I read the Foundation series a while ago, and lately I read the Robot trilogy (The Caves of Steel and its sequels) then The Currents of Space and I am now reading The Stars, Like Dust.
I don't know whether this is something that is often discussed, but the theme of colonization strikes me as very present, especially :
- in The Caves of Steel the Spacers are presented as super powerful former colonies, and I wondered whether they were supposed to be an expy of the USA.
- in The Currents of Space planet Florina is dominated by planet Sark in a way that feels like neocolonialism (or maybe straight colonialism if that makes any difference) in a very violent manner.
I didn't expect that, but this is quite interesting. In comparison I think the Foundation series was a bit bland (or maybe this is because I was younger, but I didn't notice much political content).
Edited by gropcbf on Feb 25th 2023 at 1:23:19 PM
Raven Wilder
Thing with the Foundation series is it was created as a series of short stories, with each one jumping ahead decades in time to after a major sociological shift, so it never spends too long exploring any particular status quo.
"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko
I just wrote up a works page for The Stars, Like Dust if any my fellow Asimov fans would like to take a look at it for mistakes or things I missed.
That's Dr. Title, thank you!
Weirdly for a short story that isn't at all about AI, The Machine That Won the War makes a good story about current issues with AI and the lack of trust that goes with them.
Really? I found political themes everywhere, in the Foundation series.
I've read I, Robot and I Think the first two Foundation books, but the one's that really clicked for me were the Black Widowers short story collections. I've read the first couple of them and the sort of 'anti-mystery' vibe to them is fun as well as the conversation author's afterwords after each story.