/lit/ - Literature

>>23479429
>Why?

>Hated Herbert's Dune
anti white savior
>Liked Asimov's Foundation
white savior

that's the rub

>>23479429
had no idea, but I've always agreed about dune I never even finished it just thought it was kind of bad never got the reverence for it
I like foundation/asimov though
>>23480030
every autistic catholic loves star trek, i'm sure tolkien would have as well

>Hated Herbert's Dune
>Liked Asimov's Foundation

Why?

>>23455667
I like Asimov but his early stuff aged badly not just in regards to the shallow characters and repetitive plotting, but many of his ideas reflect a outdated historiography/sociology (the Foundation trilogy was based off Gibbon's Roman history, which was already becoming outdated). He himself acknowledged this which is why the novels after the trilogy depart from the notion of the Seldon Plan.

Frank Herbert's Dune series has issues and I got burned out with God Emperor, but the sociology has aged better, the characters have more depth, and the narratives and plotting are more complex and intriguing.

Foundation, Asimov

>>23411472
He seems to have been pretty influenced by Heinlein. So Stranger in a Strange Land and maybe the Foundation series by Asimov?

>>23407676
Ostensibly, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is supposed to be an SF retelling of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the assumption that the empire centered at Trantor is Rome.
Having read Foundation, I can confidently say that Isaac Asimov never read Edward Gibbon.

>>23400628
I started with Asimov, Lem, and Bradbury. Great basic introduction to scifi but they are 1 step above my level of basic. Read Red Mars or Revelation Space series and then get back to me. Im not front loading a book with some imminent issue and then introducing a million characters and then flesh them out as the book comes. I personally I dont like that. The issue with Foundation specifically, is that the characters are shells for the plot. They do what Asimov needed them to do whilst writing as if they didn't. Very clever gaslighting from that jew if you ask me. Please read Alistair Reynolds. Please. I sound retarded but after House of Suns, you'll thank me.

Never read Asimov before and I recently bought the Foundation "trilogy" from a thrift store. What is your opinion of Asimov?

>>23364200
>>23366394

Thriftbooks seems good but I have seen good deals on mercari and ebay if you're fastidious and specific. There's sometimes "buy X, get X free/get 10-30% discount on order from store" coupons on ebay.

Mercari is a YMMV place. I've found some gems on there. Got me a big robert e howard lot that woulda realistically been sold on amazon for way way more.

I also hear pangobooks is alright. Never tried it myself. Pangobooks, Mercari, and Ebay are very much a "fuck around and try to find what you're looking for" scenario.

>Pangobooks may be more useful if you're looking for something that doesn't have a bad existing circulation and is in publication. I've seen the modern heinlein/asimov/clarke/bradbury reprints go on there fairly often. Penguin classics, etc. You could possibly find some other stuff for good on there but we warned that you're paying for the shipping price yourself. It's still a fine place to check out stuff.

>Ebay. You're gonna have to release the trawling nets for this one. Could be great, could stink. I've found a few hits here, such as grabbing SF Masterworks copies of I am Legend/Lord of Light for good prices.

>Mercari is a major crapshoot and feels like it's got mostly boomers or foreigners on it. You'll notice that you gotta pay shipping for most things on it and that, often, sellers don't really know how to price things. However, you'll occasionally find a good lot of books or something that's way underpriced for what it normally goes for. I saw that late 90s/mid 00s omnibus of The Book of the New Sun go for like 40? bucks recently and I was kicking myself for not recognizing it sooner as I'm a bit of a newbie at SF/F. Mercari also has coupons where YMMV.

Amazon, I've got stuff from them. It can be nice on occasion.

Can other anons enlighten me on thriftbooks? I'm mostly interested in the usual classic SF/F and Pulps. Found out that Splatterlight Press has kept all of Jack Vances work in publication and I'm curious-ish about it all.

On the other hand, I've seen someone try to sell shitty old paperback omnibus of the foundation trilogy or LoTR on Mercari for 40+ dollars. I seriously doubt they're worth that kinda money.

>>23346009
>>23346073
What do you talk about with your friends? Do you not know well enough what they like/dislike? Do you guys lack deep connections? I'm not recommending you buy a book for someone you hardly know, like a stranger. But surely you can gauge your good friends'/partner's interests quite easily?
Here's some examples of when book giving was positive for me:
>girl I fancied, huge Roman history buff. Gifted her the Aeneid by Virgil and later Satyricon by Petronius
>ex-gf, huge sci-fi nerd, gifted her Asimov's Foundation series
>friend, massive Nazi, gifted him Mein Kampf
>friend who wants to start getting into reading, gifted him 1984
>friend is Jewish stemcel, gifted him Sapiens.
Maybe I'm just not as autistic as you guys

I have two questions..
>Is it still considered reading if I'm listening to audiobooks?
>Are there any audiobooks that aren't dramatic readings that raise the quality of the story?

I'm currently listening to the Empire, Foundation and Robots series. Lindstrom, Brick and Dufris are the readers and they're kino. Especially Scott Brick. Really sold me on Salvor Hardin and Asimov's work as a whole. Im trying to listen to Blood Meridian but it hasn't gotten good yet, was it a meme? Or maybe its because the reader sounds like he's salivating. Idk

>>23268450
>>23268488
Foundation and I, robot are really great and super influental but Asimov is really shitty writer compared to Herbert
>>23268377
Also, K. Dick is the goat of scifi

>>23238229
problem is asimov gradually lost his fucking mind. he'd absolutely be welcoming the abomination that was foundation tv series.

>>23230052
Well those kind of novels are a lot harder to find, compared to your novels about localized apocalypses. While I have encountered a few titles, I really can't remember them right now.
Asimov's Foundation has the whole rebuilding civilization theme, if you are into older works.

>>23230081
This reads like a women wrote it.
Grim.

>>23230107
Yeah but the WH40k is not sci-fi.

>>23230110
Many such cases.
Sad!

Been thinking about getting into bookbinding and making my own personal classical literature library over time, like The Easton Press but better. Physical media, archival quality paper in a tasteful format, leather bound guilt edges...something that might be saved and passed on by our 80 IQ normie descendants for the long haul. (Bonus: to sell an extra bespoke copy or two to fellow nutters at cost, since the economics quite certainly do not pencil-out).

I've schizo posted about this before; something like Asimov's "Foundation" for but classical lit, to survive the next time 98% of the corpus is lost. Also, just to have physical hard copies that are a little nicer than what you find in academia (Teubner, Oxford Classical Texts, Loeb's, etc). Trying to find tasteful "ego library" editions of classical lit is difficult, most likely for very good reasons.

A fool's errand to be sure. Just wondering if anyone else on /clg/ has fantasized about this...

didn't asimov say foundation was written for the jewish people?

>>23188469
I mean of course he would dislike anti-Christian elements in books, but he loved plenty of books despite that. He liked Asimov's Foundation, Conan, A Voyage of Arcturus, Dunsany, H.G. Wells, etc. not to mention the pagan stuff that he absolutely loved.

>>23184358
>severe case of shape rotation predilection
>what if psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation series was actually le real and worked
>hilarity ensues

>>23172435
Foundation (or any Asimov) and Hyperion are nice to start

>>23166704
>>23166740
Dune cribs from Foundation. In fact Asimov -> Herbert -> Bakker is a pretty clear genealogy with one being inspired by but also critiquing/complicating to what came before. The shared thread is the idea of a science of civilization, of management principles scaled to the level of history, and then all the attendant questions that the existence of such a science implies, of which the individual writers flavour with their personal values and beliefs.
Psychohistory -> Golden Path -> Thousandfold Thought.

>>23159600
Caves of Steel or Foundation by Asimov

Trying to make sense of Asimov's chronology here. Does the Robots and ultimately Foundation stories take place in the universe Multivav rebooted at the end of The Last Question or are those an entirely seperate continuinty all together.

>>23143963
>The bugs are bad, too. They're literally framed as fascist drones. They are, however, not worse than than Federation
It's visually set up this way too. The subtext behind "to fight the bug we must understand the bug" is that they *become* the bugs. The humans swarm like the bugs. They have no individuality. The bug sucking out human brains is also paralleled at the end with the probe the scientist jams into the brain bug's mouth to "suck its brains out."

>>23146085
Hubba hubba!

>>23148105
>Him and his son save humanity from extinction. That is canonically what the books are about, they're a spin on the ideas in Foundation.
Yes. Or kind of a subversion of the Foundation trilogy. Herbert was deeply skeptical of Asimov's technological optimism. Asimov was a real Atomic Age guy, and Asimov's protagonists of prescient scientists become the antagonists in Herbert's world (the Bene Gesserit). Paul is an inversion of The Mule.

>>23148202
>Dune managed to be the most self reflecting science fiction books while still having an all powerful clairvoyant worm god.
What's also interesting about this is how Herbert seems to have ridden along with the later post-60s zeitgeist and counter-culture that was critical of technological society. The novel was published in 1965 and was extremely weird and had all ecological themes and people high on mind-altering substances. The Foundation novels were written in the 40s and published in the early 50s.

Herbert's politics were also peculiar, hard to pin down. I'd describe him almost like an American individualist anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, which is kind of a lost tradition but there were a lot of people in the 19th century like that. Had a lot of influence in America. Thoreau, Emerson, Josiah Warren, Voltairine de Cleyre. They're obscure now and they weren't communists but would've probably been really hostile to Ayn Rand big capitalism as well (as another form of centralized power).