Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
This is it! Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will finally make it to visual media. After the rights passing through a few hands, they’ve finally made their way to HBO. Check out the entire article at The Wrap where Jonah Nolan talks about the new project. I’ll definitely keeping tabs on the development. No dates were given, so I’ll try to hold back most of my excitement until I hear more.
Happy birthday Isaac Asimov! I started casually reading “In Memory Yet Green
Sadly, Isaac Asimov died of heart and kidney failure complications due to AIDS on April 6, 1992. He contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during a heart bypass operation in 1983. This link to HIV and AIDS wasn’t revealed until later when Janet Asimov published “It’s Been a Good Life
It is a shame that such a talented author died before his time, but not before he wrote or edited over 400 books and countless essays and letters. I would have loved see how he continued his Robot and Foundation novels in the future. Hopefully I will find time to read some of his non-fiction this year, which most of his writing consists of. For a start, I received “Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Life in Letters
After reading the Cobra Strike Trilogy, I was glad to be getting back to a more recent book by Timothy Zahn. Angelmass is about a small group of human worlds on the edge of the Galaxy dubbed “The Empyrean” that sprouted up near a very peculiar black hole. They eventually discover that this no ordinary black hole, if it is one at all. They named it Angelmass because it emits “angels” that when harvested can affect the behavior of humans that are near them. They make humans act honorably, when otherwise they might have tendencies otherwise. Soon the government requires that all politicians wear an angel around their neck so that everyone knows they will be trustworthy. (more…)
Published 39 years ago in 1979, Isaac Asimov discussed the possibilities of finding intelligent life in his book Extraterrestrial Civilizations. This has been on my reading list for quite a long time, but I just now got the notion to mark it off. Having read literally all of Asimov’s fiction, I thought it was time to read more of his non-fiction. Unwittingly, I finished this just a week or two before his birthday, which by the way was 99 years ago today!
I was thinking Extraterrestrial Civilizations would be a discussion on what civilizations might be like when if/when we discover them, or they discover us. It turned out to be more of a thought experiment, methodically laying out probabilities based on list of assumptions. Most of these assumptions were made with what scientific knowledge there was available at the time. Asimov was very careful to speckle the book with asterisks noting that if certain assumptions would change in the future, the predictions would be changed or invalidated. (more…)