this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
186 points (97.9% liked)
Science Fiction
13565 readers
15 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For me, the "grounded in science" ship had already sailed by the end of the original trilogy, when
book spoilers
the Second Foundation was revealed to be a shadowy group of mind-manipulating telepaths.I partly agree with your comment about the books. But there's a curious historical element to consider: at that time telepathy was really discussed in the mainstream scientific literature as a scientific possibility. Not in a crackpot way, but in a scientific way: theories were developed, tests and experiments made, and then it was concluded that it doesn't exist, with explanations about why.
Since it was a scientific possibility at that time, or at least it wasn't seen as crackpottery, it was obviously used in science-based sci-fi books (not only Asimov's).
It's a little like they do in today's sci-fi with "parallel universes" or "quantum theory & consciousness" and similar stuff, which is discussed in today's scientific literature. Maybe (or very probably, in my opinion) in 50 or 100 years they'll laugh their arses off looking at our "science-based" sci-fi of today.