episode? By now, the time has moved forward to approximately thirty-five years after the exiling of the Foundation and the terrorist attack on the Skybridge. The city world of Trantor still bears a scar from the attack nor is there any indication that they are rebuilding the Skybridge – after thirty-five years. For comparison, thirty-five years after the end of WWII. i.e. in 1980, the bombed out German cities and infrastructure had long since been rebuilt (the rebuilding mostly happened in the 1950s with a few laggards in the 1960s) and improved compared to the pre-war era. There were a few remaining ruins or empty plots of land – inevitably hidden behind billboards, so passers-by wouldn’t see what was or rather wasn’t there – but that was mostly because no one knew who owned those plots of land. The fact that the Empire hasn’t even managed to rebuild their capital in thirty-five years shows that they really are in decline. And yes, the destruction of Trantor was massive, but not more massive than the reducing entire countries to rubble during WWII.

As we saw last episode, the Emperors Three have moved one up now. The gleefully tyrannical Brother Day of the first two episodes is now Brother Dusk. The terrified kid Brother Dawn from the first two episodes is now Brother Day, the prime Emperor. And the baby decanted in the previous episode is now a teenaged Brother Dawn. Only Demerzel is her unchanging robotic self.

So far, the Emperors Three seem to have gotten along well with each other, but this trio is at odds. The current Brother Day blames Brother Dusk both for the terrorist attack, the brutal retaliation, which he now claims he never agreed with, but only pretended to agree, because he was terrified of the then Brother Day, and the generally poor state of the Empire. Brother Day also suspects that Hari Seldon and his followers are to blame for the Empire’s problems, since some recent events – riots on Trantor, the failure of a vital communications relay and a religious schism – echo some of Seldon’t predictions at his trial. Brothers Dusk and Day were never really impressed, let alone scared by Seldon, but it makes sense that Brother Dawn, who was only nine years old at the time, would be scared and traumatised by the events and would also link Seldon to the Skybridge attack, because he experienced both at the same time.

Of the crisises facing the Empire, the religious schism is given the most time. In short, the leader of an important religion with billions of followers has died – we see her funeral in an early scene – and there is a challenger to her designated successor. And this challenger promotes a belief that is deemed heretical, namely that one human being only has one soul. The Emperors, however, are three human beings – of fourteen clones altgether – sharing the same body. According to the heretical belief, it is questionable whether they have a soul, which could lead to revolts and uprisings down the line, so that heresy must be stamped out and he ascension of the heretical would-be leader prevented.

I have to admit that my eyes glazed over during this discussion about the beliefs of a fictional religion. I also find that the TV version of Foundation pays way too much attention to religion, first with Gaal and the anti-tech cult she left and now with the religion of the white-robed women who debate whether clones have souls. It’s obvious that any entity as large as the Empire would have any number of religions, including weird ones, but we see very little of this in the books. We do have a society, whose religion forbids all technology on the pain of death in “The Wedge”, but the only religion which plays any real role in the original Foundation stories is Scientism, a cult which worships nuclear power and is very much a scam devised by Salvor Hardin to control the four kingdoms, something I really hope we get to see in the series. Nor was Scientism the only fake religion to appear in the pages of Astounding in the 1940s – no, “science disguised as a scam religion” was a very common trope during the golden age, particularly in Astounding. Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Gather, Darkness! is another example that is quite a bit weirder than Foundation’s scientism.

Isaac Asimov was a secular Jew and avowed atheist who had no real connection to Judaism, as this article by Stephen Silver explains. Asimov apparently developed an interest in the Bible later on and indeed, there are quite a few biblical references in The Caves of Steel (which baffled my teenaged self, partly because I had trouble locating the respective Bible chapters due to transliteration and translation disparities*, and partly because I wondered why a Jewish author would include references to the New Testament in a novel). However, The Caves of Steel was published in 1953, eleven years after the first Foundation story. The Isaac Asimov who wrote those stories had little to no interest in religion of any kind and was writing in an environment, where religion was not considered a suitable subject for science fiction, unless it was a scam. There were religiously tinged science fiction stories published in the 1940s, but not in Astounding.

Therefore, I find the focus on religion in the TV show baffling, since the spirit of the original stories is very much anti-religious, unless you view the Foundation as a cult that worships the hologram of its dead leader, which is a valid reading.  I also wonder whether they couldn’t have found another crisis for the Emperors Three to deal with than an impending schism in a religion of white-robed women that we’ve never even seen before. Because the whole religious schism and heresy issue is mainly an excuse to get Brother Day to break with protocol and leave Trantor himself, something which is not done, rather than leave the issue to Brother Dusk.

The current Brother Day is also more hands on in other respects. Since this Brother Day is worried about Seldon and his predictions, he has several members of the Royal Institute of Statistics summoned to the palace to inquire if they have made any progress replicating or analysing Seldon’s calculations. Alas, the mathematicians have made as much progress as the Empire has made rebuilding the Skybridge in thirty-five years, namely none. This infuriates Brother Day so much that he channels his inner intergalactic tyrant – he used to practice in front of the mirror, he tells Brother Dusk at one point – and pitches an epic fit that causes the head mathematician to drop dead of a heart attack. He should have just asked the Second Foundation, who already have to be lurking on Trantor in this time, instead.

And talking of the Foundation, since Brother Day is the one who’s worried whether Seldon was right and whether the Foundation are a threat, Brother Day also dispatches an Imperial envoy named Lord Dorwin to Terminus. Lord Dorwin actually appears in the original story, where he is a pompous and hopelessly ineffective Imperial official who can’t really help Terminus agains the Four Kingdoms. This character is one of the very few things the episode actually took from the original story.

Those folks who want Foundation to be Game of Thrones and only watched the latter for the sex scenes are also treated to a scene of Lee Pace’s Brother Day attempting to have sex with what appears to be a high class prostitute. Havin sex is not so easy for the Emperors Three, because they are surrounded by a personal forceshield (which is something that actually exists in the books, though differently) that repells kinetic energy, so you can only touch them if you move very slowly and very carefully. The prostitute is just about the get the hang of it, when Brother Day experiences the ultimate coitus interruptus in the form of Demerzel walking into his bedroom and icily remarking that she knows that the Emperor has physical needs that have to be satisfied once in a while, but that there is a crisis he has to attend to. Since I suspect Daneel/Demerzel would have learned  in twenty-thousand years that interrupting humans while they have sex is just rude, I bet she did it on purpose. Most likely, Daneel/Demerzel is jealous.

While Brothers Dusk and Day are sniping at each other, they are both neglecting the teenaged Brother Dawn. This is a mistake, because this Brother Dawn has plenty of issues that should be attended to, preferably before he becomes the prime Emperor. The episode actually opens with Brother Dawn attempting to commit suicide by hurling himself out of his bedroom window. However, the same personal forceshield that frustrates his brother’s attempts to have sex saves his life. The suicide attempt is witnessed by a young woman who works in the gardens, a woman with whom Brother Dawn becomes obsessed. The gardener offers him a medicinal plant against the lingering pain from the suicide attempt, so Brother Dawn accepts the plant – after testing it on another staffer first – and also builds a dragonfly drone to spy on the young gardener.

So in short, we have an aged tyrant, who screwed up the Empire and committed genocide, a prime Emperor who at least tries to do better, but is still trapped by circumstances and genetics, and a suicidal teenager who creeps on random gardeners. Truly, the Empire is screwed.

Meanwhile, on Terminus, Salvor Hardin has met the Anacreonians, who have snuck ont the planet’s surface undetected and threated Salvor with bow and arrows. Since the Anacreons – who have ditched the tree cosply in favour of Xena – Warrior Princess cosplay – outnumber Salvor, she is briefly taken prisoner. The Anacreons claim to be scrappers looking for the colony ship’s navigation unit, but Salvor tells them it was removed long ago. So they force Salvor to take them to Terminus City, where the unit is kept. Since Terminus City is surrounded by a force field fence, Salvor tells them she can only take one person through the field. That one person is the leader of the group, a scarred woman named Phara (Indian actress Kubbra Sait). It turns out that Phara does have a blaster as well, though she does carry bow and arrow and knows how to use them. However, Salvor tricks her by piloting her landspeeder too close to the Time Vault and its repellant field (which doesn’t work on Salvor), knocking her out.

Salvor takes Phara prisoner and interrogates her, but Phara keeps insisting that her people are just scrappers. Since Phara’s comrades are still outside the forcefield fence, Salvor also arms her few troops and tells them to keep watch. “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”, Salvor’s Dad, the mayor of Terminus City, tells her. “That’s an old man’s doctrine”, Salvor counters.

Now “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” is an actual line from the first Foundation story. However in the story, it is uttered by Salvor Hardin, who in the books is a fount of aphorisms, and not by his/her father. This line could also be used as an epigraph for the entire first book, because the Foundation prefers to solve problems with cunning and intelligence rather than violence, at least partly because they are not powerful enough to stand against their more aggressive neighbours. And indeed in the book, Salvor takes down the Four Kingdoms without engaging in any physical iolence.

The brains over brawn ethos, which is summed up by that one line, is one of the things that initially attracted me to the Foundation stories. Because I loved reading about smart people solving problems with their brains rather than with violence. And to see TV Salvor rejecting one of the sayings that are associated with the character hurts. Of course, it’s still possible that Salvor eventually comes to see that her Dad was right, but this is yet another storytelling choice that is just baffling. Salvor Hardin doesn’t need to be a white man or indeed a man of any race (since Salvor’s race is never specified in the original stories) at all and I have no problem with Salvor being a black woman with parents and a lover. However, it would be nice if Salvor were at least vaguely the same character as in the stories.

Salvor, her parents and Hugo also examine Phara’s bow and realise that the Anacreons have not really been reduced to using bow and arrow, as I assumed in my last review, but that the bow is ceremonial, since Anacreon’s culture is obsessed with hunting. And the fact that Phara has the ceremonial bow means that she is not just a random scrapper, but the Great Huntress of Anacreon and someone very important indeed.

Anacreon in the books is a neo-feudalist kingdom, which wants to carve up Terminus into estates and have peasants work the land, which was as anachronistic in 1942 as it is today. Their representative is a pompous self-styled aristocrat named Anselm haut Roderick. Meanwhile, Anacreon in the TV series is a post-apocalyptic society with a hunting obsession and a taste for leather garb, whose representative is a scarred Xena cosplayer, which is no less anachronistic than the neo-feudalist kingdom of the book.

Since Phara is still not talking, Salvor calls in Hugo, who has more experience with Anacreons and who attempts to intimidate her by flashing his eyes weirdly blue at her. The Thesbian delegation we saw in the first two episodes had those weird blue eyes as well. Finally, Salvor deduces from Phara’s facial scars that she was wounded during the bombing of Anacreon thirty-five years before. And since the bombing killed off half of Anacreons population within a week and another twenty percent within a year, Salvor deduces that Phara lost her family in the bombing, which is why she is so angry. Of course, none of this is really a huge feat of deduction – after all, when faced with the scarred survivor of the devastating war, it’s likely that they’ve lost someone.

Eventually, Phara also reveals what the Anacreons want from the Foundation. Cause it turns out that they really just want the navigational device from the Foundation’s colony ship, since the devastated Anacreon is no longer capable of supporting its much reduced population, so the Anacreons want to use what ships they have to look for greener pastures. However, they have no navigation tech. So apparently, navigation technology will take the place of nuclear power in the TV show.

As for the Empire killing off seventy percent of the population of Anacreon (and Thesbis), we already knew that the ex-Brother Day, now Brother Dusk revelled in his intergalactic tyrant role and that genocide and mass executions were exactly the sort of thing he would do. However, I do think that Demerzel needs to have her positronic brain examined, because she seems to have forgotten about the Three Laws of Robotics.  Of course, the Zeroth Law, the one that Demerzel/Daneel and their old pal Giscard came up with, allows them to occasionally let humans come to harm, if this is for the good of all humanity. However, killing off millions of innocents clearly isn’t beneficial for the good of all humanity.

Lewis Pirenne, the head of the Encyclopedists, also shows up to question Phara, with even less success than Salvor. Now Lewis Pirenne is a character who also exists in the books and is actually Salvor’s chief antagonist. He’s also the closest to his book counterpart, because Lewis Pirenne is an incompetent arsehole in the books and an incompetent arsehole in the series.

While the Anacreons are gathering outside the fence and turn out to be a lot more than expected, Salvor, Lewis, Hugo and Salvor’s parents are debating what to do. Salvor experiences another weird episode, a flashback where she finds herself in the Imperial Library on Trantor – the place where Gaal Dornick first met Hari Seldon.  She also sees the mysterious phantom kid she’s been chasing again, only this time the kid turns around and is a black boy wielding a knife. It’s a knife we’ve seen before, wielded by Raych, when he murdered his adoptive father Hari Seldon (something the show still hasn’t addressed). Salvor has never met Raych, so she’s clearly having visions of the past.

Now Salvor Hardin in the books is a very shrewd and intelligent, but otherwise perfectly ordinary person. He is no one whose coming was foretold by Seldon, because psychohistory cannot predict the actions of individuals, just general trends – a fact that the TV show repeatedly notes. And the books make it clear that if Salvor Hardin wouldn’t have been the mayor of Terminus City who came up with a way to hold the Four Kingdoms at bay, someone else would have done it.

Salvor in the TV series, on the other hand, is special, as we are repeatedly told. TV Salvor also obviously has psychic powers of some kind, as Camestros Felapton notes in his review of this episode. Now telepathy exists in the Foundation universe – the original stories were published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, after all. However, telepathy is very rare in the Foundation universe. The only humans who have it are the Mule and the Second Foundation (and Raych’s daughter Wanda in the prequels). R. Daneel Olivaw also acquires telepathy from his pal R. Giscard.

Book Salvor Hardin, however, has no psychic abilities of any kind – and TV Salvor seems to be some kind of clairvoyant rather than a telepath, an ability that is never mentioned at all in the Foundation series. I honestly have no idea why the TV series felt the need to make Salvor psychic and super-special in general. In fact, Salvor is so special and different that Lewis Pirenne wonders whether her mere existence might not upset the Seldon Plan. Hold that thought, Lewis, and jot it down somewhere, cause it will come in handy in approx. two hundred years, when the Foundation meets the Mule.

The episode ends with the Anacreons assembling a very big gun outside the forcefield fence and preparing to fire at Terminus city. Meanwhile, a mysterious spaceship picks up the escape pod in which Gaal Dornick has been lying in suspended animation for thirty-five years now.

It was obvious that the TV series could not adapt “Foundation”/”The Encyclopedists” as it is, because the story is a little dull and not very cinematic and dated, too. That said, a lot of the storytelling choices just make zero sense.

The main conflict in “Foundation”/”The Encyclopedists” is the conflict between the Terminus and Anacreon. But there is also a secondary conflict between the Encyclopedists as represented by Lewis Pirenne, who still believe that their main purpose is compiling the Encyclopedia Galactica to stave off the encroaching dark ages, and the first generation born on Terminus for whom Terminus is their home and who couldn’t care less about the Encyclopedia, a generation that is represented by Salvor Hardin in the books. The conflict between these two fractions is compelling enough IMO, especially since it signals the turn of the Foundation away from the Encyclopedia Galactica (though it’s notable that the Encyclopedia does get written eventually, since it provides the epigraphs for the stories) to becoming the bastion of knowledge and kernel of the second empire or whatever will arise from the ashes of the dark ages. And indeed, the TV show hints at this conflict by putting Salvor at odds not just with Lewis Pirenne, but also with her Enyclopedist parents. I just don’t understand why we need to add layers of specialness and psychic powers to Salvor, when book Salvor never needed more than his wits.  Why not simply have Salvor be what they are in the books, namely a highly intelligent person and the representative of the generation for whom Terminus is home and who don’t give a damn about the Encyclopedia, but care very much what happens to Terminus? With the added threat of the Anacreons, that would be conflict enough.

Foundation has been renewed for a second season, which is a very good thing, because considering the glacial pace at which the show moves (at least three episodes for a short novelette), the first season probably won’t even get through the first book. Also note that we haven’t had any casting news for Hober Mallow or Limmar Ponyets. And I really want to see Hober Mallow engaging in some nude sunbathing and cigar smoking with his male friend. I also want to see Bel Riose (finally a reason to dust off the Cleons) and the Mule and Bayta and Arcadia Darrell, etc…

So far the show is still enjoyable enough, though many of the storytelling choices and departures from the books make little sense. I hope that the showrunners will pull everything together eventually and give us a story that is not exactly like the books – because that would neither be possible nor make for good TV – but yet close enough in spirit to be recognisable as Foundation.

 

*I even took my copy of The Caves of Steel to my high school religious education teacher, showed him the biblical references and asked him which chapters of the Bible they referred, because I wantd to read them and had problems finding them. The poor man was very baffled, even though he should have been aware of the translation and transliteration issue. But then, he was not a very good teacher and didn’t know much about his supposed subject either. Also, what sort of religious education teacher sends a student away, when they have a question about the Bible?

First Monday Free Fiction: Ritual Failure

Welcome to the October 2021 edition of First Monday Free Fiction, which goes out on a Tuesday, because I was really busy yesterday and just forgot to post this.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on the first Monday of every month. At the end of the month, I’ll take the story down and post another.

October is the spooky month, so it’s the perfect time to post a spooky story. Of course, I’m still horror-impaired, though I’m getting better, so most of my attempts at writing horror either turn into “Let’s figure out what the ghost/werewolf/vampire/insert monster here wants” or they turn into humour pieces skewering horror tropes.

This month’s story, from the collection Demon Summoning for Beginners, falls into the latter category. And if you want to read all of my spooky stories to date, check out The Spooky Bundle, available exclusively at DriveThruFiction, where you can get all of my attempts at writing horror in one handy bundle at a reduced price.

So follow Lucas, as his attempt to summon a demon goes quite differently than expected.

Ritual Failure

Lucas took a deep breath. Everything was ready.

The altar had been prepared and the ritual circle had been drawn on the basement floor with chalk pilfered from the classroom. A gong had been set up. The candles and the incense — proper church incense and not those joss sticks from the Chinese import store — awaited. The correct page was bookmarked in the ancient grimoire he’d found in the local used book store. Lucas had put on a ceremonial robe that looked only a little bit like the bathrobe it was. The athame was ready — forged of virgin steel as required (though Lucas wasn’t sure if there even was non-virginal steel — after all, who had sex with daggers?). He’d even procured a sacrifice, a clucking chicken that had gifted him with a bonus egg it had laid that afternoon.

Lucas checked his wristwatch. The hour was here, determined by arcane calculations. In its cage, the chicken clucked and idly picked at some grains.

Time to get started. Time to summon a demon, a real bona-fide demon. A demon who would hopefully help Lucas win the heart and undying love of Bethany Morris, the prettiest girl in his class.

Lucas lit the candles and the incense and promptly inhaled a plume of smoke, which caused a violent coughing fit and drove tears into his eyes.

So Lucas had to step out of the circle again to get his inhaler, which he’d forgotten. Of course in theory, you weren’t supposed to leave the circle, once the ritual had started. But then, Lucas hadn’t gotten started yet, not really. All he’d done was light the incense and the candles. And besides, he was extra careful not to smudge the chalk lines that marked the circle.

Once he’d dealt with his inopportune coughing fit, Lucas picked up the grimoire and began to read, solemnly intoning the words. The summoning ritual was in Latin with a bit of Hebrew sprinkled in, as magical rituals tended to be.

Of course, Lucas spoke neither Latin nor Hebrew, so he had absolutely no idea just what he was intoning. He only hoped it wasn’t something terribly embarrassing.

Besides, the guy in the used book store who’d sold him the grimoire had said that most magicians did not actually speak Latin, let alone Hebrew. It was perfectly okay just to recite the words.

So Lucas did just that. He recited the words, struck the gong at the prescribed moments and did his best to ignore the clucking chicken. He did all that and nothing, absolutely nothing happened, except that the chicken began to pick at stray crumbs of ash raining from the incense burner.

After about ten minutes of nothing happening, Lucas began to feel very silly indeed. After all, he was standing here in his bathrobe in the basement, breathing incense fumes that made his asthma flare up and reciting strange words in a language he did not understand, while a chicken offered a running commentary in clicks and clucks.

It was, in a word, ridiculous. And obviously not going to work, because there was no sign of a demon, not even the faint smell of brimstone, whatever brimstone was supposed to smell like. Unless it smelled like this godawful stinking church incense he’d bought.

Lucas abruptly stopped and plopped down on his butt in the middle of his magical circle. He looked over at the cage with the clucking chicken and wondered what to do with it now. The ritual called for slitting its throat with the athame and spilling its blood on the altar, but Lucas probably could never have brought himself to do that anyway. The chicken was a living creature, after all, and Lucas was just too damned soft-hearted to kill it, demon summoning ritual or not.

Maybe he could just keep the chicken as a pet. After all, he’d always wanted a pet. And fresh eggs every morning would sure be nice and a welcome change from last night’s stale pizza.

So he reached for the cage and got to his feet. “Sorry, pal,” he said to the chicken, “I wasn’t really going to slit your throat, you know? No hard feelings, okay?”

And then, as he was just about to leave the circle, the cage with the chicken in hand, the unthinkable happened. A demon appeared in a puff of smoke that stank of the aftermath of a high school chemistry experiment gone wrong.

Okay, so that’s what brimstone was.

“I am Razariel, the Fearsome, and that was the worst Latin I ever heard,” the demon thundered.

The creature looked just like Lucas had expected a demon to look. Blood red skin, yellow eyes, cloven hooves, horns and a spiked tail.

“It’s ‘sacrificio’ with a k-sound, not an s-sound,” the demon continued, clearly infuriated.

Lucas took a step back, stumbled over the altar and promptly landed on his butt, though thankfully still inside the circle. The chicken squeaked in protest.

“I… I beg your pardon,” he stammered.

“Your Latin is absolutely abominable,” the demon continued, “And don’t even get me started on your Hebrew. At any rate, I suspect those strange throat-clearing noises you just made were supposed to be Hebrew. Cause if they were really just throat-clearing, I’d see a doctor about that. What do they teach you kids at school these days?”

“Ahem, I… I took Spanish,” Lucas stammered.

“Well, next time before you summon anybody, learn proper Latin first,” the demon snarled, “And is that a chicken? Let me guess, you wanted to sacrifice it to gain my favour?”

“That was the idea, yes.”

“Do I look like I want a chicken?” the demon demanded, “If I get a hankering for chicken, I go to Kentucky Fried Chicken just like everybody else. But if I’m to be summoned, I at least expect a nice, juicy virgin, preferably two, as a reward.”

The demon sniffed the air.

“Oh dear, you are a virgin,” it said.

Lucas felt himself blushing furiously. “Uhm yes, but…”

“You weren’t planning to sacrifice yourself, were you?”

Lucas shook his head.

“Well, good for you and the chicken here that I’ve just had a nice big, super-spicy burrito and am not hungry anyway. And just a tip, next time you want to summon someone, bring a burrito rather than a live chicken…”

“I… I’ll remember it, thanks.”

The demon sighed, emitting a burp of sulphur in the process.

“All right, so you summoned me. Congratulations. Now tell me what you want, so I can get back to my Narcos binge.”

“Uhm, I… I…”

“Are you brain-damaged or just stupid? You did summon me for a reason, did you? Not just to see if I would show up. Cause I’m warning you, we demons don’t like jokers who summon us just to prove a point.”

“I didn’t,” Lucas said hastily, “I really wanted something.”

The demon tapped its cloved-hoofed foot, while its tail swished back and forth. “Well, what?”

“B… Be… Bethany Morris. I want the undying love of Bethany Morris.”

The demon rolled its yellow eyes. “That’s all? You summon a demon from hell and interrupt my Narcos binge just to win the heart of some girl? What happened? Was the local occult shop all out of love charms? Or did you accidentally open that grimoire on the wrong page and ended up with a demon summoning spell instead of a love spell?”

“I… It said in there…” Lucas pointed at the grimoire. “…that you would grant me my heart’s desire. And my heart’s desire is the undying love of Bethany Morris.”

The demon emitted another sulphurous sigh. “Humans. So predictable. You are aware that she’ll probably want to get married and move to the suburbs one day, that the sex will get boring and that she’ll get fat and that she’ll want babies that cry and poop all the time…”

The demon glared at Lucas with its yellow eyes.

“So are you really sure you want Bethany Whatshername and not riches beyond your imagination or everlasting fame or to become the best blues musician of all time or one of the other classic wishes?”

“No, I…” Lucas hesitated for a moment, because fame and fortune and musical talent and riches beyond his imagination really did sound tempting. “…I want the love of Bethany Morris.”

“All right then…”

The demon made a few strange gestures that looked a bit like interpretative dance and mumbled some words in what Lucas presumed was correctly pronounced Latin. Or maybe it was correctly pronounced Hebrew.

“There. That’s it,” the demon said with a toothy smile, “Now go find Bethany Whatshername and talk to her, which is what you should have done in the first place. Maybe tell her you summoned a demon to win her love, cause that’s sure to impress her.”

The demon looked Lucas up and down with its yellow eyes.

“On the other hand, maybe not. Anyway, if we’re all done now, then good-bye and all that jazz. Narcos awaits.”

The demon vanished in a puff of foul-smelling smoke.

When it was gone and Lucas had stopped coughing, he turned to the chicken.

“All right, so do you think I should call Bethany?”

The chicken clucked once. Lucas decided to take that as a yes.

The End

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

Foundation Meets “The Mathematician’s Ghost”

I’m still not sure, if this will be an ongoing series of episode by episode reviews, but I did watch the third episode of Foundation, though the review is a little late, because I was also at the virtual Octocon this weekend (a con report is coming). Meanwhile, Reviews of previous episodes of Foundation (well, just two so far) as well as two actual Foundation stories may be found here BTW.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

The third episode of Foundation takes a step forward to the very first Foundation story – entitled only “Foundation”, when it was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942, but known to those of us who have read the book versions as “The Encyclopedists”. But in order to take that step forward, the show first takes a step back four hundred years in time (Foundation only deal in centuries) to the very first Emperor Cleon who was so eager to cling to power that he cloned himself. And so the episode opens with Cleon I (Terrence Mann in old age make-up) observing the Skybridge space elevator being built, Demerzel/Daneel by his side. Cleon I is dying and he knows it. He wishes that he could stand on the docking platform atop the Skybridge with Demerzel, but Demerzel will stand there with another Cleon.

Fast forward some 419 years and Demerzel is standing next to another dying Emperor, namely the Brother Dusk from the first two episodes (also played by Terrence Mann in old age make-up). Nineteen years have passed since the terrorist attack on the Skybridge (and we still don’t know who’s responsible, since the Anacreonian and Thesbian fall guys clearly didn’t do it) and the Imperial Threesome is about to shift forward. The next Brother Dawn is about to be decanted (literally, since the Emperors are grown in artificial wombs watched over by Demerzel who sings lullabyes to them), which means that there is one surplus Emperor, because there can only ever be three. Why can there only ever be three? There’s no real explanation beyond the fact that more Emperors would mean either hiring more similar looking actors or spending more time and money on old age make-up.

So the episode follows the soon to be ex-Brother Dusk through his last day in the universe. Brother Dusk is still working on the massive mural he’s been working on for decades – in fact, he is known as Cleon XI the Painter – putting some finishing touches on the mural. He has his death robes fitted and talks to Demerzel who assures him that she will remember him, because she remembers everything. She also tells him that all the Cleons are different and that they all leave her too soon.

This bit is interesting, because it explains why Demerzel supports that whole cloning enterprise. Because Daneel/Demerzel is approximately twenty thousand years old at this point and has seen countless people die, including people who meant something to her. And she can remember them all, which means she’s probably still mourning them all, too. Because no matter what Daneel/Demerzel was in the beginning, by now she is very much a sentient, feeling being. And mourning all the people she lost over twenty thousand years must be traumatic to her. Hell, she’s probably still mourning Elijah Baley, who was after all Daneel’s first human. Even in the books, it was always clear how important Elijah was to Daneel. And if Daneel always had a female body in this version of Foundation, this would also put an interesting spin on her relationship with Elijah.

So the whole Imperial cloning scheme may well be Daneel/Demerzel’s desperate attempt to finally get to keep a human she cares about, only to see him dying over and over again  in slight variations. In his review of the episode, Camestros Felapton also goes into Daneel/Demerzel’s role in Foundation and whether he/she will turn out to be humanity self-appointed guardian, as in the books, or the series’ main villain. I really hope they won’t make Daneel/Demerzel the main villain, because that would completely undermine what is the most important character in Asimov’s whole oevre.

The robot who can’t come to terms with the fact that his humans keep aging and dying is actually pure Asimov. It just isn’t Foundation, but the basic plot of “The Bicentennial Man”, only that the humans who keep aging and dying are not clones, but the robot’s family, the Martins.

Brothers Day and Dawn as well as Demerzel also take the aged Brother Dusk for one last flight up to the Skybridge docking platform, which is still orbiting Trantor, complete with a hologram of the Emperor in his Lee Pace form welcoming the non-existent visitors. However, the orbit of the platform is decaying, so it needs to to destroyed. And if you needed any confirmation that the Empire is in decline, the fact that they haven’t even gotten rid of the ruined docking platform (not switched off the hologram), let alone started to build a replacement space elevator in nineteen years certainly is proof.

After the flight to the docking platform,  the now ex-Brother Dusk is met by the newly ascended Brother Dusk, Brother Day (the Brother Dawn kid from the first two episodes) and the newly decanted Brother Dawn, who’s still a baby being held by Demerzel and the new Brother Day (Lee Pace briefly forgets that he’s supposed to be an intergalactic tyrant and just bobs around the baby, clearly enjoying himself). The former Brother Dusk is now Brother Darkness. He steps into a disintegration chamber (“Thanks for all your hard work for the Empire, now die.”) and is reduced to ashes, which are smeared onto the forehead of the new Brother Dawn. The baby is then placed in a crib underneath the mural his predessor so painstakingly painted.

Fast forward another fifteen years and the now teenaged Brother Dawn is having servants erase the mural (and Brother Dusk’s hard work), because he claims to have outgrown it. So much for rejecting tradition.

These scenes, which take up almost half the episode, are genuinely moving and well acted. However, they also have fuck all to do with Foundation and their only purpose seems to be to remind viewers that time has passed and that the Emperors Three they’re about to see are not the same people as in the first two episodes. Never mind that the story already made the cloning concept clear and that a simple caption would have done the job just as well and left more room for the main story, namely what the Foundation is doing on Terminus.

The Terminus section is introduced by a voiceover courtesy of Lou Llobell, the actress who plays Gaal. So she is the narrator’s voice we’ve heard all along, which suggests that Gaal – a one-of character in a single short story in the original – will be around at least until the time of the Mule.

If you were wondering what happened to Gaal and what happened to Raych, after he murdered his adoptive father at the end of the previous episode, well, keep wondering, because the episode doesn’t tell us. However, Raych is no longer around, when the Encyclopedists finally reach Terminus, which suggests that he was thrown out of the nearest airlock. Nonetheless, I wonder why they had to have that dramatic out-of-character murder at all, when they’re not even going to address it. “Hari Seldon died of old age en route to Terminus” would have worked just as well.

We get a few brief scenes of the Foundationers arriving on Terminus, finding the Vault already there and finding themselves unable to go near it. The Foundationers have no idea what the Vault is, whether it’s an alien artefact (nope, Foundation is set in a purely human universe) or a probe sent ahead by the Empire to spy on them. Of course, those of us who have known the books know what the Vault is, though in the books the Vault is in Terminus City and sealed by a timelock controlled by an atomic clock. Of course, the big question is how did the Vault get to Terminus. Did Hari send it ahead? Was it the doing of the Second Foundation?

We now get a timelapse sequence of the Foundationers scuttling their colony ship and using the parts to build their city, which looks like any Star Wars frontier town. It’s somewhat more primitive than the Terminus City of the books, but then Asimov never really payed much attention to how Terminus was settled and also underestimated the difficulties the colonists would face. It’s probably no surprise that the western is one genre Asimov never dabbled in, though he otherwise tried to write his way through the Dewey Decimal System.

We also meet Salvor Hardin again and learn that she (Leah Harvey is non-binary, but Salvor Hardin is female in the series, so I’m using she/her pronouns) is a member of the first generation born on Terminus, the daughter of two of the original settlers whom we already saw in the previous episode. This Salvor appears to be younger than her book counterpart. She’s also not the Mayor of Terminus, that’s her Dad, but the Warden of Terminus, who watches the perimeter, chases around stray kids and defends the town against the entirely non-Asimovian aliens monsters that inhabit Terminus. Salvor’s Mom is a senior Encyclopedist.

Like all teenagers, Salvor rebels against her parents. She has zero interest in the encyclopedia and thinks that her parents’ faith in Hari Seldon is akin to a cult. She’s not wrong either. Salvor’s Dad swears by Seldon’s ghost at one point and about the only thing in Terminus City that’s not needed for bare survival is a big statue of Hari Seldon in the town square, a statue that resembles the Lenin statues once found on every town square in Eastern Europe, as Paul Levinson points out in his review.

In the books, Salvor Hardin as the representative of the civilian government of Trantor is opposed to the Encylopedists, but it’s a political, not a personal opposition. Salvor’s main antagonist in the original story is Lewis Pirenne, head of the Board of Trustees of the Encyclopedia Galactica. Lewis Pirenne exists in the show and is just as much a jerk as he is in the original story. However, the conflict between Salvor and her parents, most notably her mother, doesn’t exist in the books and is apparently an attempt to give the character’s conflict a personal dimension. In his review at The AV-Club, Nick Wanserski notes that after Gaal Dornick’s opposition to her parents’ anti-science religion, this is already the second time that Foundation turns a general social or religious conflict into a family drama. I guess just as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everybody in Foundation has parent issues.

I suspect the idea behind Salvor’s parent issues is to give the character more of a personality, because in the books, Salvor Hardin is very much a cypher. Book Salvor is a fount of aphorisms and a shrewd politician, who happens to be on the right side during the first ever Seldon crisis. We learn pretty much nothing else about Book Salvor except that he uses male pronouns, is big and broad and smokes cigars. Turning Salvor Hardin into a black woman changes absolutely nothing about the character, because Salvor Hardin has none.

While I’m perfectly fine with giving Salvor more of a personality than he/she had in the original stories, one thing that irks me is that Salvor – just like Gaal Dornick before her – is portrayed as somehow special. Because this undermines the whole point of Foundation. Because psychohistory is all about using large populations and general trends to predict future outcomes, which Hari Seldon actually explains in episode 1 of the series. Psychohistory is very much an antidote to the great man (and it’s almost always men) theory of history, which was still prevalent in the 1940s, when the stories were written, because no one individual truly matters in psychohistory, it’s the sum of all individuals that matter.

As a result, none of the various protagonists of the Foundation stories are in any way special. Gaal Dornick, Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow, Limmar Ponyets, Bayta Darrell are not special. They’re just people who happened to be in the right place at the right time. However, if none of them had ever been born, the events would still have happened with different protagonists.

There’s only one character in the Foundation stories who’s special and that’s the Mule. And the very reason he’s special, namely random mutation which has made him a powerful telepath, is also the reason why Hari Seldon could neither foresee his existence nor prepare for it. Being special is not a good thing in the Foundation universe.

Therefore, I wonder why the screenplay is falling over its own feet to tell us how very special Salvor Hardin is. It seems as if every second line in the Terminus scenes is “She’s different”, “She’s special” and the like. For Salvor is the only one who can approach the Time Vault without succumbing to nosebleeds and fainting spells. And once, as a child, she even claimed that the Vault was calling to her. In the series, Salvor is special the way Gaal was/is special, even though neither of them was special in the books. Book Salvor and Book Gaal are very intelligent and shrewd people, but special they’re not.

Salvor’s parents, who know that being special is not a good thing in the Foundation universe, keep Salvor’s specialness a secret, though the rest of the Foudationers suspect anyway. At one point, Salvor’s Mom even tries to figure out what it is that makes Salvor special and hands her the dodecahedron that holds Hari Seldon’s plan, the plan no one could understand except Hari Seldon himself and Gaal Dornick, neither of whom are available anymore. Salvor’s Mom also manages to speak about Hari’s death without even uttering the word “murder”. Alas, Salvor can’t make heads nor tail of the calculations. She’s special, but not in that way.

The plot of the Terminus section very loosely follows the plot of the very first Foundation story written, entitled simply “Foundation”, when it was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942, and “The Encyclopedists”, when it was republished as part of the first Foundation book. The reason that this episode follows the plot only loosely is that “Foundation”/”The Encyclopedists” is full of beginning writer issues (Asimov was twenty-two, when he wrote it) and also not very thrilling.

Because “Foundation”/”The Encyclopedists” essentially consists of a series of meetings of men discussing the plot. First, we have Salvor Hardin squaring off against Lewis Pirenne, head of the Encyclopedists, who only cares about his encyclopedia and wants Salvor to leave him alone with his concerns about the newly independent Anacreon and Smyrno. Then, we have Salvor reluctantly welcoming one Anselm haut Roderik, a delightfully pompous envoy from Anacreon. Next we have Anselm haut Roderik, Salvor Hardin and Lewis Pirenne meeting, whereby Anselm haut Roderik tries to pressure the Foundation allowing itself to be annexed by Anacreon, while Salvor Hardin slyly tries to figure out what the true intentions of Anacreon are and also where their weaknesses lie. Finally, we have various Foundation dignities gathering in the Time Vault just in time for Hari Seldon’s hologram to show up and explain the plot to everybody, without actually offering a solution (Hari is just as helpful as Gandalf in that regard). The story literally ends with Salvor declaring that he has found the solution to their dilemma – impending annexion by Anacreon or another equally aggressive neighbour – and that it’s very obvious – without telling us what it is. Asimov supposedly ending the story without supplying the resolution to force Campbell to buy the sequel “Bridle and Saddle” a.k.a. “The Mayors”.

It’s pretty obvious that this story will not make a good TV episode as is, so “The Mathematician’s Ghost” only borrows the basic premise that Anacreon is getting uppity and Salvor is the only one who can see the danger. Meanwhile, Salvor also notices that the repellant field around the Vault seems to be expanding – almost as if the Vault is waking up. Which it is – after all, Hari Seldon’s hologram needs to dispense its sage advice.

Salvor’s regular routine of patrolling Terminus is relieved by the arrival of a Thesbian trader named Hugo who supplies the Foundationers with everything from onions to Korellian chocolate (The Korellian Republic will become relevant in “The Big and the Little” a.k.a. “The Merchant Princes”). But for Salvor, Hugo (Daniel MacPherson) isn’t just a source of rare goods, he’s also a welcome distraction, because the two of them happen to be lovers. Since Salvor Hardin barely has a personality in the original stories, we also never learn about his love life. But TV Salvor is an adult woman, so more power to her for having a pleasant no strings attached affair with a trader, even if Hugo is a tad old for her (and he is older than he looks due to suspended animation – foreshadowing). We even get the requisite sex scene for those who want Foundation to be Game of Thrones and who only watched the latter for the sex scenes. There’s also nothing wrong with the sex scene, though it still feels jarring to me in Foundation of all things, because the original stories are so very sexless.

At night, Salvor wakes up with weird premonitions of doom – she’s special, you see? – and goes on a patrol round. She chases a mysterious kid to the wreck of the scuttled colony ship, meets an alien critter called a bishop’s claw (still more of a Star Wars than an Asimov idea) and chances to spot a strange ship heading for Terminus. A magical telescope reveals that there is not one but three ships and that they are Anacreonian gunships. Hugo wants to get the hell out of Terminus and take Salvor with him, but Salvor wants to defend her home, only that the Foudationers have barely any weapons. Lewis Pirenne wants to call the Empire for help – after all, Terminus is an Imperial outpost and Anacreon officially disgraced. However, when Lewis Pirenne and the rest of the Encyclopedists try calling the Empire for help, they receive no reply. Apparently, communication lines are already breaking down.

Salvor, meanwhile, chases the mystery kid into the scuttled colony ship again and finds the bishop’s claw wounded, with an arrow in its side. This is rather alarming, because there are no arrows on Terminus except in the Encyclopedists’ store of primitive technology to preserve for the coming fall. Soon thereafter, Salvor finds herself faced by a squad of Anacreonians. Thankfully, they seem to have given up their tree cosplay. They’re also threatening her with bow and arrows! Cue credits.

The central idea behind the first two Foundation stories is that Anacreon, Smyrno, Thesbis and the fourth kingdom whose name I have forgotten have experienced technological decline in the fifty years (thirty-five in the show) since they declared themselves independent from the Empire/were kicked out of the Empire. More precisely, the Four Kingdoms no longer have nuclear power, whereas Terminus, having been settled by Encyclopedia nerds, does. Salvor Hardin tickles this information out of Anselm haut Roderick during their meeting. The solution to the threat posed by the Four Kingdoms is that the Foundation uses their superior technology to both hold them off and kindly offer to share the miracle of nuclear power with its neighbours, provided they convert to a sham religion the Foundation uses to control them.

Of course, this plotline will have to be altered, because nuclear power is now a failed cold war era technology and no longer something that promises miracles (as Asimov realised earlier than most, because nuclear optimism vanishes abruptly from his stories after 1945). However, you could easily insert another advanced technology – nano-tech, fusion reactors, magical handwavium – in place of nuclear power. Of course, technologies and knowledge just being lost and forgotten is a lot less likely in general these days than it was after the fall of the Roman Empire or even in the 1940s (a lot of German research into transgender people was irrevocably lost, because the Nazis burned the research results and there were no copies), because there will always be multiple copies of papers, books, etc… stories in various archives both online and off. Even if the whole world decided to abandon nuclear power and switch off all reactors tomorrow, we could still build new reactors in fifty or hundred years, should we want to, because all the papers, blueprints, etc… will still be available in archives around the world. This is probably also why the show bombed Anacreon and Thesbis to smithereens, to accelerate the technology loss.

However, the Anacreonians fighting with bow and arrow, even though they have gunships is just anachronistic. Yes, the spaceships are probably a legacy technology – and indeed later Foundation stories confirm that the now independent outer reaches of the Empire are using legacy technology. And yes, apparently Anacreon has no more metal than Terminus. But bow and arrow, really? If the Anacreonians have legacy spaceships, surely they have a few legacy firearms lying around. As for ammunition, during WWI and WWII everything that was not bolted down and many things that were, e.g. statues (Bremen lost this statue of Gustav Adolf of Sweden and this statue of Wilhelm I to WWII metal drives among other things), were melted down to make ammunition. Surely, Anacreon has a few surplus statues of Creon lying around.

That said, I do hope that the TV show will keep the sham religion plot, simply because it’s such a typical 1940s Astounding idea (also see Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber) and also illustrates how the Foundation inevitably wins by brain over brawn (because they have barely any brawn) and how ruthless they can be. Besides, you can’t really tell either “The Wedge” or “The Big and the Little” without the sham religion plot.

However, I do think that the episode ends too early. First of all, we don’t even get to meet “The Mathematician’s Ghost”, namely Hari Seldon’s hologram. And in general, it would have been much more satisfying, if the episode had ended where the original story ended, namely with Salvor Harding proclaiming that he/she has the solution and that it’s obvious. But then, the episode spent so much time on the Emperor plot, which was interesting enough, but barely relevant, that they shortchanged the actual Terminus plot.

Still, I’ll be interested to see how they update the plot of “Foundation” and “Bridle and Saddle” for the 21st century.