a seance, unexpected guests,
a journey across the universe on bottled light,
the complete history of all that ever was and ever will be,
a robot revolt in three acts
Welcome to the weird,
The Forgotten foundations are about to get strange
Let's begin with a work that I myself don't understand
I don't know if I agree with it or disagree with it.
in fact It's so bizarre that I actually don't know if I like it
or completely loathe it
Let us start with a voyage to Arcturus.
This has got to be one of the strangest novels I have ever read
None of the characters make sense. They feel like wooden props
But they also feel like they're supposed to feel like wooden props
in the same way that David Lynch characters are supposed to feel odd and uncanny
So all of the characters make sense, kind of. The plot makes no sense
It starts with an occult seance
and then suddenly the main character is joining two strangers out at
an abandoned observatory ripped straight from the pages of a horror novel,
so that he can go on a voyage to a different star on a beam of light
and land on a planet where he is guaranteed to die
and the main character does not believe in any of this but decides to go along anyway
Then he and the strangers who he met at the observatory,
for the express purpose of journeying together, are split up
And the strangers just go missing for most of the book without explanation.
Then our hero basically murders his way through a bunch of philosophy
until he finds out he's actually someone else and nothing's real.
Unless it is which is unclear
Then there are some steps and some bubbles
which are basically the spiritual consumption of the universe
and then done
But it actually does make total sense, just not the literal plot.
Most of the book
And this is why I fundamentally don't understand it,
is written as a series of very thinly veiled
philosophical discussions by way of sci-fi Scenarios.
The main character will meet some alien entity
who will have an attitude or a way of living that Represents a philosophy
and the main character will have a dialogue with them.
Then, more often than not, the main character will murder them horribly
So is the author just exploding philosophies?
Or does he agree with any of them.
Is the Gnostic mysticism at the end what he's really trying to say?
Are we supposed to see the main character as brutish and unrefined
and some of the philosophies he literally beats to a pulp as wise and good?
If so, which ones? How can we know?
But there is a lot to sync your brains teeth into
if you can get over the strange style
and just follow the psychedelic weirdness
CS Lewis, JRR tolkien, Clive Barker and of course Michael Moorcock
thought that there was something to get from this,
whether or not they agreed with it
And I agree with them.
just know what you're getting yourself into.
which brings us to the next piece of philosophical sci fi.
A work which Arthur C Clarke called
one of the greatest pieces of science fiction ever written.
This is Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon
I almost feel like I'm doing an injustice writing about only one of Stapleton's works
because he was a master of sprawling concept exploring sci-fi
But if we have to choose just one
we might as well go with his most sprawling, most ambitious work
Star Maker is less a story than a stampede of ideas.
it takes one human being and sort of expands their scope
progressively pulling them out to see larger and larger parts of the universe.
it presents us with so many possible worlds in so many ways
that life and intelligence could take shape
that it serves as the precursor to many of the great ideas of sci-fi
From Dyson spheres to collective consciousness
to the idea that the universe itself might be one giant thinking Organism
You will find all of that here
but most fascinating to me was the star maker himself,
the creator of Universes
The star maker serves as a chance for Stapledon to play around with his thoughts on God.
First he conceptualizes the star maker as a child
making itself toys just to see how they work
Then as an artist, interested in the subtle beauty of their art
But utterly unconcerned that the suffering depicted therein
When we meet the star maker,
we are shown all the different universes he might create
from a realm of pure rhythm to a universe with multiple Temporal dimensions
where whenever faced with a choice, a creature takes every possible action at once.
This book was an enormous influence
Not only on Asimov, but on science fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem
mainstream authors like jorge luis borges
and even Freeman Dyson, the man who credit for the Dyson Sphere
Although he himself said that it should be called the Stapleton's sphere
But speaking of works that introduced something into our vernacular
We have to talk about Rossum's Universal robots
robot wasn't a word until 1921 when this play came out.
How wild is that. The word robot is less than a hundred years old
And it comes from a Czech play.
Rossum's Universal robots was a three-act play in which robots,
which were much more Biological than we usually think of today,
are mass-produced and serve Humankind's every need.
They have no wants of their own and are simply
Handed all of humanity's manual labor.
A few humans argue that these entities are alive and should have rights
But these arguments are rapidly crushed in a growing age of cheap production
Then humanity starts experimenting with better more advanced robots
that might take on yet more tasks
But these more advanced robots lead their brethren in an uprising
and wipe out mankind
this play Basically laid out every generic story beat
from every robot uprising tale that has come out since
We may have refined the delivery a bit since then but to this day
It sometimes amazes me how closely so much of our robot fictions
sticks to the form of Rossum's Universal robots
Well except for one thing.
At the very end of Rossum's Universal robots
The last remaining human hands over stewardship of the world to the robots
Acknowledging that our time has come and passed
And that something new should get a chance at happiness,
a chance to make a better go of it than we did
That is an interesting take that I would love to see explored more.
But you know what else is interesting
Asimov even though he borrowed the word robot for his famous laws of robotics
Didn't think Rossum's Universal robots was actually very good.
He thought it was trite.
Though to me It does seem like
he was at least a little bit Influenced by it.
Because you can see his robot series as an attempt to explore
How we might prevent the very future that Rossum's Universal robots first imagined?
Oh and speaking of robots,
the author of Rossum's actually chose the word 'robot'
because it was based on an old Czech word for corvée or forced labor
Like the kind serfs had to do for their feudal lords
So think about that the next time you see your Roomba scooting around your house
and join us next week for the Forgotten Foundations author who may be the most influential of all of them,
and the one who certainly had the most impact on James