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Asimov foundation books6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() In the Foundation trilogy, politics as a grand imperial adventure quickly turns into a boring affair of managing social unrest while keeping productivity growing. It’s been literally more than twenty five years since I read it last, but Titus Techera has a marvelous essay on our sister website, Law and Liberty, on Asimov’s work. Seldon is the founder of a discipline called “psychohistory”, which is a pseudo-scientific version of the old dream of forecasting the future so that you can change it. How can we make the Middle Ages run faster? That is the question which Asimov and his alter ego, Hari Seldon, asked. ![]() I was unaware of the fact Asimov was somehow loosely inspired by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which instead I read only recently and would recommend heartily: it is such a magnificent work), but echoes of the fall of Rome were all over. While I never quite cared about his Robot stories, I loved the Foundation ones. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein and, yes, Asimov. I read (in the Italian translation) many novels of the golden era of American sci-fi: A.E. ![]() Science fiction and comic books were my path toward the appreciation of literature. I remember reading Asimov’s Foundation as a kid of 9 or 10 years old. As, I suppose, many other viewers, I welcome the Apple TV series “Foundation” as a dream coming true. ![]()
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Susanna clark author6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Unknown author, New England Historical and Genealogical Register., Vol. ![]() Susanna Clarke died after 13 July 1661 at Ipswich, Essex, MA.2 Andrew by the Wardrobe, London, Middlesex, England.
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Mere christianity spanish6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. A world of automata-of creatures that worked like machines-would hardly be worth creating. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. And free will is what has made evil possible. ![]() If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong I cannot. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. ![]()
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Choosing theo by victoria aveline6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() It was not often that she was required to leave her home and venture into the world, and she preferred it that way. ![]() Her home office was a perfectly cultivated creative area, and the majority of her designs were produced there, rather than in a stifling office. Whenever she tried to sleep, her fatigued body was at odds with her active mind.Īs a landscape designer, Jade could get away with both sleeping and working at odd hours. She envied people who were able to lay down and drift away to dreamland in a matter of minutes. It had never been easy for Jade to sleep. “Why do I do this to myself?” she muttered. Other names, characters, places, incidents, and events are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. ![]() |