Well, we're not stopping with songs, as you can see from minternational's first post. Now we're on to what we will refer to as 'literature' (ie not theology or non-fiction). We felt we ought to make that clear to our legions of fans, who now number several more than zero.
I've applied my usual aesthetic criterion: if I was stuck on a desert island/in a cave/in an attic avoiding relatives, which books would I want with me? So in countdown fashion, here's the first of my 15:
#15 Foundation by Isaac Asimov
This is pure SF, as opposed to just flying around in spaceships shooting things, and was some of the first real SF I read. I think it has been justly called the ultimate SF series (it really is a series, but me and minty didn't discuss the validity of series, so I'm plumping for volume1).
The central hypothesis is brilliant and simple, the more so for being invented way before modern statistical analysis. Hari Seldon discovers that given a big enough clump of humanity, one can actually predict what the future will be. This doesn't work with smaller numbers, but with a quadrillion people in the galaxy it can be done with startling accuracy.
Through this he discovers that the Galactic Empire will collapse and a dark age of 30,000 years will follow (his description of the beginning of the crumbling of empire has always stuck with me: no big wars or the like, just...grass growing through cracks in sidewalks and no one removes it; systems break down and no one fixes them... and in our day and age, when essential services are being withdrawn...hmmmmm).
But what if it could be stopped? Using this science, he develops a way in which the dark age can reduced to 1000 years and creates Foundation to do it. Outwardly it is a repository for all knowledge (50 years before wikipedia), which will be preserved for through the dark age; but unwittingly it is part of Seldon's brilliant plan to insert other dynamics into history in order to proactively limit the darkness...
Against this massive background characters play out stories, and plots unfold. Foundation's Edge is my favourite, but it is an epic sequence of books all round (I think there is one I have not read: to be honest I think Asimov went a bit funny in some ways towards the end of his career and I was starting to get a bit uncomfortable with some of his later stuff).
So there you go!
1 comment:
I really must read the Foundation Trilogy (which might be a quintology by now), it sounds truly excellent.
Did get 'I Robot' not so long back but struggled to get into it. Maybe I ought to watch the film. Or maybe not.
My early reading life was dominated by SF too....well, apart from Enid Blyton.
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