Fixing Tron Legacy (Includes some Spoilers)

A couple days ago I reviewed Tron Legacy and pointed out some of the problems with the story. I really wanted to like this movie.  It's beautiful.  The look of the movie really resonates with me.

In today’s post, I’ll propose a way to partially fix it. Of course, I don’t pretend to solve all the problems here; I’m a random amateur and not a professional screen writer. And I’m not constrained by budgets or anything like that, so I have a little more freedom.

I should note that this post includes spoilers for Tron Legacy. If you plan to see the movie and want to be surprised, skip the rest of this post.
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In Tron Legacy, CLU was created by Flynn and charged with pursuing perfection within the system. He goes beyond that role and becomes an evil dictator within the system assuring that it runs perfectly. Ultimately he wants to leave the digital world and move into the real world for some reason. He even has has a sycophant and entourage for some reason. The only way he can break into the real world, though, is by getting Flynn’s disk so he has the information and skill needed to make the leap through the portal separating the two worlds

I’m not sure what they mean by perfection; the world of the grid with its nightclubs and rebels certainly doesn’t seem perfect. That’s kind of the point of the movie, though -- perfection is unknowable.

To fix it, we need to slightly change the nature of CLU. To begin wihth, CLU needs to be more Borg and less Klingon.

Beyond that, CLU was created by Flynn in Fynn’s image. We need to treat CLU as part of Flynn. In the movie they tell us that Flynn stopped fighting CLU because it made him more powerful. Maybe they were already going down that path.

If they are parts of each other in the Grid, then CLU has the same performance skills as Flynn. He can execute the same tasks, perform the same actions, and know the same things. He basically download Flynn’s knowledge at time of creation. But because he is a program, and not a user, he lacks one thing -- creativity. CLU cannot develop new skill or tactics. He can’t envision how to do new things. Code can only do what it’s been told. It can’t learn form new thoughts from its own experience.

Flynn can learn. He can create new ideas. Afterall, he’s human. He’s a user. He’s the maker. The one thing CLU can’t do, Flynn can.

The problem for Flynn is that they are inhernetly connected. They are still, in some respects, one. Anytime Flynn comes up with something new -- an original approach, a new idea, a unique way of seeing the word, CLU learns it too. Flynn can try to fight CLU, but CLU knows everything about fighting that Flynn knows. Anytime Flynn learns a new skill, or thinks he has the upper hand on CLU, CLU suddenly has that skill as well. Now, not only are they continually evenly matched, anything new that CLU learns in battle with Flynn, he can now repurpose into his other efforts. Fighting CLU only makes CLU stronger and makes “life” for other programs even worse.

That’s why Flynn pursues a lifestyle of zen. He needs to keep his mind at peace. He needs to push aggressive thoughts out of his head so he doesn't risk giving new skills to CLU.

Qora becomes more important in this context. She’s a program but with the spontaneous creation story of the Isos we already know she’s different. She’s a program that can learn and can think. Flynn needs to work on educating her without simultaneously educating CLU.

She’s underutilized in the movie. Most of what she does in the movie has noting to do with her Iso nature. That’s what they should exploit more. She can be the one to tell Flynn’s sone more about the history of what happened in the world. She can become more of a guide than she is in Tron Legacy. She can be more of a random factor -- a glitch in the grid.

We can keep the final conflict between CLU and Flynn the way it is. Ultimately the way to defeat him is to join with him -- to reintegrate with CLU.

As part of the bigger picture, the entire grid can be shaped by the conflict between Flynn and CLU. The arrival of Flynn’s son is what breaks the stalemate -- he’s a user not constrained by the limitations of code. He can team with Qora who is not necessarily constrained by the limitations of code, but it largely constrained by her lack of vision. She doesn’t know the world outside the grid. Her intimate knowledge of the grid, and a her abilities, combined with the rogue nature of Flynn, who is not constrained by “knowing”something is impossible is a powerful tool.

I think we can grow Qora’s role even further and make her more like Neo from The Matrix. She’s different and can ultimately break free of the grid, see it in a different way, and finally break free to a different world.

Those structures may not solve all the problems in the movie and the may be a bit derivative of other stories, but they would make Tron Legacy a better movie than it is.

Have you seen Tron Legacy? How would you fix the story?

Movie Review 18: Tron Legacy

On Saturday, The GF, her college roommate, and I went to see Tron Legacy in 3D.  I went in with low expecatations, and I think the movie met them.

This is not a good movie.  It's fun.  It's pretty.  It's entertaining. It has great music  But it's not good.

The problems with this 2+ hour movie are mainly script issues.

The story is a sequel to the orignal Tron from 1982.

In Tron Legacy, Sam Flynn is a goaless, wealthy 27 year old, reluctant to grow up and run the corporattion his is a major shareholder in.  He's disapointed in his father, Kevin Flynn (the main character of the original Tron), who disappeared years ago. He stumbles onto his father's old work station and gets zapped into "the grid." Now he is a program.  But not just a program; he's also a user.  He embarks on quest to survive, find his father, and get back to the real world.

That's when things start to fall apart. Flynn gets captured pretty quickly. Other programs outfit Flynn with the uniform he'll wear in the grid and the assign him a disk.  Is it unusual to have a new program show up with not uniform, lights, and disk?  It would seem likely, but there is no indication of that. Perhaps the nature of the digitla environment is that there is nothing "unusual" to an operting system.  There are just standard procedures.

That's part of the problem.  The film doesn't treat other programs as applications with specific tasks.  It treats them like people, but never clarifies was makes these collections of code individual applications.  It waffles on the fundamental nature of the characters.

Flynn's new outfit glows blues instead of yellow or red so we know he's a good guy. But they don't every tell us why things are those colors.  Is this a program-based decision?  Do they other programs see each others' colors? Is this just a convention to help the audience keep track of the characters?

After getting his new outift and told he must protect and keep his disk, Flynn is immediately sent to an arena to battle other programs for no apparent reason.  At that point, he is supposed to remove his disk and fling it at other programs in an effort to destroy them.  What happens when he takes his disk off?  Nothing, apparently.

The movie goes on and more random things happens.  Characters accomplish tasks that should be hard but just seem to happen.  Flynn meets his father who may or may not have god-like powers. There are plenty of biblical references, Star Wars references, and even a couple Lebowski references.

There is a fundamental problem with the rules of the universe on the grid.  There doens't appear to be an overriding prinicple or physics of the grid. Characters do things that are impossible in our world, which is fine, but we are never really told what is possible or real in the grid.  How do characters alter their environment?  Are there things they can't do?  How can the rules change?  What is the nature of Flynns?  How are users different from programs?  How do programs interact?

I'm not suggesting we need 15 minutes of exposition to tells us all of this.  We can pick it up from the characters' interactions if we know the foundation.  The problem is I don't get the sense that there is an over-riding rule book used in the creation of the world.

The lines in the script are often trite. The dialog isn't strong enough to make up for the confusion and missing plot elements.  It feels like it's full of short cuts.

Part of this may simply be timing.  In the past 30 years, a lot has happened that the original Tron script did not need to deal with.   Tron's style and design was revolutionary in 1982.  It dealt with concepts of data, avatars, and the desire of information to be free in a way the movie-going public had never seen before.  It was rare to have a computer at home and even rarer the have a way to connect it to other computers.  At the conecptual level it was mind-bendingly awesome.  In the time since then, computer technology has become part of mainstream culture.  While much of the culture remains suspicious of new technology, it also lives with it every day.

Those of us in the technology industry live even closer with the digital culture.  While the first Tron showed us a world that could be, Tron Legacy shows us a world that we know does not exist.  Reality has gotten in the way of the Tron world creation.

In addition to the changes in the real world, our movie culture changed, too.  In 1982 we were still dealing with the new Sci-Fi blockbuster format.  Sure, we had the first two Star Wars movies, and Tron came out the same year as Star Trek II and Blade Runner, but we still hadn't seen the movies that come to show us more about the possibilites of digital effects and digital integration with our lives.  War Games, Hackers, and The Matrix still had not some out.  William Gibson had not yet published Neuromancer and Neil Stephenson had not yet published Snow Crash. Tron was leaving its footprints in a field covered with fresh snow.

Tron Legacy tries to do the same thing, but the digital pop culture landscape is by now well trod.  Tron Legacy has to do more to tell us about how its digital landscape is different than the ones we have already seen and lived in.  In short, the bar is higher in 2011 than is would have been in 1984.

That said, this is an undeniably beautiful film  The production design is fantastic.  The updates to the original Tron look-and-feel are well done.  I really like the aesthetic of the simple neon lines on black.  The look if rife with possibilities and still looks futuristic, rather than dated.

The 3D effect is nice; the film is only 3D in the digital world.  Even then it's not necessary.  There aren't many 3D effects that are striking and you can easily enjoy the view in 2D.

Part of the buzz for the film was on the score, by Daft Punk.  The GF was initially sceptical, since the soundtrack does not sound like the traditional stuff Daft Punk does.  In the movie though, it's excellent.  The movie and sound is very well done.

The bottom line is that if you want a fun, entertaining, somewhat forgettable film, check out Tron Legacy.  It's good popcorn fare.  If you're looking for a picture that says something interesting or that has a good story, that's not Tron Legacy.

But it sure is pretty.

Book Review 59: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake. Or anyhow so it must seem to them.

Page 98

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K Dick is one of those books that any fan of Sci-Fi should read at some point. It is also the basis for the movie Bladerunner (which has been recut and released at least 4 times).

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed the other Dick novel I read (A Scanner Darkly), but it was still a good read.

The book follows Richard Deckard, an android (or “andy”) hunter for what’s left of the San Francisco police department. Much of the human population has either died off or migrated to Mars. Most of the animal population has also died off; only the wealthy can afford pets. Those with less money can have a robotic pet, like the titular Electric Sheep. They look like normal animals and require similar upkeep, but they are still robots.

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a subform of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him.

Page 42

Androids serve humans on Mars and are not allowed on Earth. Deckard and his colleagues hunt and destroy androids that escape to San Francisco. The trick is distinguishing them from humans. To distinguish them, they conduct a series of tests designed to measure empathy. As new androids get developed, however, they also do a better job of passing the tests. Separating them from humans becomes an even bigger challenge.

“On the test or otherwise. Everything that gives it a different quality. And then I report back and the association makes modifications of its zygote-bath DNS factors. And we then have the Nexus-7. And when that gets caught, we modify again and eventually the association has a type that can’t be distinguished.

‘Do you know of the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test?” he asked,

"We’re working on the spinal ganglia, too. Someday the Boneli test will fade into yesterday’s hoary shroud of spiritual oblivion.” She smiled innocuously—at variance with her words. At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait, possibly, he thought. No emotional awareness, no feeling-sense of the actual meaning of what she s said. Only the hollow, formal, intellectual definitions of the separate terms.

Page 190

It’s a frustrating and never-ending cycle of development and destruction. Whether Dick is talking about people, androids, or animals, the same cycle persists.

“It’s not just false memory structures,” Phil Resch said. “I own an animal; not a false one but the real thing. A squirrel. I love the squirrel, Deckard; every goddamn morning I feed it and change its papers—you know, clean up its cage—and then in the evening when I get off work I let it loose in my apt and it runs all over the place. It has a wheel in its cage; ever seen a squirrel running inside a wheel? It runs and runs, the wheel spins, but the squirrel stays in the same spot. Buffy seems to like it, though.

“I guess squirrels aren’t too bright,” Rick said.

They flew on, then, in silence.

Page 128

The entertainment in the society is equally as bleak. There is basically one show on TV -- a talk show. It runs for days at a time.

“I’ll sit in the hotel room,” he said, “and watch Buster Friendly on TV. His guest for the last three days has been Amanda Werner. I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.”

Page 183

The dominant religion is Mercerism. Its followers experience it by interfacing with a virtual reality machine, and they continually walk up hill with Mercer and get pelted with rocks. The rocks leave bruises in the real world, too.

“Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it’s better to do something wrong than right.”

“It’s the curse on us,” Iran said. “That Mercer talks about.”

Page 242

When folks need to adjust their emotions, they have the option of dialing in on another machine. They can choose what they want to feel for the day.

Dick explores theme of decay, struggle, and identity in this book. Answering the question of, “Who is alive?” is a continuing challenge in the book. It’s not just about which people are androids. It’s also about whether the humans are alive in a spiritual or emotional sense in the wasteland they inhabit. It’s about how they continually wrestle the challenge of decay. Despite the advances in robotics, the humans are clearly on the losing end of the battle with entropy. They fight it, yet still seem resigned to their lives as they are.

In some respects, it’s a book about how technology has simply left the Earth-bound humans behind and gone off without them. It’s not a Luddite book, but it is a dark one.

They themes make it an interesting read. The plot has the twists and turns to keep things moving. Some of the characters are fascinating. And if you are a student of science fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is just one of those books you should be reading, anyway.

While I can’t say I enjoyed it, I can say that I’m glad I read it. And I do recommend reading it. If you’re looking for a happy book, though, this isn’t it.

You can find more of my book reviews here.

Tokyo Travels Part 06: Fraking Cylons on the Sumida River

I saw them in St Louis, and now, they are in Tokyo.

Is it really that much of a surprise that the Cylons have moved there?

Geek Culture Part 02: w00tstock 2.0

On Friday night (2010-05-07) The GF and I ventured out to the epicenter of Geek Culture in Seattle that evening -- w00tstock 2.0 at the Moore theater.  The show, billed as three hours of Geeks and Music was more like 3.5 - 4.0 hours, and was fantastic.

I'd like to write an insightful review of the show, but I can't. There was just too much awesome to break it down.  I'd like to write a detailed commentary on each set.  They were so amazing they deserve it.  But I'd don't think I have the spare brain cycles for that right now.

So here are some quick notes.

Wil Wheaton's reading about his first Rocky Horror Picture show was great.

Paul and Storm killed with "Opening Band" despite being pelted with only two pair of panties (apparently Portland kicked our butts with that the following night).

Molly Lewis had one of the best sets I've seen her do.

Hank Green sang about Star Trek and particle physics.  How could you go wrong?

We heard prerecorded musical interludes featuring George Takei.  Catch his rendition of Springsteen's "Fire" someday.

I hadn't seen MC Frontalot before, but his Locutus meets Dilbert stage outfit was perfect for the audience.  Unfortunately, his audio was poor.  He's a Nerdcore hip-hop artist and the music overwhelmed his voice.  I couldn't understand 90% of his lyrics so the performance lost something.

LoadingReadyRun had some great sketches.

Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse explained just what sort of folks he deals with enforcing community standards in the XBox Live universe.  It was a surprisingly hysterical performance.

And Adam Savage, who just seems to love this audience, regaled us with tales from Mythbusters and Jamie impressions.

The show felt different than the one I saw in San Francisco.  It felt a little less personal. Then again, there were probably more than 1000 people in the theater, which can't help but have a negative impact on the intimacy.  At the same time, that lager crowd also made the whole show bigger.  So it was no better or worse than San Francisco -- just different.

The performers released the show under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-alike license and encourage recording and rebroadcast.  I manged to record about 60% of it before my camera batteries died.  So if you want to experience the show from 6 rows back, and don't mind a little shaky camera work and an annoying laugh, watch any or all of the 22 clips below.

And when w00tstock 2.x comes to your town (next up are Minneapolis and Chicago) just go.



w00tstock Seattle Part 1




w00tstock 2.0 Part 2 -- Opening Band



w00tstock 2.0 Part 3 -- LoadingReadyRun



w00tstock 2.0 Part 4 -- Install Linux



w00tstock 2.0 Part 5 -- Molly Lewis



w00tstock 2.0 Part 6 -- Molly Lewis



w00tstock 2.0 Part 7 -- Molly Lewis and Wikipedia



w00tstock 2.0 Part 08 -- Molly Lewis and Kristen Shirts -- Conjunction Junction



w00tstock 2.0 Part 09 -- James Ernest and Mike Selinker



w00tstock 2.0 Part 10 -- Generic Film



w00tstock 2.0 Part 11 -- Wil Wheaton Rocky Horror Part 1



w00tstock 2.0 Part 12 -- Wil Wheaton Rocky Horror Part 2



w00tstock 2.0 Part 13 -- Wil Wheaton Rocky Horror Part 3



w00tstock 2.0 Part 14 -- Paul Plugs



w00tstock 2.0 Part 15 -- MC Frontalot Part 1



w00tstock 2.0 Part 16 -- MC Frontalot Part 2




w00tstock 2.0 Part 17 -- MC Frontalot Part 3



w00tstock 2.0 Part 18 -- Paul, Storm, and Wil in an Eastern European Lounge Song



w00tstock 2.0 Part 19 -- Hank Green Part 1



w00tstock 2.0 Part 20 -- Hank Green Part 2



w00tstock 2.0 Part 21 -- Recursive Wil and Stephen "Stepto" Toulouse



w00tstock 2.0 Part 22 (of 22) -- Stephen "Stepto" Toulouse Part 2

Original Galactica on NBC

I have one of those ring tones that most people under 30 don't recognize.  When someone calls, and I'd don't have things set to vibrate, the strains of majestic music burst forth from my cell phone. Well, maybe burst is optimisic.  The notes more trickle out of my Samsung A900 (I know, it's time for new phone).

The tense chase is on, and the mind of sci-fi fans from the 70s drift back to that powerful theme as Galactica leads the colonists on a quest for freedom.

The original Battlestar Galactica theme reminds of those days when I longed to pilot a Colonial Viper. 

So I was thrilled to stumble across the NBC Classics site.

You can now watch  full episodes of the original BSG, the original Bionic Woman, the original Knight Rider, the original A-Team, the original Miami Vice, and a few shows they haven't remade yet.

NBC early on "got it" when it came to online video with their current shows, and now it's great to see them bringing back these classics for free. 

If your craving hour-long 70s and 80s drama, check out the site.  Now you can finally satisfy your jones-ing for more Simon and Simon.

FlashForward seems like a winner

I was skeptical at first, but FlashForward is winning me over. This ABC serial drama has an interesting premise, reasonably compelling plot, and a story line that's not too convoluted.  My enthusiasm is mildly dampened by the twist at the end of tonight's episode (don't worry, no spoilers) which seemed a bit too contrived but the show is good enough that I'll let it go.

The premise of FlashForward is that one day, everyone, everywhere in the world suddenly past out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds.  While the were passed out millions died as suddenly out of control cars wrecked, 800+ airplanes crashed, and similar problems popped up when people who operate machinery were as unconscious as everyone else.

But people weren't quite unconscious.  They actually saw 2 minutes and 17 seconds of a date 6 months in the future.  People saw where they were and what they were doing.  They ended up with a memory of the future. When they woke up, they corroborated there stories with one another.

So now the show is about how people deal with this glimpse of the future and the investigators who try to figure out what happened.

I've seen a lot of Star Trek in my time (I know -- shocking, isn't it) and time travel is often badly done with temporal loops and figure 8s that just leave me scratching my head.  Heroes has just gotten awful in its time travel stuff (I'm pulling for Hiro Nakamuara to succeed at what he wants but he's got to stop with the lousy year jumping -- it was a cructch for the show that has atrophied the leg.)

But FlashForward is getting it right so far.

You can debate whether this is a time travel show or not.I find is most interesting as a meditation on predestination.

Now that you know what your future holds, what do you do?  If you don't like it, can you do things now to make sure that future doen't come to pass or are you stuck with it regardless of what you do?  If it is a future you want, can you consciously do things to bring it about?  Or since you know the future, can you not worry about doing things to bring it about because it will happen regardless?

If it's not the future that you want, you may try to change things.  But is it possible to change things and alter the future at all? Or will all attempts to avoid an outcome?

When people know the future, are they compelled to do things they might not otherwise do just to ensure that future comes about?

In that sense, it calls to mind some of the ideas from Bad Monkees -- Omne Mundum Facimus  or "We all make the World."

These are the questions science fiction often tries to answer regarding time travel.  FlashForward is asking them the right way.

So did April 29, 2010 happen the way it did, or did it happen differently than it did?  I imagine we'll get some answers before then.

I can see them coming.


Oh, and be sure to visit The FlashForward Experience and connect with Facebook.  It's pretty trippy.

Book Review 44: Prelude to Foundation

His eyes were watching the Emperor carefully, as though to see how far he might go on his own. "Still, if that be so, one could have any person make the prophecy."

"Not all persons would be equally believed, Demerzel. A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone."

Page 5

There is a big hole in my Science Fiction reading. I have read very little Asimov. It's time to start changing that and get back to the original cannon.

Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov is the fist book in the Foundation series, the second to last one written in the Foundation series, and, according to Wikipedia, the 9 book in the Asimov Foundation universe.

The Foundation novels began as short stories in the 40s, became a trilogy of novels in the 50s, and expanded beyond that through the rest of the century. If you would like to know more about the way the Foundation novels were written, you can get an overview here.

Prelude to Foundation is an intellectual novel. It is a story less about characters and plot, and more about ideas and concepts. There's some suspense, sure, and I wanted to know what happened next. But I didn't feel a visceral connection to the fate of the characters. Knowing a little bit about where the series is going made the characters a bit larger than life - historical heroes, rather than normal people struggling against the odds.

The story takes place in the Galactic Empire, thousands of years in the future. Humanity populates hundreds of thousands of worlds, and Earth is merely a legend few people have heard about.

The novel opens with the Emperor discussing things with his top aid, and conversation turns to the topic of a mathematician.

Hari Seldon is a young mathematician who presents a paper about his new theoretical framework -- psychohistory. The goal of psychohistory is to mathematically predict the future by studying the events of the past. It's a powerful idea that has some challenges:

• It's theoretical.
• It can only predict major changes.
• It requires huge amounts of input data.
• It's creator doesn't believe it's possible.

The Emperor wants it to predict his future. Seldon explains it won't work. Chetter Hummin, a reporter, convinces Seldon that he now needs to flee the Emperor and hide in the sub-societies of the Empire's home world.

Thus we get a chase novel that visits strikingly distant societies while Seldon pushes the boundaries of law and tradition to determine if his psychohistory might really be possible.

The story and plot appealed to my intellectual curiosity, which makes it quite different from a lot of the other novels I read. In that respect, Asimov is the complete opposite ofHaruki Murakami.

Normally I write these review a week or two after reading the book. In this case it's been about a month and a half. While I did mark a number of interesting passages at the time, they've become more interesting to me as their context has started to fade.

Asimov says a lot of things about human nature and modern society. And he uses different anecdotes within the novel to symbolize the broader direction the novel is going. And sometimes he gets too blunt with that.

"What can we do? We test constantly for any mutations that may spring up, any new viruses that may appear, any accidental contamination or alteration of the environment. It rarely happens that we detect anything wrong, but if we do, we take drastic action. The result is that bad years are very few and even bad years affect only fractional bits here and there. The worst year we've ever had fell short of the average by only 12 percent—though that was enough to produce hardship. The trouble is that even the most careful forethought and the most cleverly designed computer programs can't always predict what is essentially unpredictable."

(Seldon felt an involuntary shudder go through him. It was as though she was speaking of psychohistory—but she was only speaking of the microfarm produce of a tiny fraction of humanity, while he himself was considering all the mighty Galactic Empire in every one of all its activities.)

Page 228-229

The last sentence of the first paragraph makes the point perfectly clear. We don't actually need the parenthetical expression.

The central problem that Seldon encounters is that he is trying to build a model of the entire universe, but the sheer scale of it makes it nearly impossible. It's like when Steven Wright talks about having a map that's 1:1 scale. He can't figure out how to fold it.

"In other words, you can't get any picture of the Universe as a whole except by studying the entire Universe. It has been shown also that if one attempts to substitute simulations of a small part of the Universe, then another small part, then another small part, and so on, intending to put them all together to form a total picture of the Universe, one would find that there are an infinite number of such part simulations. It would therefore take an infinite time to understand the Universe in full and that is just another way of saying that it is impossible to gain all the knowledge there is."

Page 169

Seldon's background is in math, and while it's a powerful field, understanding the future requires understanding the past. So early on Hummin pairs Seldon up with with Dors, a historian, both to protect him, and to help him develop his theories. While he might understand numbers, she has the broader understanding of how politics work and societies evolve.

That's what holds the Empire together. The Outworlds are also less restive when a noticeable portion of the administrators who represent the Imperial government are their own people by birth and upbringing."

Seldon felt embarrassed again. This was something he had never given any thought to. He wondered if anyone could be a truly great mathematician if mathematics was all he knew. He said, "Is this common knowledge?"

"I suppose it isn't," said Dors after some thought. "There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned."

Page 89

This is one of the things I find compelling about this novel. Even though he sometimes does hit the reader over the head with the symbolism, Asimov still includes great commentary on how our own society works.

That last paragraph itself is an interesting commentary on the challenges of information overload in our own digital age, while the first is great description of the importance of parceling out political jobs to a diverse group of supporters.

Asimov comments on how the most beautiful things in the world are, by their very nature temporary. He uses a description of some wonderful snacks to illustrate the point.

She was right. He tried to have the dainty linger in his mouth; he tried licking it carefully; tried biting off a piece. However, the most careful lick destroyed it. When a bit was crunched off a piece, the rest of it disappeared at once. And each taste was undefinable and not quite like the one before.

"The only trouble is," said the Sister happily, "that every once in a while you have a very unusual one and you never forget it, but you never have it again either. I had one when I was nine --" Her expression suddenly lost its excitement and she said, "it's a good thing. It teaches you the evanescence of things of the world."

Page 227

One of my favorite passages describes Seldon's thought process when lost in the wilderness. Staying still was not an option.

What should he do?

If he was facing the wrong direction, there was a chance that light would be visible right or left—and it wasn't. If he had followed the wrong crease, there was no possible way he could return to the copse and locate a different crease.

His only chance lay in the assumption that he was facing the right direction and that the meteorological station was more or less directly ahead of him, but that the meteorologists had gone and had left it in darkness.

Move forward, then. The chances of success might be small, but it was the only chance he had.

Page 128

Many times in life people spend time trying to figure out the best way to go. Choosing the best course of action, or the best path to follow, isn't nearly as important as moving in a "good enough" direction.

Of course if you're actually lost in the woods, staying put is probably the best practice. This is where the metaphorical woods diverges from the literal. If ever you find your self lost in the metaphorical woods, it's best to make a guess about the right direction and to just move forward.

Rescuers will find us in the literal woods; the only ones who can rescue us from the metaphorical woods is ourselves.

And then there are moments in the book that make me think the Matt Groening was an Asimov fan.

"The robot you see near the center was, according to tradition, named Bendar and served twenty-two years, according to the ancient records, before being replaced."

Page 294

Prelude to Foundation is an interesting and long book. If you are a science fiction fan you have probably already read Asimov or you probably should. His influence on the genre is profound, and Prelude to Foundation is a great place to begin exploring that influence.